Joe Hendren

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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Bye Bye Bloglines - sob

Sad to hear that Bloglines will be shutting down its servers, just over a week away, on 1 October 2010.

I've used Bloglines as my primary blog reader for some years. Sometimes a simple uncluttered interface can be so much easier to use than something that tries to do all the bells and whistles.

Unfortunately this blog, or at least the counter of subscribed readers is going to take a hit with bloglines shutting down. Around half of my subscribed readers (22), at least according to feedburner stats, use bloglines to read this blog.

So dear readers I would appreciate it muchly if you were able to transfer their subscriptions over to another blog reader. Thanks to a recommendation of a friend I am trying out Google reader. This link shows you how to download your subscriptions from Bloglines and upload them into Google reader, so you don't have to go entering all your blog subscriptions in again.

Another option is to subscribe by email. If all else fails put this into your blog reader.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JoeHendren

Since Bloglines came along all those years ago, it is clear that blog readers have fundamentally changed the way people read blogs. While they certainly make it more convenient, I suspect they are one reason the smaller blogs do not get as many visitors as they used to, and don't attract as many comments. I am comparing the situation to when I first started blogging over six years ago now, and even saying that I feel old. Despite this I suspect the advent of blog readers has increased readership overall.

Another change, which I am not sure is for the better is that some blog readers have presented only the first few lines of a post as a teaser, rather than the entire post. Some blog owners have adopted this format so that readers are forced to click through from a blog reader to the site to read the entire post. In some cases this may be motivated by wanting to keep their visitor count up. Personally I find all these click throughs annoying - if I want to read something I want the entire post on screen thank you very much. Sometimes I don't bother reading blogs that force me to do a click through to read anything. Even Public Address!

It is also possible this 'teaser' culture has encouraged people writing on blogs to structure their posts more like news stories.

Be interested on peoples thoughts on these blog related ramblings. Also interested to hear what other blog readers people use, and how they find them.

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3 Comments:

At 6:46 pm, Blogger Will de Cleene said...

I started on Bloglines, but Reader has been quicker with updates for some time. Good onya with full posts in RSS. I know what you mean about truncated titles and click throughs. N00bs tend to surf websites for updates, whilst RSS aggregators tend to be switched on users. Respect your audience!

 
At 7:16 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like to use http://www.dailyrotation.com for my RSS. I just want headlines with a hover and that is what I get.

 
At 10:11 am, Blogger Joe Hendren said...

Cheers Will glad I am not the only one who is annoyed by click throughs!

Anon - most blog readers have an option for headlines. The problem is blog publishers who only put teasers in the RSS - it takes the choice away from the audience.

 

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