Blogs in your inbox?

Not everyone has an aggregator. In fact, to be honest, most people don’t. The vast majority of educators have no idea what an aggregator is. So far as those people are concerned, a blog is just another web page. They will visit it again and again to check to see if there’s new content.

That’s one thing that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit as I get comfortable in my role as Blogfather to the Discovery Educator Network family of blogs. At Blawgthink, I attended a session where I learned about Feedblitz, an new app that’s been integrated into the features available through Feedburner. In a nutshell, people can subscribe to your feed via email, so any new posts will be sent directly to their inbox. In some sense, it turns a blog into a one way mailing list, like a newsletter. Feedburner does keep track of people who subscribe this way, allowing you to get good stats on everything, but it does create it’s own little suite of issues.

On the positive end, it does allow people to subscribe to your content. They don’t have to visit your blog every day to see if there’s something new. It’s easy and comfortable to people who are already familiar with email. It doesn’t require them to learn any new skills, or to mess around with ugly things like pages of xml code. And you’re still able to keep track of them the same way you track the rest of your blog traffic.

However, it kinda takes some of the magic away from the blog concept. People don’t see the posts at their leisure, they just pop up when Feedblitz sends them out. You go to an aggregator when you’re ready to read your news, it doesn’t just force it out to you. I guess that’s not that big a deal, a daily digest will just show you your new posts like an aggregator would. And you can always save the email, which would be the same sort of thing like keeping a blog post ‘new’ in bloglines.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just being old fashioned in a strange sort of hi-tech way. I feel like having blog posts emailed out to people is a step back in some way but I’m having a pretty tough time putting my finger on what’s so wrong with it.

Got any thoughts about this one?

8 Comments

Brian Mull
12/1/2005

I would probably lean toward keeping the two apart. I see email as being my “have to dos” while checking my aggregator is my “want to do.” Keeping them apart lets me stay a bit more focused. As the Technology Director at my school, I am constantly getting emails with both technical and curricular help, and a lot of these are of the moment type things. I can’t sit back and contemplate a topic with email. I have to act. On the other hand, when I open my aggregator, I can escape a bit from that and really think about things.

I guess one way around this would be to set up rules in my email program to send all of my feeds into a particular “aggregator” folder. Then, I could just focus on that when I want to. In the end, I guess I like my Bloglines account just the way it is.

By the way, I followed your instructions that you mentioned a few weeks ago about setting up a pre-populated Bloglines account and sent that list to two people just to test their response. Both said they had an easy time getting registered, and both said they saw a few interesting posts that caught their attention. I think this is a good method to hook some people in and introduce them to what RSS is.

Jo McLeay
12/2/2005

I agree with what Brian says about keeping email and blogs separate for similar reasons. On the other hand, Steve, your post reminds me a bit about the reactions of my blogging students when they get comments on their blogs – the first time time they know about it is when they get an email and so they tell me they’ve been keeping in touch with these people through email (only they call it texting). It seems that I haven’t been able to show them the difference between these different forms of communication, but they were enjoying the interaction non the less.
Jo

Amy Hendrickson
12/2/2005

As one of those teachers who is pretty new to blogging, I agree that I do not want anymore stuff in my email inbox! As with many of the listserves and newsletters that I get – I probably wouldn’t have enough time / dedication to read them. Brian notes well that email is a “to do list”.

I have about 3 blogs that I read near daily – I just go to them as webpages from my internet dropbox. I also have a few more listed on a Bloglines account, which I check, also. To me, as someone new to this all, Bloglines is almost “too much pressure” – I see that I have new posts in my Bloglines account and it’s almost like looking at the stack of newspapers sitting on my kitchen table. We subscribe to the paper, but rarely read it daily – then you feel sort of guilty that you even subscribed. Sometimes I feel that way with Bloglines – I don’t want to be one of those people with 3500 posts that they haven’t read, so sometimes I just click on the link to clear the numbers of new posts.

From the 3 blogs I read daily, I follow links and read other blogs. Sometimes, when I have enough time, I just search for stuff that interests me. You note that “You go to an aggregator when you’re ready to read your news, it doesn’t just force it out to you.” Isn’t that what all of us “newbies” are doing when we just check the blogs as websites? On a slow, rural internet link, it takes about the same amount of time for a webpage to come up as it does for the link on Bloglines to come up – so it’s not too much of a time saver. Just wondering what I’m missing as the difference / benefits to an “aggregator” (if that’s what Bloglines is?) Thanks – Amy H.

Brian Mull
12/2/2005

You’re probably right that if you only follow 2 or 3 blogs, then you don’t need an aggregator, but once you get more “into it”, you’ll probably want to consider going the aggregator route.

Amy Hendrickson
12/7/2005

Hi Steve: Just to update our discussion about aggregators vs. email vs. using as webpages:

I am happy to report that I’ve now moved far enough into the “blog-world” that I see the value, use
of having an aggregator! I attended a great workshop this weekend put on by Tim Wilson (The “Savvy Technologist”)that helped me move my blogging skills up a notch. Now I’m subscribing to a few more people and understanding the RSS feed stuff a little more. Maybe starting with following a few good blogs (as webpages) is not such a bad start for us “newbies” – definitely helped get me into this all. Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing soon myself!

Thanks for the good ideas / discussions.
Amy Hendrickson

Aaron Smith
12/9/2005

We see aggregators as wonderful things because we’re tech savvy. Unfortunately I think many more people are like my Mom – someone who started using computers around the same time I did (I remember her helping me type a report on our Apple II) but just learned how to copy and paste a few months ago.

A lot of people (not so much students as people who have already entered the “real world) are at the limits of what they’re comfortable using, and while they COULD learn to do more if they absolutely had to, they will fight tooth and nail rather than develop new skills.

So in that regard RSS to your inbox is a great idea. Will I ever use it? No way, I love my aggregator.

Jon Stoper
12/11/2005

Gmail just started listing RSS feeds right above the inbox. Clearly, this has a long way to go, as you can custmize which feeds it pulls from, but doesn’t keep track of which posts you’ve read. Thus it decides for you which posts are “new”. I’m curious to see how they expand this feature.

Jack Vinson
12/11/2005

Having a email feature gives your readers more options. Particularly for those who don’t know about aggregators or who don’t want to know, email is a very comfortable mode.

What I’ve done is to create a separate “excerpts only” feed that I send to FeedBlitz. I recognize that readers (if they are anything like me) don’t want long email messages every day. So, FeedBlitz sends them brief excerpts of all the posts I’ve made today, and if the recipients want more they just click through to my website. I’ve noticed that other people also include things like recent Flickr photos and recent delicious links in their FeedBlitz as well.

By the way, I believe FeedBlitz is separate from FeedBurner. They just have an agreement that makes it easier to set up FeedBlitz through your FeedBurner account.

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