Feed Me, Seymour

Fitz-Hume from Begging the Question blogs on the prevalance of RSS feeds and how they might influence the design and content of popular blogs. I personally do a hybrid - I use the RSS to eliminate the "doh" factor of having a VP walk in to discover me eating lunch at my desk when I've actually got 30 different screens of Internet Explorer open to read all the blogs. I've even downloaded the notifier, which lets me know someone's updated. I scan through for stories I'm interested in, then open the blog in a new window to read them. Advantage: far fewer windows, immediate notification, you can stop when you've finished with the new stuff rather than keep scrolling until you hit something you remember. Disadvantage: You can miss something scrolling like that, Nobody probably knows it's me visiting their site anymore since I don't register as having been referred from Random Mentality, and there are a few holdouts that still don't have RSS (*cough* Iowa Libertarian / CopTalk *cough*) and so I don't get the update on them as often, and as Fitz-Hume points out, you miss all the little graphics and such. I don't think this is going to lead to the demise of all but plain-vanilla content-driven posts, 'cause you still have the "cool factor" when somebody's done an interesting graphic or has a pretty layout. But the more people who don't bother to actually to to the blogs, the less cool stuff will be in evidence.