Tech & VC 06 Aug 2007 04:28 pm
The New Media Deal
My Twitter followers page just cracked 100. Cruising through it and seeing everyone who knows what I’m doing all the time is wild. I don’t know who a bunch of these people are, but at least I have some way to identify them if I really wanted to (in other words, I have their Twitter IDs). By contrast, my RSS feed has 500 subscribers according to FeedBurner, and I don’t know who 95% of them are. I wish I knew more about my RSS readers.
MyBlogLog gives me some exposure into who is reading my blog, but that’s only a small subset of my readers who opt-in by signing up for MyBlogLog in the first place. I wish there was an RSS equivalent of Twitter “following” that required people subscribing to my feed to expose who they are to me (and only me), but of course, then RSS would no longer be “Really Simple Syndication.” Instead, it would be complex and intrusive because it would require giving up your identity in exchange for a feed. But, that’s the new media deal: Identity information and attention in exchange for service and content of equivalent value. It’s the deal that drives almost everything interesting web service today.
3 Responses to “The New Media Deal”
on 06 Aug 2007 at 7:24 pm 1.Darren Herman said …
Andrew, I hear you 100%. I would absolutely love to know who has subscribed to my RSS feed. The only people I know are the folks that comment on my blog. That’s it. There is ample opportunity to find out your “community”, whether it’s Twitter, RSS, etc.
on 06 Aug 2007 at 9:28 pm 2.candice said …
Yes, but how many of your twitter followers are auto-adding everyone who posts to the public timeline with a script? Those are starting to get annoying.
Whatever happened to browsing in the background? I actually signed out of mybloglog because I got tired of being followed from page to page.
That said, I tend to check stats on the images on my posts to see who is actually reading on RSS; the livejournal-based people if nothing else have their login names on the referral.
on 07 Aug 2007 at 5:33 am 3.Andrew Parker said …
Time to go check my image logs so I can spy on you all ;)