When I’m jumping around blogs I’ve noticed that everyone is crazy about RSS.
Subscribe with RSS! Rawr!
There are little notices to subscribe and big RSS icons to get your attention.
How important is RSS to everyone?
Personally, I don’t use it. I don’t promote it, and I don’t care if people subscribe to me. If I want to read a blog, then I just visit the site - no big deal to me. And if someone wants to subscribe to me, then go for it but I’m not going to shove it in your face.
In fact, I’ve only used RSS once - and that was only because it was one of those “subscribe and get suchandsuch!” type things. So I subscribed, got what I wanted, and never used it again.
So why is RSS so important to bloggers? What if you have 500 people subscribed but no one bothers checking the reader thing?
RSS just never seemed like a big deal to me. It can make it more convenient to the reader, but for the blogger I’m not sure why it matters.
To me, having a ton of RSS subscribers doesn’t make your blog anymore popular. It’s like having a forum with 500 registered members, but only 5 active members. High RSS numbers don’t mean anything to me.
But that’s just my view on it, since I don’t use it. How do other people see it?
RSS important? Not important? Somewhere in between?
Am I missing something?
somewhere in between for me. It’s not super important but having RSS subscribers especially if they are not acquired through, contest and/or giveaways kinda makes you know our entries will certainly be read by a certain amount of people.
I don’t use or care about it myself. I visit blogs the old fashioned way I guess.
RSS is crucial for me, now if i wasn’t subscribed to yours rss feed, then i wouldn’t know that you had a new post, and usually when people subscribe to your RSS feed then that sorta signifies that there interested in your blog and more than often they read your posts.
Now let’s say i read 10-15 blogs, your telling me i should visit each one to check for updates, nonsence, with rss i just subscribe to all these blogs rss feed and if there is a new post on anyone, then it will show up in my rss reader, now you being the one who is not subscribed would have to check each blog for updates, which can take 10-15 minutes, which basically takes mere seconds for me, but if you only read 2 blogs, it makes no sence using an rss feed. Right now i’m subscribed to 43 blogs, so without rss, how would i keep on top of posts?, check all 43 of them, everyday?. What you should tell me is, how many blogs/websites do you read, and if so how do you keep up to date on the updates?
P.S sorry i had to post twice, the link for my blog was wrong in the first one. delete it for me(the first one)
Well, for readers I think it can be very useful. If you read a lot of blogs, then yeah, use it. It makes it all easy to keep up with.
But for bloggers I’m not sure why they shove RSS in your face so much. Readers should subscribe because they WANT to, not because some blogger is trying to shove RSS down their throat.
Like, what’s the point of doing contests where you make the visitors subscribe to your RSS in order to win? I’ve seen those many times. Those visitors aren’t subscribing because they care about the blog, they’re subscribing to win.
And I think that gives the blogger a false representation of how many people read a blog. They might have 400 people subscribed, but most of them might have only signed up to win.
I just don’t see the point in bloggers pushing RSS all the time. People will subscribe if they want to. I don’t need a million banners and buttons telling me too.
Sometimes it just feels like people use RSS as a popularity contest.
Subscribe to me so that I look important!
I’m not saying it’s not important at all, I just don’t need every blog trying to get me to subscribe by using huge icons and stuff. If I want to subscribe, then I will.
Well i am a lazy bugger and I subscribe to feeds of all my favourite bloggers, so i can read their latest posts in one place at my leisure. I use google reader.
I like to call it feed lurking
But I don’t have a click on RSS thingie on my blog, if they want it they can find it
I personally never use it. I hate how people shove it in your face it makes you sure not to ever sign up for it.