In getting ready to do the long task of looking at a lot of blogs for the 2005 demographic study, I’ve been thinking through growth and changes in how we communicate in the blogosphere. And since the last time I did that, there have been changes.
It’s harder to comment at many blogs now, an extra step or sign in is needed as bloggers protect themselves, not from each other, but from floods of spam.
There is room for more clutter as blog ads help many pay for this hobby.
And RSS feeds are the big new toy. I don’t use one. I did have Cre8d-design set one up early on, but the coding was too difficult.
Now, I guess most average users could use one if they wanted to.
I don’t. I’m told some feeds show the whole post. Most bloggers aren’t professional writers, I don’t expect them to have a grabbing first line or two. The essence may be in the middle of their post.
To me an RSS feed is like a fast food resturant drive through. Do I need the information the minute it is put up? I gain little from that type of rushing and consumption. I’d rather go to a blog, it’s like sitting down to a meal.
And in taking the extra minutes and looking at a blog, I get a far better sense of the person - even if it is a blog I visit daily. Jordon Cooper calls it the front porch, Shalom takes a minute to pray. Blogging isn’t a race, or an exam, it’s people learning to talk to each other. And my black little heart aside, to me it is about learning to listen.
As I watch Darren Rowse go through his blogathon to provide aid to the millions whose lives were wiped away from the tsunami and as I ponder the demographics - I realize in the connectedness of blogger to blogger, blogger to reader, reader to blogger that all the new technical advances in computing and blog platforms will not change basics of the communities we attempt to build.
I haven’t ventured past this blog much lately. Between the rash of technical difficulties that felt like they piled up one on the other, my frustration, low tolerance, impatience with inevitable technological burps and the ensuing sense of helplessness, I’ve been like a turtle, stopping in my meanderings and tucking my head into my shell. And I don’t like myself when I do that. It is one thing to rest, reflect and think through, it is another to back away from my passion about this medium because I decide I’m overwhelmed by the pace or what I cannot control.
I took the opportunity yesterday to email a blogger I wouldn’t normally ‘talk’ to.
This blogger is successful, driven, smart and goal oriented, and we come from very different places and cultures.
It was thought provoking. I’m not going to name him. I’m glad we had the opportunity to email back and forth a bit because a couple of things hit me. He was looking at what he is doing online and it struck me that all our differences aside, we (as do many others) have more things in common that we easily see.
In the end, it may turn out to be a fruitless effort. But I have
such a passion for this medium that I want to do what I can to try to bring us
together. Blogging allows anyone to have a voice but if no one is listening its
all in vain. I’m hoping that by helping the “voiceless” have their say that we
will be able to impact our culture and move away from the purely political.
Yeah. In responding to that, I had the opportunity to acknowledge that sometimes we shut others out inadvertently, online or off.
I’ve been guilty of that, of losing sight of my primary goal here at BDBO.
And some of the grumblings directed my way about elitism, holier-than-thou-ness and cliqueishness have enough truth in them to pay attention to.
I may not mean to be that way, but I am and even more so when I turtle, when I let the passion cool. I stand guilty.
But I would like to see the day when evangelicals in Texas are communicating with Catholics in Ireland and Orthodox in Armenia. The blogosphere, in my opinion, provides a unique potential for promoting a greater understanding among the universal church.
It is happening, one by one, link by link, comment by comment.
Stopping by an Australian blog today is a terrfic step in the right direction
Search
Subscribe 
You are currently browsing the Bene Diction Blogs On weblog archives.
Related Entries
For blog design, Wordpress or MovableType coding or blog consulting, see cre8d design.
Hey there,
I use my rss aggregator not to sort through what I want to read, but simply to be alerted when one of “my bloggers” posts something. This is easier for me than trolling through a large number of sites to see if something new is up.
When it comes to reading the work, I still prefer to click and go to the blog itself. I don’t read the summary or comment from the aggregator. I think when used this way, an rss tool is a good thing. Especially for busy people who might not come to read at all or might miss a post if they get busy.
I’m with Gordon… My aggregator has — in my opinion — made me a better, more efficient blogger. Honestly, sometimes I do skip by posts that don’t catch me in the first line or two (or even by the title sometimes!), but I do that when I visit the actual site too. And for those sites that I consider my “favorites” (like yours), I always make a point to visit.
It’s build into MovableType … your aggregation that is … http://www.benedictionblogson.com/index.rdf
“And RSS feeds are the big new toy. I don’t use one. I did have Cre8d-design set one up early on, but the coding was too difficult.
Now, I guess most average users could use one if they wanted to.”
Um…Bene, I’ve been reading your blog via RSS for quite some time.
You strike me as someone who doesn’t at all mind tinkering with tech stuff, Funky Dung.
A lot of us don’t and I know others that have stopped using an RSS feed.
It appears there are different reasons people like or utilize them.
“To me an RSS feed is like a fast food resturant drive through. Do I need the information the minute it is put up? I gain little from that type of rushing and consumption. I’d rather go to a blog, it’s like sitting down to a meal.
And in taking the extra minutes and looking at a blog, I get a far better sense of the person - even if it is a blog I visit daily. Jordon Cooper calls it the front porch, Shalom takes a minute to pray. Blogging isn’t a race, or an exam, it’s people learning to talk to each other. And my black little heart aside, to me it is about learning to listen.”
I don’t use RSS because I want a McBlog experience. I have 140 feeds in my aggregator. I intend to weed out a few soon, but I don’t expect that number to drop below 100. There is absolutely no way I could read that many blogs and news outlets by manually visiting each one. By using RSS, I can see if someone has posted something of interest to me. If they have, I click through to their site and read (most considerate people limit their feeds to summaries of posts, rather than whole posts). Since I stopped worrying and learned to love syndication, I’ve felt connected to the rest of the blogosphere like never before. The only flaw in my current methods is that I don’t read enough different kinds of blogs and enough opposing opinions. Sure, I read a few, but most of my feeds could be described as a “mutual admiration society”. In the future, I see myself reading more blogs via syndication, not less, and I think my blogging experience will benefit from the “networking” and exposure rather than suffer at the hands of McDonaldization.
BTW, Adrian Warnock wrote an excellent defense of syndication.
Crud, the link got stripped. Here is is:
http://adrian.warnock.info/2005/01/why-hugh-hewitt-needs-to-get-rss.htm
I obviously seem to be misunderstanding some things, so help me out here.
Why would you have 140 blogs on RSS?
Why would you expect yourself to read them all?
That xml page is a feed that I thought was picked up by sites like Technoati.
It is a series of numbers, codes, symbols and BDBO archives. Is that what bloggers pick up in a feed reader?
Is my terminology wrong - should I be saying an RSS reader? I’ve read a fair bit about this, I don’t understand some of it, and I really hated the one I had, it was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe I need to be more open minded and find something that isn’t going to be such a technical hassle.
I don’t read them all per se. I periodically check for new posts. I scan them for things that interest me. I click through to those posts that catch my eye. I may blog about some, link to some others, or do nothing but read. I then mark all feeds read. In some ways, it’s like reading email from a very busy discussion list. The folks at Mozilla see it that way too. Thunderbird has a built-in RSS reader (which I’ve never tried). Anyhow, the whole post of aggregation is to give people the ability to encounter more posts than manually surfing would allow. It’s like having your own news service like AP or Reuters, with articles coming in from all over the world. Some you send to press, others you don’t.
BTW, give Bloglines a try. I hear good things about it.
XML is just another markup language like HTML. IT’s more robust, though. XML is the chosen markup for RSS and ATOM. What you see in a RSS or ATOM feed are mostly posts, dates, and links. Readers and aggregators use the XML to parse the info and display it in a readable form.
Technorati and PubSub track who links to you. They probably scan feeds for those links.
Fundy Dung - Did I mention above you are a bit more tech saavy than most of us?:^)
Thanks.