UPDATED
Dave Winer has put his finger on a budding problem:
Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc.
His answer: more cooperation. Good idea; hope the community will work on something like this.
UPDATE: Other folks have other ideas.
The qualitative answer is cooperation, but the specific answer is cooperative standards implemented on a distributed basis, which is not quite what Dave Winer proposed.
Posted by: Scott Rafer | January 12, 2005 at 04:09 PM
Dan, I'm a new blogger and have tried turning on the RSS feeds, etc. I added my own blog to My Yahoo News page. For the last week, my new posts haven't been showing up--then today suddenly they are listed and up-to-date. I don't understand the technology but I'm trying to use it to write about my life as a writer and editor. I appreciate your insight.
Posted by: Terry Whalin | January 13, 2005 at 07:13 AM
Like many librarians, I'm format-agnostic when I can be, but I understand why content providers are happy when aggregators make it easy for newbies to get feeds. RSS is still way too geeky; it doesn't even have a name or icon that makes sense; anything that makes it easy to subscribe to a feed is desirable from a content provider's point of view.
Also, it's Winer's blog, but "Please only comment here if you support the proposal" doesn't leave much leeway for actual discussion.
Posted by: K.G. Schneider | January 13, 2005 at 07:47 AM