Yet More Arguments for Using Feeds to Distribute Content: Visibility and Ease of Linking
Just watching my own behavior now, I’m learning that I’m much more likely to read something that comes to me; and, since I blog, I’m likely to write about what I see and point to the links I have on hand. With some blog posts, like the one about the Open Content Alliance, I make an effort to go on the Web to hunt down relevant links. With others, I don’t. Any number of factors influence my decision to track something down, like energy, time, computer power, importance, and Internet connection. I could have stopped with a link I found easily, but I like including material from various sources when I can. With a project like the Open Content Alliance, that might mean tracking down public relations materials (press releases, special announcements, etc.) from various entities, news articles, etc.
Yeah, I’m not the first person to share these thoughts. It just reinforces my office’s decision to use feeds because we want more people to read our articles and we want to make it easy for them to do so.
But, then again, there’s always going to be more content available on the Web than what I want (or anyone wants) to aggregate, so the intial questions of how to let people know about the feeds, how to get them to subscribe, and how to keep them as subscribers are very real ones.
