2005-10-30

Scobelizer on WordPress.com feeds

Posted in RSS at 11:27 pm by cori

There’s a bit of a Atom/RSS, FeedBurner/Never-Feedburner donnybrook going on in Scoble’s post on how WordPress.com feeds suck.

My 2¢…who really cares? Atom-type folks are going to keep believing Atom-centric things and RSS-type folks will continue to believe RSS-centric things. With most (if not all) readers supporting any style of content syndication, the users win all the way around. And contrary to what Dave says in those comments:

(“People don’t [use] things they don’t understand”)

I must disagree – I think people do that all the time. I don’t generally do so, and I expect Dave never does, but I think the 98% probably do (I should be clear, I think that’s the 98% that have better thikngs to do with their time). For a rather poor analogy, look at your car, or your air conditioner, or even your browser. How well do you really understand their inner workings?

As far as Feedburner or not, I’m a little more on the fence. Were I Scoble under his current situation, I wouldn’t use it, because he can’t (to my knowledge) redirect from the actual feed address since it’s a hosted service. Actually, while he could certainly generate a FeedBurner feed for his blog, it’s not entirely clear to me how he would actually have it show up in his WordPress.com blog – I don’t know of a way to do this in this hosted environment. However, I’m a neophyte in WordPress.com, so it’s quite possible I’ve missed something.

On the other hand and in another environment (like a hosting provider solution) I’d say FeedBurner would be a great choice. I use it at elliptical… and am highly pleased with the value it offers me. But that’s because I redirect users from my local feed addresses to the feedburner ones, giving me the control and ability to shut them off that Scoble’s worried about.

On the gripping hand, redirecting feeds isn’t something that any blogger is able to do even if they have themselves hosted with a provider somewhere. And until that becomes transparent to the average user then FeedBurner is less than totally satisfactory. It’s an even bet whether redirection will become commodetized to the extent that it alleviates the FeedBurner readership-ownership problem before website stats become as easy to use as setting up a FeedBurner feed.

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