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Suddenly, bloggers didn’t have to fight so hard to get people to read their stuff they just had to amass followers on these platforms. A large portion of the bloggers just began publishing to places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc… These platforms weren’t as robust from a CMS standpoint, but they were easy to use and they created a network effect that allowed for wider distribution. It divided the blogosphere into two realms. The rise of social media changed all that.
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If you wanted to write and publish your thoughts and you didn’t belong to a traditional media company, you had to publish to a blog. There used to be thousands upon thousands of independent bloggers who were publishing semi-regularly to sites like Blogspot, Typepad, and WordPress. The RSS golden age coincided with the blogosphere’s golden age, and that’s not a coincidence.
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What changed? Why did I abandon RSS, a technology that had felt so magical to me when I first embraced it? A few reasons. But I didn’t stick with it for very long, and it eventually fell out of my internet browsing diet completely. And then, when Google announced it was shutting down Google Reader in 2013, I went ahead and signed up for an alternate RSS reader - the newly-launched Digg Reader.
#Best free rss readers 2017 full#
Some bloggers (including Nick Denton, if I remember correctly) argued that full RSS posts meant that you couldn’t monetize those views with advertising, while a few RSS purists announced they would never subscribe to a blog that didn’t display full post RSS.īut then something changed. I remember bloggers would have these esoteric debates about whether RSS readers should show full posts or partial posts, the latter of which you’d have to click on so it would take you to the actual blog post itself. The blogosphere back then seemed huge but was actually small and insular when you compare it to the chaotic web of today. I eventually graduated from Bloglines to Google Reader, and for a couple years I always kept it open in my browser tab, waiting there for when I had free time and wanted to dip in for some fresh content. I no longer had to visit blogs those blogs came to me. Suddenly, I could just go to this one repository, hit refresh, and get an instantaneous readout on who had published new posts. I had heard about RSS readers long before I actually tried one, and then one day I finally broke down and created an account on Bloglines. Before RSS, I had been forced to bookmark all my favorite blogs in my browser, and several times each day I’d essentially have to make my way down the list to check whether a particular blog had published a new post.
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I still remember the euphoric moment I used an RSS reader for the first time. “You’re in full control of what’s in your feed and what isn’t, so you don’t get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you’ve got no interest in reading.” “RSS…cuts out everything you don’t want to hear about,” wrote David Nield. Recently, Gizmodo published a post making the argument that you should resist the siren song of social media and instead consume your news through an RSS reader.