Is Social Media Destroying RSS? And Does It Matter Anyway?
Social Media provides us with a multitude of sources from which to satisfy our thirst for information. Many bloggers are now catching on to the power of social media which means that a good blog post will often be propagated far and wide. Could this phenomena be silently destroying our RSS readerships without us knowing?
I Used to Read a Lot of Blogs
Like, 30-40 blogs… It was too much and I have been on a never-ending quest to cut back on my daily reading as I found much of it to be non-essential. On the flipside however, my consumption of social media has increased somewhat.
I am an avid user of Twitter, and keep an eye on my twitter feed all day long, I Stumble every day and regularly check out the Stumble feeds of my friends and stumble through the friends channel. I visit niche specific news submission sites such as Sphinn on a regular basis. After a while, I noticed something rather interesting…
The Good Stuff Is Everywhere!
Lets take a very popular blog as an example - DoshDosh. Maki is an avid social media user himself and he has a high profile on all the sites I mentioned plus other big ones such as Digg and Reddit. What I started to notice was that everywhere I looked, I would see Maki’s work. All his good posts would be on Sphinn, every single post would be Stumbled and reviewed many times meaning that I would see links to them multiple times over when looking through my StumbleUpon feeds.
Really, I don’t need to subscribe to DoshDosh because it is highly unlikely that I would miss any of his good stuff because I’d see it all over the social media sites that I use. Dosh Dosh is not the only site. As I began to use Sphinn more and more I found content from the same sites being posted over and over.
This is a GOOD thing, because only the best content gets submitted to social media. You don’t get the irrelevant fluff posts like how the blogger is going on holiday for a week, or how her cat died :(
So Did I Unsubscribe?
I didn’t unsubscribe from DoshDosh’s feed because I actually prefer to read his posts in my feed reader and I know there is no fluff on his blog but I did unsubscribe from many others that I was only partially interested in. Over the last few months I have continued to cull my RSS subscriptions and I have felt much better about doing so knowing that I can find the best stuff from those blogs in the social media space.
Does it Even Matter?
I suppose this is the bigger question. Does it matter if I unsubscribe from a blog but continue to read the good content? The question is that of sourcing - rather than source the information directly from the RSS feed I source it from a submission to StumbleUpon, Sphinn etc or a tweet in the Twittersphere.
As a blog owner what is important? Is it the RSS number or is it the number of people who truly read the content? For many bloggers, myself included, it can be quite hard not to focus on the number - it’s lovely to see that number go up and up every month. But really, it’s just a number and it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Even though I still have around a dozen blogs in my reader that still doesn’t mean that I actually read every post in there. I scan through the headlines picking out what interests me and I ignore the rest. Everybody does this! The RSS number is essentially meaningless, but it’s handy for getting more people to subscribe which makes the number go up which um… we’re going round in circles here!
Is that any different to picking out the good stuff from a social media site? I don’t think so. In fact, if anything I think it can be better if people find you from social media because that means the content has already been endorsed by other people so those readers come in with the impression that the content is good.
What Do You Think?
I’d love to know if I am the only one who has done this - have you unsubscribed from blogs knowing that you can find their content in social media? Do you think this will become common practice? What is your opinion of RSS in general? Should bloggers be obsessing with the RSS number so much? Will RSS shift the emphasis away from individual feeds? Does anyone even care?
