Blog design in the age of RSS:
“The risk is no longer of losing readers with an an insufficient volume of posts, but of annoying readers with insufficiently interesting posts. In my original article, I argued that Long Tail tactics discourage overthinking the quality question. Throw it all out there and let the marketplace sort it out, I urged; good will rise to prominence and bad will fade to obscurity. But the problem with RSS is that it isn’t a marketplace. Once someone’s subscribed to your feed, they get everything, whether they want it or not. Bad content is as prominent as good content, and one can tarnish the other. So what are the new Rules of Push? Is there a Push threshold–a post worth pushing? If not, what to do with it?”
Chris’ Long Tail article has been around for a bit, but I’ve just started reading and re-reading it after spending months reading about the article (future essay topic: The Internet and the Rise of the Secondary Source?), and it’s one of the few pieces in recent memory that I’ve actually found myself highlighting. As I spend more time in the web development area, his thoughts are having a big influence on me, and since I’ve been thinking a lot lately on my potential use of RSS in future projects, this bit is timely. Alternate future essay topic: Stop Shifting My Damned Paradigm So I Can Actually Get Something Done.
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