The Problem with RSS
Golden Guy RSS by LuMaxArt
I’m a huge fan of creating a great RSS feed where you can find useful information at all times and read posts from a bunch of the super blogrockers out there. I use Google Reader for my RSS feed and I share articles pretty frequently for anybody that wants to check out my favorite posts.
I’ve noticed one huge problem with my RSS feed though.
There is no way to comment via my reader. I haven’t been commenting as much as I should, or want to, since I filled up my RSS feed with such excellent thinkers. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts about the posts, I’ve just got another list of posts staring me in the face that I can’t wait to read.
Not only are comments viewed as currency in the blogosphere at times, but comments drive conversation. The best bloggers are not looking merely to tell you what they think – they’re looking to build on ideas and participate in thought-provoking conversations.
Blogging is a two-way street. Make it a busy one.
Show your favorite bloggers that you appreciate their work by striking up conversation. Go beyond a simple agreement and a thank you. Use your comment to build on the blogger’s ideas, ask questions, and challenge points in a constructive or inquisitive format. You can form a valuable relationship simply through commenting and carrying your comments and conversations over to other platforms.
So here’s my social media resolution for 2010 – I’m going to make a point to do more commenting on blogs by Danny Brown, Jim Connolly, Arik Hanson, David Spinks, Rich DeMatteo, Lauren Fernandez, Valeria Maltoni, Stuart Foster, Leigh Durst, Scott Hepburn, Jackie Adkins, Matt Cheuvront, Amber Naslund, Ryan Stephens, B.L. Ochman, Samantha Ogborn, David Mullen, Mack Collier, Amy Mengel, Jason Falls, etc. (Seriously, the list goes on and on)
What are some of your favorite blogs and how can you improve your relationship through commenting?
Scott,
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I wish I could follow blogs more like I follow Twitter. Live stream. Live comments. Live interaction. Live reblogs.
I think is the promise of Tumblr, or more specifically interoperable tumbling. Imagine if there was one protocol, like RSS that allowed us all to follow blogs using a Twitter-esque client…
Okay time to stop dreaming and get real.
I know that I need to devote more time to commenting on blogs, so that’s the first step for me: devote the time to doing nothing else but commenting and asking questions.
I follow most of those on the list. To it I would add Stowe Boyd (http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/) and Doc Searls (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/).
Thanks for the post!
A live stream of blog posts would be great, or even just a link in a reader that sent you to the comments section of a blog. Unfortunately there are so many different tools people use for comments that it would be nearly impossible to implement.
I’ve been using Tumblr for a couple years and I just can’t make it work in an efficient way. The user-base is small and people use it much more like Twitter than a blog in most cases I have found. There is potential (think Gary V.), but we’re a long way from it.
Thanks a bunch for the recommendations, I’ll be diving into those blogs shortly
I can’t figure out how to tackle solve RSS. It overwhelms me, distracts me, makes me feel guilty when Google Reader tells me I have 100 unread articles and no offense but not every article every person I follow writes is worth reading, nor are mine. I had a mid-life RSS crisis recently and blew up Google Reader, deleted both folders of natural RSS in my toolbar, and I am living RSS free for 3 months now… How’s it going?
Because I truly valued every blog I followed I made sure to connect with them in some format (almost every blog has options but 98% were twitter.) A lot of the people I follow/interact with on Twitter read the same blogs. What I found is that by letting others read the blogs first and decide if they like the post then I can almost in a bastard like way let everyone else to the digging and then when I see 2, 3, or 4 tweets from different people I will head over and read the post.
I really just felt like a consumption whore for the first 9 months of last year and since I quit RSS altogether I have gotten an incredible amount of stuff done and to your point on this article, I comment a lot more because every post I read is usually very well written and I feel like I have time. (Hence this long winded response.. Good Post man and I don’t really have a solution, just what I did.
How did I find this post? Certain people you follow you will read everything that they Retweet because they have shown that everything they share is worth sharing. Others not so much so you just wait to see if more people start talking about it. @wordpost tweeted your post and here I am.
I had a similar conversation with a friend a few weeks ago – he basically said that he saw me as his live RSS. Twitter is a great tool for finding content by waiting for some attention to surround the content. Of course, you get to weed out the posts that are less interesting (weekly recap, speaking schedule, etc.), but I fear you miss the relationship.
At this point, I’m willing to be one of those that will tweet an article so that others know it is worth reading. I’m not scrapping my RSS feed just yet, I’ll just be commenting before tweeting in most cases.
Thanks for your comment and for stopping by, Shane.
A lofty goal to be sure.
I wish you well Scott
(I tried similar this summer…learned a LOT)
Thanks, Stuart.
I think you’ve hit on kind of a secondary goal of my drive to comment more – I hope to be more engaged with the content I read. I won’t be able to blast through as quickly if I want to stop and comment at the end.
I’m looking forward to it and I hope I can slip into the same kind of learning you managed in your experience.
Sadly, me and my RSS feed had a divorce a couple weeks ago after I begun to cheat with twitter. Rather than constantly going back to my RSS feed I just have hootsuite opened up and let the community show me what I should be reading. I don’t have any regrets yet, as of right now the affair has been plenty worth it. Twitter and the community are fulfilling my needs and making it easy for me so I can’t complain.
I find that when you comment on posts you learn more about the topic and yourself then you would if you just read it. I’m with Stuart on this one – I wish you the best on your commenting goals, you’ll definitely learn a lot.
After about a month of putting less emphasis on the RSS feed and more emphasis on commenting, it has been going great. If nothing else, my involvement in the community of others has expanded my interaction and connected me to some great people.
I still can’t get the hang of letting Twitter tell me what to read because I feel like somebody has to get the information out into their crowd first. I still try to tweet articles that are relevant to my followers in the hopes that they will find it useful and pass it around their community.
Luckily, I just started working on a project that requires me to keep my RSS feed strong and updated, so I won’t be moving totally away from it any time soon.