Robin Rendle:

It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions).

This. I love the newsletters I’ve subscribed to — but I love them because of their content, not their format. There is not a single one of them that I wouldn’t prefer as a blog. Blogs are better under every aspect — it just makes so much more sense to publish content in a way that’s reusable, searchable, linkable, and so on.

And I’ve come to the same conclusion as Robin, newsletters exist because they’re easy to subscribe to. It’s one click, two if they’re asking you to verify your email. How do you subscribe to a blog? RSS, right. I’m a big fan of RSS, but first you need to explain what it is, then how it works, then pick a reader — it’s just not as simple.

To me, newsletters look like an accident of the monopoly of a few platforms, in the sense that they provide a channel devoid of algorithmic sorting or filtering. But they aren’t better than the web. Were we to have built a subscription functionality in the browser (RSS but for everyone), they’d occupy a less central space.

But — here we are, in a world where to subscribe to content it either needs to belong to a network or else it will be delivered to me via email. Again, quoting Robin:

[W]riters choose a newsletter service like Substack because the business model is straightforward. I just sort of wish this infrastructure was built into websites themselves. […]

The web today is built for apps — and I think we need to take it back.

It’s gotten harder, rather than easier, to put something online without going through a platform.

Techcrunch:

Ultimately, all of media is prioritization — every site, every newspaper, every broadcast has editors involved in determining what is the hierarchy of information to be presented to users. Somehow, RSS (at least in its current incarnation) never understood that. This is both a failure of the readers themselves, but also of the protocol, which never forced publishers to provide signals on what was most and least important.

Seth Godin:

Other than writing a daily blog (a practice that’s free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on. The last great online bargain.

Good blogs aren’t focused on the vapid race for clicks that other forms of social media encourage. Instead, they patiently inform and challenge, using your time with respect.

Here’s the thing: Google doesn’t want you to read blogs. They shut down their RSS reader and they’re dumping many blog subscriptions into the gmail promo folder, where they languish unread.

And Facebook doesn’t want you to read blogs either. They have cut back the organic sharing some blogs benefitted from so that those bloggers will pay to ‘boost’ their traffic to what it used to be.

Mi accodo. Nessuna alternativa agli rss — che sia Facebook, che sia Twitter — vale quanto la lista di blog e feed rss che negli anni mi sono costruito, fatta di opinioni che posso ricondurre a persone, fatta da siti piccoli meno ossessionati dal numero di pagine viste. Iscriversi a un feed rss è come iscriversi a una persona e alle sue idee. Come scriveva Anil Dash tempo fa l’unità fondamentale di un blog non è l’articolo, l’unità fondamentale di un blog è lo stream. Non è il singolo articolo a renderlo interessante, ma l’insieme degli articoli che si susseguono.

È un vero peccato che dalla morte di Google Reader in poi siano caduti in disuso — sono una cosa per geek, per addetti ai lavori, e neppure credo oramai che abbiamo molte possibilità di battere le alternative basate su algoritmi. Se avete smesso di utilizzarli vi invito però a ridargli una chance: tutto sta nella selezione di alcune fonti non rumorose ma valide.

E se siete alla ricerca di un client, per me il migliore è Feedbin.

(via Andrea Contino)

Silvia Killingsworth:

There was a time (2007) when I had hope for this Internet. There was once a humane way to sift through the day’s news that wasn’t just standing under a faucet of opinions and viral pixels that get stuck to you and then you have to pass them on like germs because you are just a vector. It’s like if, instead of reading the newspaper (haha paper) of your choice, your neighbors and frenemies just shouted whatever they thought was newsworthy in your general direction, UNSOLICITED.

Dave Winer:

To publishers and bloggers — this is a big deal because it means that the same feeds you generate to post stories to Facebook can be used for other sites. It’s a very strong statement. No publishing silos. Let news flow where it wants to. And let competitors arise who may do more interesting and useful things with news than the big companies can.

Questa è un’ottima notizia, che rende gli Instant Articles molto più appetibili. Invece di costringere editori e blogger a rinunciare ai loro contenuti, gli Instant Articles utilizzano un feed rss per mostrare quello che, in sostanza, appartiene altrove.

Su Techcrunch MG Siegler ha mostrato come Google Reader sia una delle fonti di traffico più stabili, soprattutto per i blog di piccole e medie dimensioni. Si chiede quindi cosa comporterà la chiusura del servizio: questi lettori migreranno da qualche altra parte, o in uno scenario peggiore scompariranno?

Mentre infatti i grandi siti possono fare affidamento su una diffusione continua dei loro articoli su Twitter; gli RSS si rivelano particolarmente importanti per i blog meno “popolari”, che altrimenti ci si dimenticherebbe di visitare e le cui opinioni non hanno altrettanto eco. Come ha scritto Marco Arment:

It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets. The fundamental flaw in the stream paradigm is that items from different feeds don’t have equal value: I don’t mind missing a random New York Times post, but I’ll regret missing the only Dan’s Data post this month because it was buried under everyone’s basketball tweets and nobody else I follow will link to it later.

Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off. The rich would get richer: only the big-name sites get regular readership without RSS, so the smaller sites would only get scraps of occasional Twitter links from the few people who remember to check them regularly, and that number would dwindle.

Brent Simmons (creatore di NetNewsWire) elenca le ragioni per cui gli RSS sono ancora vivi e apprezzati da tutti noi, geek e utenti comuni (senza che però se ne rendano conto):

The formats are stable. Code I wrote five years ago to parse feeds would work today and will work in five years. (The formats are simple, too.) Other services have APIs that change and break existing apps.

RSS can’t be shut down. Any number of companies can go out of business, but nobody can stop anybody from publishing and reading RSS feeds.

(O del perché distribuire i propri contenuti via RSS è una buona soluzione, migliore che costringere i propri lettori a qualcosa di chiuso e fuori controllo come Twitter e Facebook)

Quando Google Reader è arrivato, nel 2005, ha distrutto un intero mercato di soluzioni alternative, portandosi via l’innovazione. Era gratuito e non c’è stato più alcun incentivo per gli sviluppatori a competere: Google aveva vinto. E da anni, da allora, di feed reader innovativi non se ne sono visti.

La chiusura di Google Reader avrà due effetti. Di positivo c’è che ci saranno nuovi feed reader e tornerà la competizione. Di negativo, al contrario, c’è che molti blog (questo incluso) vedranno la loro readership — costruita negli anni — ridursi drasticamente, dal momento che diversi lettori utilizzano Google Reader per tenersi aggiornati. Ci sarà chi si preoccuperà di trasferire i feed, e chi semplicemente ne farà a meno.

Per sintetizzare con le parole di Aldo Cortesi:

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.