Better than a Magazine Subscription?
Dawn Douglass sent this note to Scoble and me, in the hopes that she’d receive responses from our readership. She’s seeking something more top-level than categories – but I don’t think there is such a thing? When you subscribe to a feed, you’re subscribing to a magazine – but a blog, in many ways, is better than a magazine. By limiting your subscription’s scope, you’re ruling out serindipity. Moreover, I’ve seen people promote categorized feeds and ultimately push users back to a single feed for any given site.
She writes:
I’d like something added to the blogosphere and wonder if either of you would be interested in throwing the idea out to your readers so that it might actually get adopted at some point…
For a long time, I’ve wished I could subscribe to one or more particular “hats” worn by a blogger, rather than getting every single post. For example, I read Fred Wilson’s blog, but wind up ignoring more than half of it, because his second main hat is “music lover,” something I’m not interested in.
For MyFridj, I’ve asked users what hat they are wearing when they post “Fridj Notes,” which are very similar to blog posts (…the point of which are to give raw material to comic writers. If something a user writes inspires a cartoon, then the writer will be the first to get a copy of it and an acknowledgment link back to their MyFridj page will accompany the cartoon.) I wish the blogosphere could do the same and assign blog hats, too.
I know there are tags and categories, but this would be a more top level sort. The point is that there would be different RSS feeds for the different hats you want to put on. And maybe even some sort of toggle so that you could go to a blog and hit which hat you want to read and see only those posts and comments and archives related to it.
Now that I’ve just started my own blog, I want this even more than when I was just a reader. I’m a devout Catholic and would like to write extensively about Catholicism, but what does it have to do with cartooning? I’d also like to write about education. Most of the people who were there for one topic don’t give a care about the others. I don’t want to have to keep two or three different blogs.
I do understand that blogging is about bringing your whole self to something, and I like that both of you guys write about your family life, etc. I think that’s a great aspect about blogging, and I wouldn’t want that to end (posts like that could be for “all hats”), but at the same time, if I’m reading a blogger because of Subject A, but he covers Subject B just as often, it wastes time and can cause annoyance. And for someone like me who is just starting to blog and already has people taking my feed because of my business…how do I now start throwing in posts about religion without most of them leaving?
Surely I’m not the only one who feels this way, am I? Seems to me “blog hats” is a natural idea that a lot of people would appreciate.
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11 Comments
SocioBiblog
June 14th, 2007
at 12:50am
Better than a Magazine Subscription?(Chris Pirillo)
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June 14th, 2007
at 2:01am
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pmeme - tracking people making news - following people in the blogosphere
June 14th, 2007
at 12:15pm
through life and a myriad of web pages, we leave traces. We don’t have time to think deeply about any of this. The blogs that we visit, the music we listen to, the movies we watch; we take all of them for granted. Yet, all… Being used (BuzzMachine)Better than a Magazine Subscription?(Chris Pirillo)
Wolfman-K
June 13th, 2007
at 6:12pm
Wordpress can do this, if you click a category it can bring up just the posts or that category and I think there is a feed for them. However I don’t think many people use it that way.
for example http://net-k.us/blog/?cat=4 shows just my Apple related posts (forgive my shameless promotion on your site, Chris but its relevant.)
I read in the neighborhood of 50 or so feeds a day, from some pretty prolific sites, looking for stuff to blog about on my site. (engadget, Scoble, Gizmodo, Digg, etc…) but I don’t read every post in the feed, how could I?
I could just subscribe to specific posts or categories, but I’d rather see it all and filter it myself. I never know when something off topic will catch my eye and why limit yourself.
Phil Miller
June 13th, 2007
at 6:57pm
I agree entirely. She expressed exactly how I feel. The closest example that I can think of is Lifehacker. From what I understand they tag their posts and you can subscribe to certain tags if you wanted.
My only problem with this is that I don’t want to miss out on anything. I currently use Google Reader to absorb my feeds and I use the list view. I scan the titles of the posts and read the ones that catch my eye and mark the others read.
Aaron B. Hockley
June 13th, 2007
at 7:17pm
Separate blogs.
If your blog is about cartooning, you don’t post about Catholicism.
If you want to write about Catholicism, you do that on a blog about, well, being Catholic.
*unless the cartoon is related to the religion.
Mark Jaquith
June 14th, 2007
at 3:34am
Categories can be used to do this. I’ve been doing that for a while. Remember that in WordPress you can add
/feed/to almost any URL and get a feed for that resource.You can filter even more with the category IDs. You can do category exclusion in WP 2.1+
http://example.com/feed/?cat=-2,-4,-5 (Feed for the blog, minus any posts in categories 2, 4, or 5)
http://example.com/feed/?cat=5,-4 (Feed for all posts in category 5, minus any posts that are also in category 4)
Experiment and see what you can come up with! (note: this won’t work on this site because Chris is redirecting all feeds to FeedBurner)
Shawn Oster
June 14th, 2007
at 8:52am
I actually get what she’s saying and agree with it. I read blogs mostly for the information, not because of the person, and sometimes when a blogger starts asking for product recommendations or sharing vacation stories I’m not as interested and quickly skip them. In fact it reminds me of when blogs were really just angsty teens over on LiveJournal spilling their inner secrets and I found that pretty much the definition of boring. It wasn’t until blogs actually had a use sharing relevant information that they caught my interest.
The “bits” are actually already there, the categories and tags of blogs, yet there isn’t any feed reader I know of that does a per-feed filtering by tag, which would actually be great. It would come down to the blogger having the discipline to keep only a few main tags, so in Dawn’s case there would be “Catholicism”, “Education” and “Cartooning” for those people interested in just one or the other, while the main feed would be the “magazine” or the full tapestry of that person’s life.
I do understand the desire to have only a single blog. I have one over on blogger, another at giveness.com, yet another on myspace and then a fourth at suicidegirls. Each with a unique facet of my life. The few readers of my blogspot account probably care more about the actual nerd facts I talk about there instead of the review of the Gogol Bordello concert on the MySpace page or talking about my latest tattoo over on SuicideGirls or my latest charity work on Giveness.com, yet, there are a few that do and I would much prefer maintaining a single space.
Hmm, interesting ideas….
Shadow Myth
June 14th, 2007
at 12:02pm
Actually, I just skip over whatever doesn’t interest me. Like any magazine/blog, you aren’t going to be interested in everything provided, regardless of how *on-topic* it seems. Like in the case of Lockergnome, I skip over topics regarding Mac computers, because I don’t have one. Though this is still categorized as a topic on computers, it isn’t about *my* computer. It doesn’t take much time to scan through the articles and find what I want to read, and I never am annoyed by the process. In fact, I do read things I normally would have never looked for on my own, and feel that I am much more knowledgeable for this reason. However, if you feel that you want to divide up your blog to better suit the crowd you are looking for, I see no problem with this. It may take a little more time on your end, but if it is important to you, it seems well worth it. There have been complaints I have noticed recently on Lockergnome regarding this very issue, and I am sure it does bother some people. Though I am not Christian, I have subscribed to a few Christian newsletters that give excellent tips on subject matter not related to the religion. I have never seen a problem with scanning through the material for what I am looking for, but some people I suppose are too lazy or intolerant for that kind of thing. As they say “You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time”. That applies even if you don’t include your Catholic content with your cartoon material. Really, it comes down to what you are most comfortable with.
Hugoton Horatio
June 18th, 2007
at 2:32am
Love your BLAUGH The Un-Official Comic of the Blogosphere!
He used to send them via e-mail but evidently quit doing that,
I’d love to see them get into my local Temple of Truth, how would
one go about doing that.
Hugoton Horatio
June 18th, 2007
at 2:33am
oops sorry about that.