Another week, and another edition of Om & Niall PodSessions. This week are tackling some of the issues related to blogging, blog tools and RSS. Amongst the issues we discuss…
* The problems with today’s blogging systems. Are they just glorified publishing systems, instead of tools that capture conversations? What are some of the ideals of a conversation tracking system?
* Why are blogging tools so complex? We talk about Six Apart’s MT & TypePad, Sandvox, WordPress, Typo and ExpressionEngine.
* Are advertisements in RSS a good idea? Do readers get annoyed with ads-embedded in my RSS feeds.
* Can I make my feed display look more like my web site? What styling options are available?
As part of the podcast, Niall helped me implement Yahoo RSS ads. The reader feedback was mostly negative, and from a monetization standpoint it was not even worth it. I think it is clear – RSS is likely to remain an ad-free zone, a concept advocated mightily by Dave Winer. I personally think a small sponsorship logo is the most one can expect to get away with in the RSS feeds.
Show notes @ OnPodSessions Blog, and Download the Podcast.
couple o’ things –
1 – i was led through the typekey sign on process from the RSS feed to leave a comment but it crapped out on me when i wanted to give you the ability to see my email address. i started through the process again and it crapped out when i denied you this access…..long story short, went to the website and found my way through to it that way….it sucked…please fix it!
2 – would it be possible to get your RSS feed into iTunes so that we could more easily subscribe to it that way as well?
Rob, good idea, thanks for that suggestion and we will fix it right away.
thanks for being a listener.
Here are somethings that put me off
1. Each time a comment is added, it appears as a new post in my RSS reader (Bloglines), not all blogs , but lots of them.
2. I cannot see the comments in my RSS reader, I really enjoy reading comments and trackbacks. They are very informative. After all blogging is all about community and we are cutting off some important part of this ecosystem by not allowing comments.
3. There is far less real estate within RSS reader, so if you are gonna put all the stuff that you put on the website, hmmm….well I wouldn’t really like that. I like RSS for what it is , clean , precise and without all the noise, which I avoid anyway.
Om,
I totally agree with your analysis that there needs to be an effective way to manage online conversations. Most blog readers drop comments onto sites with the hope of receiving a reply from the poster or other readers. In order to keep track of these conversations, they typically must revisit the blog site and click around in the conversations to see if there was a reply. This is both frustrating and minimizes the value of the online conversation. Ideally, the user could pull up an application that would give a snapshot of all their latest blog posts, all the latest blog posts on other sites that they’ve commented on, and whether a reply has been provided to a comment they’ve made.
I like your idea of somehow using the forum analogy to accomplish this task. I’m unaware of the limitations of the RSS spec, but ideally this type of functionality would be driven from a more personalized feed.
By the way, I think the forum software you mention in the podcast which you couldn’t remember the name as Vanilla. I use it on my personal site and find it a very effective way to manage conversations, but I have a fairly tight group of friends who use it who don’t mind logging in to participate.
That’s probably the key factor here, as mentioned in the podcast – getting users to relinquish their anonymity when contributing comments to a new type of comment system which would track conversations. Of course, the second-hand benefit of this would be lowering the amount of comment-spam.
Hopefully someone will develop an applications similar to what we describe.