I think I’m starting to miss Mac.
Reverse Engineer. Blogger.
Like? Subscribe.
Lately it seems I start my workday with intentions to make progress on a task that I may not actually get to work on at all. I hope to buck this trend next week.
There were a number of responses to RSS isn’t dead. Subscribing is alive. Partly due to being on Micro.blog Discover and perhaps also due to Brent Simmons linking to it (thanks Brent!).
I’ve been enamored of the way that SubToMe has abstracted things to create a one click button typically with a “Follow Me” or “Subscribe” tag on it.
SubToMe seems interesting. A single button that gives the user a ton of options to subscribe. For now, I’m sticking with my Subscribe page that gives a short description of what Subscribing is and where they can do it. Perhaps I’ll extend the list of services in the future.
As for tools creating better ways to surface stuff, Newsblur does allow you to train it, which to me seems more useful than using an algorithm to train me.
I don’t need an algorithm personally. I actually like the urgency having many subscriptions creates. It forces me to weed through my subscriptions from time-to-time and unload a few. But I’m glad to hear Newsblur has something they are working on for this.
I really like how you structured your “Subscribe” page in a way that non-tech people would understand. I went with “Follow” as the title, since that’s a word that has become synonymous with getting updates. What are your thoughts on Follow vs. Subscribe?
Follow is likely the more modern and widely popular verb. I think each network has had to make this choice on its own to help users infer what type of place they signed up for. Facebook has “friend”, Twitter “follow”, LinkedIn “connect”. Each of these verbs have meaning. Follow and Subscribe are both impersonal enough to fit with blogs but each have their own feeling behind them. Subscribing, to me, feels like I’m reading a publication (whether it be by 1 person or many). Following feels more like I’m one wrung down on a ladder. I could be alone in this feeling though.
As an aside: I’m so happy that blogging is being talked and written about so much over the last few months. 2019 already feels like a boon for one of my favorite things.
Sinclair Target, writing for Motherboard:
Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was.
This isn’t the first nor the last article to cover the creation of the RSS standard, its rise to relative popularity with Google Reader, and its subsequent fall from popularity.
But the big point that many of these articles dismiss lightly or directly omit is that RSS is still used as the underpinnings of so many widely popular services today. Apple News, Google News, Flipboard (each with likely tens of millions of users or more) and many others use RSS it is just that people do not know it.
We should likely stop talking about RSS. We need to simply start calling RSS “Subscribing”. “Subscribe to my blog” is the only thing we need to say.
Also, tools like Inoreader, Feedly, etc. should create far better ways to surface content for readers from their active subscriptions. When people subscribe to more than just a few sites it quickly can be overwhelming to people that don’t like to wake up to “inboxes” with 300 unread count. People just abandon those. It is why Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. all use algorithms to select which content people should see when they open the app. I’m weird. I want to see everything in reverse chronological order. But “most people” want to see something interesting for the few moments they devote to reading their subscriptions.
RSS will never be as popular as Facebook. Let’s all get over it. But please do subscribe to my site. 🙂
I would like to start a potato chip company. My only differentiator would be to fill the entire bag full of chips. I would name it the Full Bag of Chips Company.
DHH:
These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.
SvN was not long for Medium. It never felt at home there. Basecamp (the company, formerly known as 37 Signals) has too strong of a voice and brand design to ever have their blog live inside a platform with such web and brand hostility as Medium.
I think back to 2012 when SvN redesigned, I linked to that redesign then, and how they had carefully considered their typography, graphics (they had a different graphic for each category of posts), layout. Mig Reyes, at the time, wrote:
Instead of poring over other blogs, I spent a week studying books, magazines, and of course, Bringhurst. Capturing the right feel for body text was step one—it sets the tone from here on out.
If you care this much about your site/blog you cannot be holed up in some constrained content silo like Medium. Medium is an excellent (perhaps currently the best) web-based writing tool but the platform is more than just that. It promised exposure which is why many blogs like SvN gave it a try. But that was definitely the wrong reason to go there.
Nice pick up for WordPress of course but in reality SvN could have found a home on any platform they had full control over. I like the new design too.
Super impressed with Notion so far. I’ve imported my Simplenotes, Trello Boards, spreadsheets, and Pinterest. One tool for all of this. Consider using this link to sign up as I’ll get credit.