blogs

People running corporate blogs and other large-readership sites with audacious goals should be able to get RSS feeds right. A large percentage of blog readers consume their information through syndicated feeds (RSS), and yet so many sites still make it difficult for users to find and subscribe to their work.

As I was populating my blogroll (in Google Reader) with green blogs and environmental sustainability sites, I came across two egregious examples at surprisingly large, modern websites:

• The Daily Green has thirty or so different RSS feeds, but no feed that contains all of the site content! You have to subscribe to tens of feeds to get everything. Especially in feedreaders without point and click subscription mechanisms, this is a terrible inconvenience.
• World Changing simply doesn’t have a button on the main page for new subscribers to access. I was able to find the feed using a special Firefox plugin, but many people will simply pass over the site because of this.

This is a simple, but vital task in making your blog conveniently available to readers, and to gloss over it is foolish. If you don’t currently have a dedicated feed (through Feedburner, for example), or don’t make it readily accessible on all pages of your blog, change it today.

-III

I read two interesting links concerning the rise of the streetstyle blog while going through my RSS feeds today.

The second link posed the question of how people react to and use these blogs personally. Do they go just to see the images, or to gain inspiration for their own dress? Do they try to copy the outfits showcased or simply look for ideas? Do they try to spot trends or spot pieces?

These are all very valid (and interesting) questions, but they all led me to a broader, more important question: who benefits from these blogs (to a lesser extent, fashion blogs in general)?

As a ballpark guess, I’m going to say that 90% of people who regularly read streetstyle blogs are well acquainted with the world of fashion; trends, designers, general style concepts. A large percentage of these people probably think about fashion much more than the average person (hence they are reading about it, regularly, on the internet), and probably has more experience with fashion than the average person.

This means that any learning going on here is likely to be anecdotal at best, little details and inspirations that may or may not be remembered. Personally, it’s hard for me to recall anything from these streetstyle blogs even a day after reading (unless a particular image spreads virally across the fashion blogosphere). I suspect the same is true for most readers.

The majority of streetstyle readers already have a fairly strong sense of personal style; we can see this in many of the opinionated, strong statements in the comments there. This means, once again, that people will accept and praise what they already liked, and dismiss the new things they don’t like. Every once in a while, we’ll see something novel that we agree with, and maybe we consider adding it to our repertoire. But I contend that this is rare.

It would seem, then, that seasoned fashionistas don’t get as much out of these blogs as one might expect from all the buzz about them. Paradoxically, I think it’s the person uninterested in fashion, or who has just a nascent thought of style who benefits most from these blogs. I recall stumbling across one a few years back (as I was just beginning to interest myself in this world) and marveling at how interesting and well-done some of the outfits were. I don’t remember any of them, I just remember that they continued to spark my interest and make me want to think and learn more.

Unfortunately, people like my past self generally don’t visit these sites but by chance, even though I believe they are the ones who get the most out of them.

An artist will respect and admire the work at an art gallery, but he can’t become a new artist from it. A young child who sees great art for the first time can be inspired.

-Barry

People write blogs for a myriad of reasons: to make money, to express themselves, to make social connections, as a stepping stone to other ventures, to advertise their company, to provide information, to provide value. The list could go on further. Whether people successfully achieve their blogging goals is a complicated and highly personal analysis.

On the other hand, I think the value of reading blogs is much clearer. In general, people read blogs to get information. Just as Seth Godin delineated three categories of blogs in his e-book Who’s There, I’m going to delineate three types of information we extract from blogs.

1. Social Information
2. Facts
3. Ideas and Opinions

Now, there are millions of blogs out there. Thousands are created each day, and you have no chance of reading all of them, or even an appreciable fraction of them. Great tools, such as RSS readers make it easy to power through the blogosphere, but there is simply too much out there. We need to determine how to distill the most value out of reading blogs, and I’ll discuss two ways:

1. Determining what blogs provide you value.
2. Condensing the value into a form which can be digested faster.

Social Blogs: Connection in the Vast Internet Sea

Blogging (and twittering) provide an easy, optional way to stay connected with friends, family and contacts. In general, it’s not beneficial to condense the social information in a blog, or to condense the content of a personal blog. This is because the social connection is strengthened by reading details, by reading and understanding the emotions and experiences of your friends. Social blogging goes beyond other web social media in the level of detail and emotion it provides.

What is the benchmark? Do you find yourself bored of the stories, or not caring about the person who’s written them? It’s probably not worth your while to read up on a middle school friend you haven’t spoken to in 10 years, and don’t plan on doing so (it’s not like you’ll be able to bring up any of their stories without looking like a complete stalker). These are personal judgments, but the type of criteria are clear.

Fact Blogs: Reportage at Breakneck Speed

Blogging has enabled the existence of hundreds of thousands of amateur reporters of news and facts. Their combined effort makes for blindingly fast information availability on political, trade, product, and business news. Measuring the usefulness of such blogs is surprisingly easy:

For each fact blog you read, count the number of pieces of information that actually matter to you, or have an impact on your life (for example, the release of a CD you plan to purchase, an event which informs a voting decision) over the course of a week. Quickly, you’ll see which blogs provide valuable information, and which blogs provide a timesuck.

Usually, fact blogs do a good job of making their information easily digestible, often in the form of a headline. For this reason, RSS readers are effective at filtering these blogs. One can scroll the titles of each blog, reading “Apple releases new iPhone app,” “Ravens beat Redskins 24-10,” etc. Often, the headline is sufficient information. If not, the headline can quickly tell me which blog posts to open and read, saving me the time of reading a post that doesn’t contain anything useful.

Idea Blogs: Exchanging Genius (and not so Genius)

These are my favorite blogs. These are blogs, written by real, passionate people, about the topics they know. These blogs provide actionable ideas and philosophies. Idea bloggers exchange ideas with each other about business, life, professions, and hobbies, and become better for it. Per post, these blogs have the potential to provide the most value of all blogs.

Unfortunately, they often require the most investment of time and attention. Some great ideas take thousands of words (or multiple posts) to develop. Some not-so-great idea (or ones you already know and understand) take just as much of your attention. Again, I think that the simple measuring method above works wonders for revealing this.

Here, however, is the real opportunity for condensation and distillation. Much of the time, these idea posts consist of a main idea and arguments/examples/support for that idea. Frustratingly, this idea is not often obvious from the headline (like factual information is). Great bloggers do try to allude to their intentions with clear headlines, but the actionable item is not always the best title.

A great service would be provided if someone were to read, digest, and extract the ideas out of idea blogs, and publish them in a useful format. A good model would list just the blog and the idea, with the idea text as a hyperlink to the post. This way, a person could keep track of 25 blogs by reading a one-page document each morning. If you understand the idea by reading it (or if you already know it), it’s not necessary to read the post. If you’re intrigued by the idea but want to learn more, you can read on. The attention saved here is significantly more than with fact blogs, both because of the length and difficulty of the material.

Blogs are wonderful tools for learning and sharing information, ideas, and friendship. Like any tools, however, the more efficiently they are used, the more value we can get out of them. It’s worth investing some time and energy into improving how you use them.

-Barry