Advantage, Bloggers.
One point I wish I had followed up on more at the Revenge of the Blog conference is one of the advantages that bloggers currently hold over big media – RSS. Automatic syndication by virtue of the software used. Until the BigPubs figure this out, blogs will continue to be more syndicated that even the biggest media machines. With the big, fancy, very-expensive re-design that the Wall Street Journal recently went through, you’d think they would have at least gotten a few RSS feeds up and even figured out how to handle authentication for their subscribers.
I’m willing to bet that at this particular moment in time, more people are subscribed to my site than to the Chicago Tribune site (not registered, and not email). (I feel pretty safe making this bet since they don’t offer a feed at all.) What do you think that should tell them?
As I noted during my panel’s Q&A, my server stats show me referring URLs to my site from an aggregator, and that data is (potentially) even more valuable than what we normally pull out of that other type of “web log.” (It’s also interesting to note that I’ve got a lot of readers using NetNewsWire and AmphetaDesk.
[The Shifted Librarian]