In a guest post on the Louis Gray blog, Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter / FriendFeed) asked Are We Missing Something by Reading an RSS Feed and then answered his own question:
By missing the comments, we are missing part of the conversation. It is a large part of the conversation because it is the one part of the blog post where readers can interact. Are we shortchanging ourselves by not reading the post on the blog along with the comments?
Louis Gray (Twitter / FriendFeed) posted The Trouble with RSS: I’m Not Involved and shared this:
Instead of adding to the conversation myself, I’m hitting “Add to Shared Items” for my link blog and moving on, not commenting and not alerting site owners and content generators that I’d been by. To those site owners who generate the RSS feeds themselves, I’m a mere number in their Feedburner statistics. I don’t show up in their page views, my name doesn’t show up in the comments, and I may as well be invisible.
Both of these bloggers realize that there are some serious drawbacks to not clicking through to individual blogs. Rob suggested one solution:
How much more intersting would your RSS reader become if it included the comments in the feed? Can somebody work on that?
Until that happens here is another solution: leave your RSS reader and visit blogs whenever a particularly interesting post comes in view. Don’t let RSS Readers Kill Your Involvement because, as Tony says,
…a blog is only as good as the amount of perspectives it provides.
Click through and you’ll quickly see which blogs and types of posts generate lively conversations. Even if you don’t have time to visit and comment in EVERY blog, making the time to become visible in at least some blogs brings great benefits.
I spend almost all day almost every day online. The blogs I feature here and share at cliKball, Twitter and FriendFeed are those I actually read. By commenting here you not only remind me who you are – CommentLuv also lets me know when you’ve added new content and I instantly know whether my readers would be interested. I also make a point of sharing quality posts in blogs outside my niche.
I invite you to start your new visiting here because between my commentators and my answers there is almost always more content in the comments than I shared in the original posts.
