Go Read It Today, Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Recalls: Queso fresco Mexican cheese. Lots of pet food. Just make Spot some of whatever you’re having tonight, K?

Check this special plea for The Make a Wish Foundation, an organization that makes me cry just to think about it. Imagine how the families feel who need to use its services and then go lend your support if you can.

Remembering Finn

Ann needs your love.

Are you going to BlogHer this July? Registration is now open. It sold out last year, but they’ve doubled the number of tickets this year. Does anyone know what the “unconference” is? It is a special, extra thing to register for, but I don’t know what it is… (Update: Elisa Camahort stopped by to answer this question in the comments. Thanks!) Also: need a roomate?

A great how-to for RSS feeds! If you’ve always wondered what the heck they were, check it out. (And if you change yours to only show summaries, I will cry.)

She‘s coming out. She wants the world to know!

Snort!

Newborn to mama: “food goes here!”

Thank you for your contributions yesterday to posts about Virginia Tech. I’ll be closing up submissions in a day or so, so get yours in while you can.

Comments

9 responses to “Go Read It Today, Tuesday, May 1, 2007”

  1. Elisa Camahort Avatar

    Hi Plain Jane Mom, I think I can answer a couple of your BlogHer questions.

    The Blogher Open Space on Sunday July 29th will be a moderated “unconference” which means this:

    Unconferences and OpenSpace events set their agenda in real time based on who shows up and what they want to talk about. We certainly plan the 2-day conference based on submissions of ideas and feedback from the community, but since there are so many logistics involved sessions and speakers get planed a couple of months ahead.

    On Sunday the people who show up, whoever they are, will be able to suggest topics during a set-up session first thing in the morning, and those will be scheduled for discussion. So if there was something really timely or important that we missed on the first two days, the OpenSpace will be the perfect place to discuss. The room will be a big open space conducive to either big group discussions or breaking into really small groups, so that as many diverse topics as possible get a chance to be discussed.

    Kaliya Hamlin is moderating this part of the event and has a lot of experience with OpenSpace techniques and unconferences. I should add that it’s the perfect environment for people who have thought about speaking or sharing in the big conference setting, but find it intimidating.

    Hope this helps?

  2. Ivy Avatar

    Thanks for posting the RSS feed explanation, a lot of my friends ask me about it and it’s hard to explain simply like that. I’m so going to send that to a bunch of my friends! :)

  3. Annika Avatar

    It seems like lately everyone I read has been complaining about truncated RSS feeds, and I’m starting to feel defensive. So, forgive me if I am rude! I am trying not to be, but I’m frustrated.

    The post you link to says, “However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks.” I think that is disingenuous and misleading to a novice blogger who may not understand what the risks are.

    There are some very good reasons to not allow entire posts in your RSS feed. One is copyright. There are dozens of sites that repost RSS feeds, and many of them do not credit the original author. As a professional writer, that is absolutely unacceptable to me. Another reason is safety. I post my son’s photograph on my blog. I realize that anyone can see it there, can steal it and do whatever they want with it. But I feel marginally safer limiting how people see it in the first place. There are other reasons, but those are the primary ones that are important to me.

    My blog will always be on a partial feed. It upsets me that I lose readers because of it. It’s just one click! But I understand that people won’t read because of it, and THAT is a worthwhile risk for me.

  4. Plain Jane Mom Avatar

    Annika,

    You’re right, it is all about risk tolerance. For example, I use full RSS feeds and occasionally scrapers put my posts on their sites — usually just the first few sentences. On the other hand, I don’t put pictures of my children’s faces online, but you feel comfortable doing that. Everyone is different.

    That said, I rarely read the full posts for sites that have summaries in their feed. I would estimate that for each feed I follow that has summaries only, I click through maybe 25-50% of the time.

    My goal for this site is to share my writing. There will always be thieves and asshats in the world, and I in this case I just ignore them.

  5. Haley-O Avatar

    Hi Jane! I’m a RSS Summary girl, too. My blog was being totally “bitacled,” and I didn’t like it. So, I switched it to summary feeds. Plus, I work hard on the design of my blog, so I want people to come see! :)

    Thanks for the pet food link. My kitties are on Hill’s CD — and Hills MD was recalled…. Scary stuff! It’s so sad that people are losing pets from this.

  6. Plain Jane Mom Avatar

    I work on my design too (kinda in an OCD way!) and if people stop by that’s cool, but I like it when folks read my words.

    Bitacle got me too, and after that I did partial feeds. But I started blogging to get read, and full feeds are the way I accomplish that.

    But I have a high risk-tolerance and not everyone is the same way…

  7. Haley-O Avatar

    I totally hear you, Erika. I have a low risk-tolerance. ;) So, there you go!

  8. Jordan Avatar

    I wrote the RSS article (thanks for the link!). I’m also a professional writer and my income comes from a blog (not the one linked to here). In fact, that other blog is an Internet marketing blog (one of the top 10 marketing blogs in the English language). We get our content scraped quite frequently and we still make plenty of money off our blog.

    If you’re worried about scrapers, there are many recourses. Lorelle on WordPress posted last year about whatto do when someone steals your content. As she puts, it if you put content online, it’s a certainty that at some point it will be stolen. Remember that partial RSS feeds only protect you from the laziest of scrapers. Scrapers don’t just attack your site through your RSS feed; scrapers can steal content from your site itself or even search engine results pages. The price of publishing–online or offline–may be eternal vigilance against plagiarism.

    Let me reiterate what I said in my post: The CEO of FeedBurner (the service that has “burned” millions of blog feeds to help people subscribe) says that they have seen NO increase in click-thoughs just because of partial feeds. If you want people to see the design of your site (and I think we all do), partial feeds won’t “force” them to click through.

    Other advantages of full feeds include your visitors be able to read your content when your site is down. I had this happen to one of the blogs I read this week; I would not have taken the time to go back and track down the post again if it had only been a summary.

    I subscribe to a few partial feed blogs and they annoy me pretty much every time they come up in my feed reader. Kind of a “Why am I subscribed to this again?” reaction. Erika is far more generous with her click-throughs than am I.

  9. jen Avatar

    Obviously the RSS feed debate will have people agreeing with either side of it, like any debate. It comes down to personal choice really and doing what suits you best. At least we know what the pros and cons are and can make an informed decision.

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