Yesterday I wrote a post about the silliness of some bloggers and how they treat their RSS feeds. On the whole the post was very well received with 17 comments being left on the blog itself, while over on FriendFeed there were some 26 comments left about the post.
In the conversation on FriendFeed though, one of the commenters asked me what was the difference between a blogger pumping out an RSS feed with just a headline and what happens on FriendFeed where only the title of a post is listed.
While I tried to answer Bill’s comment in the limited space on FriendFeed I realized that this was just really a part of a larger question that bloggers need to deal with. Even though FriendFeed was among the first to offer what is called a lifestreaming aggregation service it has been followed by others. In the process many bloggers are worried that they are losing their blog traffic to this type of aggregation service.
Excuse me while I gnash my teeth
As with most things in blogging you can find two different opinions about the service. For the plus team you will find bloggers who think that services like FriendFeed are a great addition to the social media field. It is pretty safe to say that the large majority of proponents of the service are bloggers that don’t rely on their blogs for their income. Sure there are some who do and who think FriendFeed is a service that they can participate in in order to keep their brand in front of the eyeballs.
A number of months back I decided to experiment on 
I read a lot of blogs throughout the day but there is one blogger I always look forward to reading each and every day and while he is involved in technology his blog usually has little to do with it. In fact I almost look with every refresh of my feeds for his usual daily post and that isn’t something that I can say about the majority of blogs I read.
Ya … okay … what ever you say bub. Any blogger who thinks that they can forever live in pajamas and sip cappuccino while caressing their hot little Apple laptop isn’t going to last very long. The fact is we have to work hard if we want even a modicum of success; personal or otherwise. We don’t have a ticket to easy street just because we have tacked on the word blogger to our CV.
Sure and the Easter Bunny is cavorting around in Florida with Mrs. Claus. I have always wondered with the insane number of conferences that the tech world just how anyone gets the time to write and posts. As for the cost you had better hope that you are making lots of those greenbacks because unless you are in the very top of the blogger stratosphere you don’t get nothin for free – even then you’d be lucky to get a free ticket. I’ve been doing this for three years and I’m still a nobody in the scheme of things and I’ve only been offered one free ticket – to DEMO08 – and it killed me to turn it down.
Get serious. Just because we have hundreds or thousands of people who want to follow us around as we traipse through the social media wilderness it doesn’t mean they are our friends. In most cases they would cut our throats to get a jump on a headline or scoop us on a breaking story. One minute they might be cozying up to you in the comments and the next they’ll be slicing and dicing you in a post. Friends in this business; like any business, are few and far between so you’d better learn to recognize them when the opportunity arises and make sure you don’t screw them.
Oh please let me get up from the floor and pick up my ass that fell off from laughing. The tech blogosphere is a small player in the whole tech world and totally inconsequential in the real world. You could take all the so-called famous people in the tech blogosphere and combined they wouldn’t even raise a blip on the real world fame radar. For some reason we think that because we hammer out a few hundred words a day in a medium that is only now beginning to tickle the underside of the mainstream that we are famous and should be listened to because we are so smart. AÂ physicist is smart, a politician might be famous and a teacher should be listened to. That is famous and respected but a blogger with an inflated ego – give me a break.
