Most of you who are reading this post are not seeing my blog. “Huh?” you ask, “whatdaya mean?”
The blog Fractals of Change is on a website at blog.tomevslin.com hosted by a service called TypePad. If you are looking at that site, you see a three column layout with an unkempt picture of me at the upper left, opportunities to subscribe, and finally a list of books I felt like listing and which you could buy from Amazon should you be so disposed.
On the top of the right hand column is a list of my podcasts. Below that are Google ads which almost no one clicks on, Google search of the blog which you do use, various ways to find old posts, and my blogroll.
In the center column is the current post – the one you’re reading now if you’re one of the few who reads it directly on the blog site – and under it are older posts. Below each post are some links including the one that lets you comment or read other people’s comments and the new one I posted about Wednesday which makes it easy to tag with del.icio.us.
But most of you read my posts and posts from other bloggers in feedreaders like Bloglines or newsgator, not on the blog sites themselves. I use both of these sites to keep current with blogs (and other things) myself. It is more convenient to go to one place and see just what’s been updated since last time I was there than to go from blog site to blog site to blog site and see whether or not my favorite bloggers have posted anything new since last time I was there.
The downside of using a feedreader is that you only see the new-to-you posts; you don’t see the rest of the stuff that’s on the blog site. Feedreaders give you content out of context. Ok, you can live without my picture and the Google ads; but it might be nice to see the book list and blogroll or to be able to search the site. (You CAN get to the blog site by clicking the title of the post in the blog reader but I don’t do that very often and neither do many of you.)
From a technical point of view (this isn’t one of my nerd blogs so I won’t be very technical), whenever I post a new article to my blog, TypePad creates a file with the content of that post. These files are called feeds and the process of creating and reading them is called RSS for Real Simple Syndication. Services like Bloglines and newsgator periodically look for new feeds from posts their users have subscribed to. When they find a new feed, they display it. You can read my new post without having to navigate to my site.
Professional news services like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times produce feeds as well. However, because they feel you need the full experience of their sites – i.e. they’re not gonna let you get away without seeing the ads, they give only the lead of an article in the feed; so, if you want to read the whole thing, you’ve got to actually go their site. I put the whole post in my feed because I’m a writer these days and I care more about readership than advertising revenue (which, in my case, is insubstantial anyway).
Google is well aware that RSS feeds can reduce potential ad exposures so they are in beta with a program which inserts ads into the RSS stream. That’s why you’ll see ads in some posts from some blogs even if you do use a feedreader.
Now to the change in my blog which is actually a change in my feed.
If you are reading this post in a feedreader, you will now see a comment link and a Tag with del.icio.us link at the bottom of the post – just as you would if you were on the blog site itself. It took almost forty-eight hours of nerding plus help from Laura at TypePad to get this to work right.
I made this change so that post reading can be participatory even when a feedreader is used. User comments are important; user tagging is a useful way for you to find old posts when you want them and may also be helpful in mining relevant nuggets from the vast word-ore of the Internet.
Given the very short history of this change – it didn’t work until Tuesday, the results are positive. There are more comments being added to my posts. More people are reading other people’s comments. Tagging is happening both from the blog and from the feedreaders.
If you feel like commenting on this subject or any other, you can now do so whether you actually read my blog – or just my posts.