RSS Awareness Day
May 1st is RSS Awareness Day. This day has been started to try and increase people’s usage of RSS as a way of reading blogs. If you want to more about RSS then visit RSSday.org.
Benefits of RSS
- If you use a reader like Bloglines (which is what I use - there are a whole range of feedreaders available online), you can view the blog posts of all your blogs in the one place instead of having to hop from blog to blog. This is a great time saver.
- The feedreader lets you know when a new post has been published.
- You can save posts that you like and go back and refer to them later.
- It can be used as an indication of how popular a blog is.
Limitations of RSS
- Some blog readers using RSS never click through to the blogs they are reading to leave comments.
- If you rely on advertising revenue from your blog, RSS can decrease this.
- Some bloggers only allow partial feeds which is REALLY FRUSTRATING, especially on days when you’d like to read what they say but don’t have time to visit their blog. This generally leaves the impression the blog writer is MORE interested in their advertising revenue (and/or their visitor stat count) than their readers.
- Sometimes new blog posts take a while to show up in a reader.
I honestly do not mind what my readers choose to do. You can subscribe or not subscribe. But if you’ve ever wondered what that pink button(under the word “subscribe”) in my sidebar is for, it enables you to subscribe to my blog. It should take you to a page which allows you to choose which feedreader you want to use (mine automatically takes me to a bloglines button because it recognises that’s what I use).
What are your thoughts on using RSS to read blogs? Do you like them? Not like them? Does it decrease your inclination to comment? Feel free to mention your preferred reader with a link so others can find it if they’re interested.
If you’re a regular reader via email or a feedreader, please take a moment to click through and make a comment on this post to say hi. I always love hearing from my readers. Lurkers are more than welcome but I’d love it if you’d also pop your heads out just to say hi. 
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Very funny and true.
I *love* using a feedreader - It’s be totally lost without it! I subscribe to about 100 blogs (yeah probably a bit obsessive lol), and read on average 30 posts / day. There is no way I could do that without a feed reader!!
I use Google Reader which works well for me.
I really don’t like partial feeds and it has to be a special blog for me to keep it, and the first couple of lines of the post have to interest me to click through and read the rest. A feedreader doesn’t stop me clicking through to comment though!
I live in Google Reader, lol. I’m fairly unlikely to comment anyway but at least I’m reading the post which is not something I’d even be doing if I had to check all these blogs. I’m probably reading about 100-120 posts per day. I really need to thin down my subscriptions though, quite a few sites just copy from their rounds so I get the same content three or four times.
And partial feeds are the devil.
I agree with Lauren that partial feeds can be quite irritating cos its breaks the flow of reading. Once I’m in Google Reader, I feel a ton of inertia just to click on the ‘read more’ link to get to the page. I would very much prefer to subscribe to RSS feeds with full feeds. That’s the whole purpose of RSS right? To allow us to read several blogs from the same place. RSS is important and very useful for busy people like all of us. But in the end I still come by through the actual URL of the blog cos of Entrecard!
I couldn’t live without my Sage RSS plugin for Firefox so much so I avoided upgrading to the much better version (in my opinion) FF3 after discovering that it wouldn’t work. Fortunately they updated the plugin to now work with Beta 3.5 so I’ve upgraded again.
I’m happy of course to say that lightning online is on my list, I use the RSS reader to show me when everyone has updated to save me time (of course I love it when I see a full list of updated blogs it just takes me a while to get through them all).
Without it I would just loose track of everyone!
ARGGGGG I meant lose not loose!!
I guess I’m new enough to this stuff to not really know. My blog only has an email subscribe thingy with feedburner. The only thing I don’t like about the email notification is that I like seeing my numbers in the blog stats go up and this doesn’t happen unless someone visits my blog
I subscribe to way too many blogs, I read way to many - the only way to do it is through RSS (I use Bloglines) - although I too click through to comment.
So g’day!
Thanks for this post. I am still learning myself about RSS. I set it up on my blog a few weeks ago without fully understanding it at the time. Now that I have subscribed to a few blogs myself, I now understand a little more. Your post has helped, so I will revise my blog settings for subscribing. Thanks again
Sewdelish