Don’t forget about RSS
18th February 2006
Dave Winer pointed out Jeff Jarvis’s post about blogs being “prisoners of their format.” Jeff says that blogs need to have richer templates and more features: not just a set of posts. He would like to see posts with pages, and maybe news tickers — anything to make a blog Web site richer.
While I would like to see some more variety in templates, blogs are presented on more than just their site. In my experience, most blogs are read far more inside an RSS aggregator than on the site itself. I have no idea what the actual sites look like for many of the blogs I read because I never visit the site — I just read the content off the blog’s RSS feed.
And it’s RSS that has made room for so many blogs. If I had to visit every site in my Web browser because they publish their content in a way that doesn’t support syndication, then I wouldn’t read even a tenth of the sites that I do.
So let’s see some richer templates on blogs. But don’t forget about RSS — anything you don’t push out through RSS will only be read by a fraction of your audience.