I love my RSS feeds that constantly flow through FeedDemon. They are the lifeblood of what I like to do – write about technology and the internet. While I am not a big fan of partial feeds and will usually unsubscribe from them or not subscribe at all. I will even accept advertisements; within reason, as part of the feed because bills have to be paid and people need to eat.
There comes a point though when too much is just plain too much and I have to say something and such is the case today when I went to check out the newest post from John Battelle’s Searchblog feed in FeedDemon and was faced with this as the entry:
That’s it .. a single three word hyperlinked sentence a bunch of whitespace and then a frikken ad that took up more space than the useless post. So what the f**k was the point of all that?
John may be a busy man with all kinds of conferences, meetings and the other great things of running a business but if you can’t take at least five minutes to at least make the post bigger than the frikken ad don’t waste my time by posting this crap.
Oh wait … that’s right … UNSUBSCRIBED!
Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?
Tweet
Meanie pants.
I tend to reserve short “posts” like that for my Twitter.
Yep – the unwritten rule of blogging ought to be – more actual content than ads. If there’s more text in the ads then there is a problem. And yes – twitter is a perfect outlet for the less than a hundred character type post… all bloggers should use it.
To be fair, to call three generic words linking to a news story “blogging” is a bit generous. Where’s the commentary? What original content is there?
What I meant was whenever I come across a piece of news that I think may be worth linking to I use Twitter, and because my Twitter feed appears on my blog’s sidebar my readers can access it if they wish.
To my mind that’s a better solution (although the best solution is clearly a link blog) that three words in a blog post. That’s the sort of “content” that turns readers off, as demonstrated by this post.
If nobody reads the Tweets it’s cost me nothing as that’s not really original “content”. If even one person reads it then it’s been a positive.
I’ve even gotten hits from my Twitter page. Nor am I the only blogger I know who has seen an increase in traffic thanks to micro-blogging services. Not a huge increase, granted, but an increase nonetheless.
Heck, I only discovered Steven’s blog thanks to Twitter!
I really dislike partial feeds as well. It’s a cheap way to get people to the site for the adds portion. If there is good content being pushed out by the provider, people will go to the site and leave comments. Just my humble opinion.
Hell, there’s more commentary than that expected on a post to the “cool links” or “coffee shop” sections on the forums on this site, which is where I’d be posting a link without in-depth critical analysis….
that’s Mr. Meanie Pants thank you
LOL
We lovingly refer to him as Mr Cranky Pants.
All bloggers should use it? Doesn’t make sense to me. Getting traffic to your site to read your carefully crafted words is the name of this game, I know. But Twitter? Honestly, I have like 40 people on my MSN contact list and maybe TWO of them use Twitter. I certainly don’t. I’ve got enough crap running on this poor old box, and enough to do without something else demanding my attention. Seems to me, that by ‘blogging’ to Twitter you’re shooting yourself in the face with a bazooka, regardless of how short the post may be.
Twitter led you here! Cool! I might have to make room for it after all.
I wasn’t referring so much to the “post” by John Battelle, as to Jason’s comment that a “less than a hundred character type post” should be a Tweet.
Yeah, that I can definitely agree with. I had a post up on my blog yesterday that came in at 78 words, possibly my shortest yet. However not once was I tempted to put it on Twitter because it’s my own content and I’m likely to get more people reading it on my own site than on my Twitter page.