Blogs in the Eye of the Beholder
To test the direction that blogs are heading - rather than where they have been historically - Catalyst probed usage and navigation of one of BusinessWeek's five new blogs. The result? No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog - not even the minority familiar with the term RSS. What's more, few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog - and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented. Prediction: come 2010 we won't be delineating blogs from web sites. They'll all be part of what we call the Internet.
It is too bad that the average web user still does not know what this thingy called RSS is or what it does. But that is not my point here. The question is how do we get from where we are to where we want to be? What do we say about our particular RSS (or ATOM or whatever) feed on our own web pages, so that people will be encouraged to tune-in to the blogosphere, to start reading blogs, to start watching for new information? The *Subscribe section on the right of Steve Rubel's blog is about as good as it gets, but it's gotta get better than that. Now i'm not talking about some new centralized subscribing network ... no, i'm just looking for some clear, concise, even catchy wording together with some graphics and pointers that "we-all" (chuckel) could start using that would lead the unwashed masses into this new space as we project our own selves into the blogosphere by hyperlinking to our feeds.
... ideas, anybody ? .... who has the best way of pointing to their feeds ?
Posted by: Seth Russell | Wednesday, July 13, 2005 at 10:17 AM