Blogline ate my blog: The Dangers of Feed Aggregators

Once upon a time, blogs were conversational hubs. Posts were written to be commented, trackbacked, circulated, debated. Blogs were places you would go to. Strolling through cyberspace, you would visit A, follow a link to B, and engage in a conversation with C. Along the way, communities were created, friends were made, important discussion happened. Blogging required traveling and social interaction.

Then blogs became too many to be visited daily. RSS aggregators were developed. Blog posts were now coming to you when a blog was updated. It was easy to add another blog to the list. We found ourselves reading hundreds of posts a day. There was no time to visit blogs, leaving comments, think about what we had read. Gradually, the conversational aspect of blogging was lost.

In The Mainstream Media IS the New Blogging A-List, Jeneane Sessum writes:

When I look around at the most subscribed to blogs in Bloglines […] I see the effects of RSS and ‘consumption-based reading’ — I see how so many real bloggers who used write in a real, human voice have slipped off the charts, replaced by ‘conglomerate’ news blogs like gizmodo, engadget, wired news, etc.

The problem, Jeneane continues is that:

RSS is a news engine. It has nothing to do with blogging. Now if only some tools for conversation-based blogging would help us sift through the noise, maybe we could still hear ourselves talk. or listen. as the case may be.

Stowe Boyd agrees:

The blurring between individual blogging and the blog machinery that is emerging — blog consortia like the Huffington Post, the search solutions that feel more and more like media, like Google and Technorati, and the memetrackers like tech.memorandum and Tailrank — means that there will be more and more readership in blogland, but less deep involvement. There will be less active ‘readering’ and more passive audience, as the mainstreaming of blogging becomes more evident.

Ralph describes the transformation of blogs from tools of social participation to things to use and consume:

The feed aggregator model reduces readers to that horrible word that anti-marketers so despise, "consumers" […] In the process of potentially discovering links between weblogs, feeds make it less likely that we participate in conversations on a single weblog.

In Pale Moon Shadow, Shelley Powers writes that what is happening to the blogging community is probably just natural evolution, and that tools have little to do with it:

Communities, friendships, a sense of companionship and sharing can’t be made or broken through the use of tools. If anything, when we become friends through our online associations, we have done something extraordinary–we have reached beyond the limits of technology and created something human, and real.

But it’s a fragile reality–like the shadow of a pale moon.

I have been into blogging for just a year and I sadly followed the trajectory that Jeneane, Stowe, and Ralph describe. I started by reading blogs. Then I began commenting them. Then I got a blog of my own. I started to feel closer to some bloggers than others. I discovered the cozy community and the interesting and fascinating exchange of ideas. Then, I discovered Bloglines: the best invention after sliced bread, it seemed at the time. I could efficiently scan for new posts in the blogs I loved the most and check out other topics and bloggers.

At some point, things got out of control, and I realized I had was drowning in RSS feeds. I exceeded my maximum post tolerance. I became the typical lazy aggregator type that makes Jeneane mad ("Please. I am not writing posts for you to read; I AM TALKING TO YOU."). But, most of all, I wasn’t having fun any more. Be up-to-date with what was going on in the blogosphere became almost a job, and most of what I was reading was not as exciting or fascinating as the first posts I read.

Jeneane’s distinction between RSS feeds as news delivery system and blogs as conversations is an important one. Mixing the two flattens everything is a passive indigestions of words and opinions. Conversations, connections, debates and arguments, discovery of similarities and differences are the fabric of social life. It’s what makes blogs alive and exciting. Debating news is blogging, reading them is not.

Tags: blogging, RSS feeds, Bloglines, Jeneane Sessum, conversation