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?
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Even as a technically literate individual (I work as a programmer) I have never felt the need to subscribe to any kind of RSS, and I rarely bookmark a page. Instead I rely on my memory to find the site once again.
Caroline,
I don’t think social media are destroying RSS anytime soon except for some really early adopters. There’s still a huge percentage of adults who are just discovering blogs or don’t know about them at all. For them, it will be a while before the phrase “social media” has any meaning.
Regards,
Kelly
Kellys last blog post..Naomi Dunford’s "I Never Called It a Meme," Meme
I think social media & rss are two different matter.
Ebooks last blog post..Buying and Selling Domains for Profit
Its interesting to see such a diverse range of responses. Everybody uses the Internet to get their information in such different ways – which I suppose is to be expected! It’s also interesting that nobody yet has said they do the same thing that I do :)
Great question AND THANKYOU FOR RAISING IT.
I found I had a Sphinn account that was sitting idle so have added you as a friend and will follow what you are doing there.
You raise an interesting topic. Where do i find the hours in the day to read write, network , twitter as well as develop as you are doing a new line( I used to do Fashion) and stay sane?
Saw on Twitter you had read Michael Losier- great- about to do a LOA put it out there that is fun and scarry- watch this space as they say.
Twitter is amazing as you say- i have written several spontaneuos blog posts based on a tweet. Ihaven’t been game to leave it up all day-YET
Thank you again for thinking out loud
i am interested that you
Hey Caroline,
While I consume quite a few RSS feeds on a regular basis, I’ve not reached that saturation point yet where I feel overwhelmed.
I have to admin though that I do enjoy the twitter.
I’d rather get my scoop straight from the source – I subscribe to dozens (nearly 200 total) RSS feeds so I don’t bother much with scrounging around on social media sites.
Occassionally, I’ll run across something interesting via Digg, but I don’t Digg the article or add the Digger to my friends list or any of that nonsense – no, I go to the originating source, subscribe to the feed, and leave comments if I have anything meaningful to contribute.
In other words, I give my partonage & support to the blogger who actually created the article or post, not some other second-hand source who just Dugg or Stumbled someone else’s stuff.
As a blog author, I know I’d rather have readers directly visiting my site and getting involved there instead of via a social media site where my original context is sorta out of the loop and subject to dozens of re-interpretations.
it would be fun to show the amount of people that follow you on twitter on your blog. i wonder if they have a twitter follower counter that you can embed on your blog.
paul sanchezs last blog post..soloride: @shaxxon not all diggers are just the ones that don’t know what they are doing. what is zeer about? curious :)
Caroline
Great timing with this article because I have been wondering if I should have a major cull back of my RSS Reader. I am very active on stumbleupon and do a bit with Digg so I seem to keep up with most of the bloggers I’m interested in anyway. I think if you make some good friends on social media who have interests like yours, you pretty much have your reading list. I think if I cull back my RSS Reader to bloggers I absolutely do not want to miss, then it will make my reading and more importantly my commenting habits more efficient.
I have also wondered if this is happening a bit because my traffic and Alexa ranking has been steadily improving since the beginning of the year when I really started to blog regularly, but my RSS numbers are stable rather than increasing at the same rate. I find it quite strange…
Anyway, great post and FYI I won’t be culling you and maybe I’ll actually get around to commenting more!
Cheers
Kelly
Kelly@SHE-POWERs last blog post..Choose the Questions for Clay Collins, our first SHE-POWER Man
I don’t think they will become mutually exclusive. There will always be those who are highly clued up on any technology and will use everything available to deliver them content just as they NEED it and then there will be others who are mildly interested in techy widgets and quite like regularly accessing different blogs direct or via another blog (moi) as they WANT it. In conclusion the different types of communities will continue to use all the options available and I don’t think one will suffer overall because it’s based on arbitrary human choice and preference.
Ordinary Internet users don’t use social media sites: they go to Google. I haven’t used Twitter. Time is gold. Twittering can be an enormous waste of time.
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Two words: Coffee Table.
My RSS reader is my personal spread of reading material.
Whether I turn to it for inspiration, curiosity or entertainment, bloglines is my lifeline to the blogosphere.
Judging by the other comments here, RSS is too valuable to be shunted aside by social media networks.
To me, social media networks are more like crowded cocktail parties, with participants all talking loudly about different things.
In this instance, I’m more of a passive observer, catching tidbits as they waft by on the ether.
There is a place for both. We still have email, after all…and IRC!
Cheers,
Mitch
Mitchell Allens last blog post..Potatoes Spill from Truck
[...] you ever wondered about the affects of social media on your RSS feed? Caroline Middlebrook brings this excellent post to us describing the affects it has on your RSS [...]