More on Feed Readers

With clients and others just getting into blogging, one of the things I recommend they do at a very early stage is to get themselves a feed reader or RSS reader and if the people are not tech savvy, or if they are not much interested in the technical information, I explain it is like having your own customised digital newspaper delivered each day, or even more often. 

I have two main reasons for encouraging them to get a feed reader. First, I want them to understand and experience that to be successful in blogging they need to be part of the conversation, not just write posts in isolation, and I feel they will get that faster and more efficiently by getting regular feeds from sites that appeal to them than from semi-random web browsing. My second reason, which is really a subset of the first point but worth making in terms of a distinct advantage, is that I want to help them get inspiration for blog posts by reading what others in their field or fields of interest are saying.

There are many feed readers available, some web-based, some for the desktop. I make no claim to know which is best or even to be able to make detailed comparisons. For a while now I’ve been recommending either Bloglines or NewsGator Online. I was a bit miffed when I found that Bloglines would not recognise the email address I’ve used there for ages and when I decided to check out the OPML generation function on NewsGator I found it would not work for me. So I decided, as posted here, to install BlogBridge. I’ve also signed up for Rojo but have not installed any feeds there yet. 

Over the weekend I spent more time than I care to think about, installing feeds manually, one by one, into my new BlogBridge reader. That weekend preoccupation probably made me more alert than I would otherwise have been to an item on Read/Write Web blog, Friday Poll: What Type of RSS Reader Do You Use?, which in turn commented on a Hitwise blog post, Web Based Feed Readers – How do they stack up? Both posts are very much focused on the stats from a Hitwise survey, what the figures mean, what’s been left out, what included, and why.

But what really got my attention was the comment in the Hitwise post about the extent of actual use of feed readers. On the basis of the stats reviewed, the writer, LeeAnn Prescott concludes:

1) RSS usage, while growing, is still a niche activity and mainstream adoption is still a ways off, and

2) the most successful blogs are being consumed in the standard Web 1.0 fashion – by visiting the websites.

So feed readers may not be such a big deal for the consumer, but a good feed reader is an essential tool for anyone who has incorporated blogging into their business day.

There is an interesting comparison of Bloglines and Google Reader on Lifehacker.