Bring the blogs to the masses

I’ve been having a ton of conversations lately about people being able to subscribe to blogs via email, and have come to the personal decision that it is most definitely a ‘good thing’. Not everybody is ready to drink from the cup of Kool-Aid. But this is definitely one way to get people’s feet in the door. Even if they just use a private blog as a way to do an email list, it’s a step in the right direction because there’s so many things you can do with the RSS feed. Combine it with any other web 2.0 technologies and you have infinite flexibility.

So I say throw the doors wide open. I think every blog should have a subscribe via email link. In fact, I say as educators we must have subscribe via email links on our blogs to help spread the word around to the unenlightened. Once they’re reading more than 10 blogs a day in their inbox they’ll start begging for someone to teach them to use an aggregator (or unsubscribe to a few I guess).

So far, I’ve been pretty happy with Feedblitz. The free service aggregates all the new posts for all the blogs you subscribe into a single digest emailed out once per day. Perfect for newbies. Also, it allows you to see the email addresses for everyone that has subscribed. It also allows you to import them and export them. How cool is that if you already have email addresses for all the parents in your class? You have to pay to customize the template with your own graphics, but I wouldn’t complain about the free service. It really ain’t bad.

Thoughts? Think you’ll rush off to add a Subscribe via Email link to your blog?

4 Comments

Tony Vincent
12/14/2005

I shared information about our school blogs and how to subscribe through email at our last PTO meeting. The parents love our blogs and now they love that it is delivered right to their inboxes. I like how Feedblitz digests all posts from all blogs into one email each day–parents appreciate it as well. We have a master page where the subscriptions can be made to any and all of the blogs at our school: http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/blog/

Ewan McIntosh
12/15/2005

Like Tony and yourself I have put it on my blog for the past week to try and make one less step for people to get into my blog. It seems to be working. Traffic is going through the roof and I’m going to have to upgrade my bandwidth. Importantly, there’s more commenting on the actual blog itself. Yay!

Casey Hales
12/15/2005

I added FeedBlitz to my SpecialEducator blog a while back, and then thought it would be a great idea to add to my classroom blog, as well. Many parents are not into the whole RSS thing, so it allows a much more mainstream method for them to get updates. I think it’s great.
Tony’s idea to share with parents during a PTO/PTA is a great idea. Gives you an opportunity to actually show them how to do it.

Aaron Smith
12/15/2005

I agree that FeedBlitz might be a good way to get started, and I’ve added the feature to my site but to be honest I’m not sure how many people are going to use it.

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