Feed reader adoption drive go!

Current Events

I cannot shut up about how cool xmlrpclib is. Issuing pingbacks yourself via interactive Python is so empowering. Still, I haven't yet conducted a formal transition from the Wordpress iteration.

By the end of the year, I intend to migrate FeedBurner whereupon the Wordpress iteration will be retired and this site will go from in-development to live. Until then, this is a venue to shake most of the meh-ta out of my system. As cathartic as writing meh-ta is, it's counter-productive more often than not, and a series of such entries leads to an increased risk of drama.

And if I wanted drama, I could just watch (and participate in) the panic on the stock market.

Topic statement

I'm here for another attempt at crystallizing my views on the relationship between audiences (not my own, because I don't have one) and authors. This draws upon an old entry of mine, a recent entry of Ryan A's, and a couple comments therein.

Here's the executive summary for those who are short on time:

• Have some faith
• Use a feed reader

The sad thing is, at the moment, I'm currently feed-less. Of course it'll be there in time for the "official" debut, but like other functionality it's a work in progress.

Consolidation and a climate of fear

Here I was, thinking that the world was flat and getting flatter. With the flight to vertical integration in the economy at large, it's tougher to be small, agile, and horizontal. Correlation is not causation, but it's hard to resist observing that the rise of collaborative sites coincided with the crisis that engulfed first global finance, and now the real economy.

I also suspect that the reasons are the same: crisis of confidence. No comment on the real world, but I see no reason why a crisis of confidence has found its way here. Then again, maybe it has always been here.

Below is a list of entry topics. Do any of them ring a bell?

• "Sorry for not posting in a while."
• "I'm not dead!"
• "On hiatus for exams."
• "I'm back!"

Any at all? Yes? When was the first time you saw one? Over four years ago, you say?

In other words, this phenomenon has been around for a while, and it is systemic.

Inquiring minds want to know

Why must people write these things? I'm not going to lie, those kinds of entries irk me to no end. They should irk you too, but maybe they don't, and that's part of the problem.

Let's get a couple things straight. An audience won't collect your mail while you're away, they are not some newspaper delivery service that has to be canceled, and they are certainly not some business client that needs to see vacation auto-reply in their e-mails.

Authors should not be under pressure to explain their absence, yet they must feel it otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. So why is this the case? They don't trust their audience, that's why. And just maybe, their audience doesn't trust them either.

No one wants to be irregular

I have a two-part theory, as detailed below.

• Authors think that breaking any kind of perceived posting schedule will cause their readers to flee.
• Readers think that if an author breaks their schedule, they have quit and will never post again.

These are the expectations that both parties have of each other, and perhaps not without precedent. Any number of writers have burned out in the past. Likewise, uncommitted readers exist in droves. It's a hassle to figure out and target who is who, so everyone assumes the worse and look at where that has gotten us.

But you know, these expectations are rooted in the bad old days of online media interaction, when the only shortcut available to an audience was the browser bookmark. We still had to click the bookmark, load the page, check the date of the newest entry, jog our memory to see if we recognized it, and then finally read the thing if it was new.

When you multiply that amount of work over numerous sites of interest, it begins to look a lot like mechanical drudgery. But the mechanical can be automated, and some clever people did just that.

Demand Posh

Yes, posh. Because feed readers look like they're pushing information to you through their notifications, but they really operate by polling. Feeds should have dominated production-consumption interaction as far as two years ago. At least.

But if the number of collaborative sites and amount of apologetic filler is any indication, site feeds have not taken off. A community that exploits the full potential of feeds would be free to write what they like without pressure from things like schedules. Audiences wouldn't have to keep bookmarks or lists of sites to check, because the feed reader automates all that. Posts are done when they're done, and notifications go out in short order.

Subscribe and forget. It's so easy, standards and clients have been available for years, and feed generation is available in all Wordpress installations.

So why isn't everyone doing it?

I have no idea. Maybe they are, and us authors don't get it. We submit our feeds to aggregators to draw more traffic, yet we don't promote those same feeds to our readership.

Here are some action items that could make life easier for all involved:

• If you write, drive traffic via feed subscription. Put the feed address somewhere prominent, make occasional mention of it in your entries.
• Everyone, get a feed reader. I don't care if it's a web reader like Google Reader, or a downloadable client. It's painless, it's easy, it reduces your bookmark count.
• Relax. Feed readers don't forget like humans do.

But I need the ad impressions

…

Seriously? That's one heck of a business model. Why didn't I think of it?

Greed isn't the solution. Just ask Wall Street.

Feeds are progress

I get the sense that we pride ourselves on being mostly on top of technology. Isn't it strange, then, that we are held back by assumptions based on the lack of it? So step into the future. All of you. To those who have, thanks for doing yourselves and others a favour.

Sites lose readers when they output bad writing, like filler. It's about time everyone got that through their heads and stopped making up excuses like failing to keep schedules.