question four: truncated vs full RSS feeds.

What are the benefits between full RSS feeds, and truncated feeds that link back to the original content?

Full RSS feeds indicate that you actually want people to read what you are writing. That you value the ease of your readership, and you want them to have at least some control over the information you've decided to create and share with them. Full RSS feeds lower the barrier to read content, because no clicking is necessary. Full RSS feeds are generally less of a hassle on mobile devices, because they don't require opening a new page.

Full RSS feeds are an indication that you are creating content because you want people to see it, not because you want to sell ad space on your page. And given the relatively low levels of RSS adoption, and the ability to include ads in RSS, it's not a huge sacrifice.

The benefits of truncated RSS feeds, linking back to the original site, include bringing more visitors to the original site, which may drive traffic to other content located there. The original formatting and design, as well as the framing that the page layout provides, is left intact (this is one of the reasons I was a latecomer to RSS, I like seeing different designs). This might result in more ad revenue. Maybe. Truncated RSS is great, if you see feeds as a kind of bait, and your site as a kind of trap.

My recommendations, in order: Have a full RSS feed. Failing that, offer an ad-supported full feed, or an ad-free truncated feed. Failing that, have a truncated feed, and be amazed at how little of your content actually gets read by RSS users, because you seem to have missed the point.

[This is the last in a series of my answering my own questions, which I think would help a few people when it comes to interviewing potential media hires. I am glad that this is over with, and apologize for how whiny I got at the end there.]

twitter and the content wall.

I'm pretty certain the main difference between being knowledgeable about social media, or being active through several different forms of social media, is whether or not you actually have time to participate in anything else.

Upon my (far too late) conversion to reading blogs via RSS, I needed to find the content wall, the magic number that is my limit: I can generally read about 100 feeds at any given time, without it impacting my productivity, and without it getting out of hand and me hitting the wall.  I'm starting to feel as though that number can rise, given my iPhone adding a lot of time where I can be reading feeds to my schedule, but I'm hesitant to try to find the wall again.  It's actually a harrowing process for me, because I'll spend a week reading the internet until 2am every night before I realize I need to cut back.

After a lot of hesitation, I'm trying to find my content wall with Twitter.  It's more difficult, because I'm trying to avoid following anyone who tweets 50+ times a day, excepting people I either know, or deeply respect.

That said, I'm looking for twitter users worth following.  My major interests are advertising/marketing, communications, internet culture, media theory, fashion, comic books, and a sarcastic take on current events.  All suggestions are welcome.

different types of instant.

Everything on the internet happens fast.  Blogging is a demonstration of the power of instant publishing, RSS is speedy content distribution, News online makes the idea of a daily update seem quaint, and so on.  But when everything is fast on a technological level, the playing field changes, and speed on a human behaviour, or an interaction level.

The best example I can use is the mixture of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.

I inevitably find out about things through Twitter first, mostly because it encourages many small updates, and many visits to find out what people are up to.  As the content isn't identical, I usually have my favourite bloggers on Twitter as well, expanding the data shadow.

I end up clicking the Twitter links for that lead me to blog posts.  That I see later in the day in Google reader.  And that pop up again later on in Facebook, having been shared by other friends who have the same interests.

Repetition is unavoidable in social media, but the difference in speed is what interests me.  Twitter is absurdly fast, faster than email, or SMS, or blogging, faster than nearly any major way I communicate with others.  And it's not a technology issue - it's based entirely on the behaviour the service inspires.

Instant is relative.  Plan accordingly.

aggregation does not a destination make.

Interesting observation:

I set up Facebook to import my posts from BrokenGentleman.com as notes.  A post that appeared both on my blog, and tumblr, to no response, got 5 comments within 5 hours on Facebook.

This, oddly enough, got me thinking about FriendFeed.

If a service’s only value as a destination is the ability to import data from multiple places and aggregate the same grouping of data from multiple contacts, then why am I headed there instead of to Facebook, which can do many of the same things (and could do all of them, if Zuckerberg and company saw potential there), while providing an established wealth of value and content of it’s own.

Honestly, if Facebook would let me set it to import more than one blog feed, and expanded importing support to more outside services, I could easily see it becoming even more of a destination than it already is.  If people are already going there to see what is going on in the lives of their associates, why not take advantage of that and put the things you are doing in front of them, whether they are RL or online based.

This is likely one of the posts that is more for me than for anyone else.

metrics that matter.

I was thinking about this before I went to sleep last night, and I thought it was important enough to post.

In terms of web traffic, I don’t really care about unique hits. My number one criteria for success is simple: how many people have the site in the bookmarks bar of their browser. How many people love this site enough that it requires one click, no menus, to get there.

Obviously, if the average visitor spends 20 minutes on your site, visiting 10 pages, that’s wonderful. But I’m more interested in how habitual their patronage is. How incorporated into their daily life a site is.

The most important thing for a person, a product, or an outlet to be, is habit-forming. So, unless people are reading your RSS feed, and making visiting your site as simple as possible, I don’t know that they really care about what you do.

I should note that I can guarantee no one has my site in their bookmarks bar. I don’t. But I have notcot.org, and ilovenewwork, and digg. And you can bet those are three of the sites I evangelize most.

the perils of new media consumption.

Too much of my information comes from the blogosphere. I realised that today when, on three separate occasions, I found a story that I had already been exposed to popped up next on my RSS feed. This doesn't bother me when there is actual commentary, but very often it's something I saw yesterday, with a link to where I saw it yesterday. Often, there's not even a quote for context.

This is an old complaint, that there's very little original content on the blogosphere. And that's true, to a point. But I read blogs not for facts, but for curation, opinion, and analysis. Curation is the hard one, because very often (and I'm guilty of this) bloggers use blogs for inspiration and information.

This is me promising to add, at the very least, commentary, context, or opinion to links posted.

transience and media consumption.

I've recently gone through a birthday, a move, and my last undergraduate exams, so things have been a little scattered in the broken gent world, of late. What I'm finding interesting is the change in my habits that has come with less ease, and less personalisation, in my media consumption.

Put simply, when I lived in a tiny room, in a house filled with university students, I was online constantly, never behind on my RSS items, speedy with response to emails, and generally as active as is reasonably in online life. This is apparently something that those who know me had grown accustomed to, as I'm not unfamiliar with being mocked for always being online, and to responding to links and forwards with 'saw that last week'. I'm an information junkie, and the way I use my time is inarguably a response to that.

Moving, and having wrecked the wireless card of my semi-functional PC, means that I've become a tech nomad, using my parents machines, only being online when sitting at a desk, and reducing myself to binges on information when I can find the time. It baffles me that I've gone from waiting for RSS items to appear and devouring them, to having hundreds piled up by the time I get to them. This wouldn't be shocking if I was busy, but at the moment I'm doing a credible sloth imitation before I redecorate my space, and begin the job hunt.

What is shocking is that the internet is no less accessible, but the loss of MY machine, MY bookmarks and presets, and MY hard drive has completely changed the way I read, watch, and listen. I suppose this would only come as a surprise to someone like me, who has only been deeply addicted to this lifestyle for the last 4 years, coinciding with my ownership of the same computer. The current situation is a nice window for me into the inadequacy of publicly available terminals for a computer literate society.

This situation, I think, is why there are so many people convinced that one laptop per child is going to be a driving force in the future of Africa. However, there is something interesting that I've noticed. I'm still keeping up with the online section of my life, but at the same time, I'm getting more done (not in terms of blogging or writing, but in terms of physical tasks) as man-without-pc, than I would as man-with-pc.

This was more rambling than intended, my apologies. It's also got me thinking, as someone who has always been desktop bound, how a laptop would change my consumption patterns even more.

[Expect a post about mobile internet access, cell phones, etc, and media consumption shortly.]

[EDIT: Upon reflection, some of the content of the above post could make it seem like I'm against the OLPC (one laptop per child) concept. While I like the idea, part of me wonders whether this is directly beneficial, or whether it is a case of trying to skip ahead in international development and give another society the tools / toys that are arguably essential in ours. Basically, I wonder whether making laptops and ad-hoc networking available to the children of the developing world makes sense at all when in so many cases drinking water and food are in short supply.

It's like giving a drowning man a car. It's nice, but it really isn't going to fix the immediate problem, regardless of how useful it will be if he can get to land.]

a nice real life proof.

It was with some hesitation that I switched from a massive list of blogs that I would read in tabs, to a single list of RSS feeds that I check, dealing only with new material. The reason against the switch was something vague about being a design enthusiast, and wanting to see content in it's original context. This is still true, to a point. But RSS is faster, easier, and helps me to avoid missing new content.

It has also made something clear to me.

One of the major anti-internet arguments I hear, in relation to news, is that endless niche production means that unless you want to, you will never have to hear something you disagree with. While I usually counter by saying the same applies to television, the switch to RSS has made it clear that there is some serious inbreeding in my information feed, specifically relating to design. Today I actually went back and checked to make sure that I wasn't just re-reading the posts from earlier in the day, as the images were exact, and the text was, though different, identical in meaning. On the plus side, the blogs I read are meticulous about linking back to where they found things, so I can see how the inspiration or interest spreads. At the same time, I've found a little network where I'm reading a bunch of people who are reading one another.

At the same time, I can hardly see a downside to only being exposed to good design.

I won't even go into the blogs I read that deal with politics, because, as mentioned earlier, no one reads the political coverage that they strongly disagree with, in the same way I wouldn't watch Fox news. The issue, in my mind, is more that I am running the risk of being trapped in a limited web of new material for inspiration. Obviously, I need to read more blogs. Or go outside. Maybe when the weather changes.