Thursday, September 28, 2006

Blogs vs. Newsfeeds vs. Feeds

This topic is related to my Web 2.0 post the other day, and how many of us in the community are simply “getting it” and moving on, but the mass audience is left behind.

Part of the blame lies in us: most of us in the office, myself included, are guilty of using the term “blog” when referring to a “newsfeed”, simply because both use the same technology in the same way. However, in most peoples minds (and I agree), a blog is a personal diary?or journal published on?a website. ?Practically all blogs also have?RSS feeds, which is a way to publish your blog so that other users can subscribe to the posts without visiting each and every blog site.

So, the difference comes down to what is being published. General news, company posts, organization posts, blogs and other web published articles or news stories when published as RSS are in fact, feeds. If the publisher is publishing audio, such as music or a show as a subscription, that is a Podcast. If it is a video publisher, they are publishing video weblogs, or “vlogs”. Feeds from the New York Times are “newsfeeds”, but just bear in mind that all of these are using the same distribution or publication method, which are RSS feeds.

How does one use these feeds?? Well, it is much more efficient to use a feedreader or news aggregator?to gather all of your feeds in one place by subscribing to?the feed,?rather than visiting each site independently. With a feedreader, you can get the headlines and a snippet of the story without actually visiting the site. If the headline is interesting, simply clicking on it will take you to the site to read the entire article. ?My current favorite is NetVibes. RSS feeds are specifically designed?for people to subscribe to with a feed reader,?making it much easier for?site visitors?to find and read the posts, which increases the audience for anyone that publishes a blog, newsfeed or something similar.

I’ve recently begun asking people what news do they read on the web regularly. In our office, we get responses like “Slashdot”, or Toms Hardware”. Next, I ask “Do you visit the site, or do you use a feedreader?”? Most of the people say something to the effect that “No, I dont use a feedreader or visit the site, I use my My Yahoo page.”? Guess what, those are feedreaders, and goods one at that. So, whether you use My Yahoo, Google, iTunes, FireAnt or whatever, subscribing to feeds is the best way to view all of the blogs, news, or other published information quickly without having to visit each site.