Over at Reblog (where I've been a having little too much fun) it's Don Quijote day.
We Make Money Not Art and Eyeteeth pointed me to X Reloaded, a parade of "proposed new readings" of the classic story. Regine's highlights are the best.
Jason pointed out the story of a French Monk who bound an edition of Don Quijote in the skin of his dead dog. Marcus Trimble, who originally blogged the story writes: "Funny, I happen to be reading Don Quixote at the moment/last eight months, so now all i need is a pet..."
And since I'm probably going to have stop hogging the Eyebeam Mic soon, I thought I'd offer a few observations about reblogging. Reblogging is nothing more than fast blogging, so it's no coincidence that making your content friendlier for rebloggers has the pleasant side effect of making the user experience more pleasant for all of your readers.
These observations come from the time I've spent on the Eyebeam reblog and designing and developing a new reblog (or 3) that should launch soon. The reblog tool is basically a newsreader in a browsers that's bound closely with your blogging platform. The output looks as much like a feed reader as it does a "regular" blog. The spirit of blogging is to blur the lines between reading and writing, and reblog is a tool which makes that blurring even more profound. [1]
- Excerpt your long posts. Reblogging 5,000 words is not feasible - it pushes the rest of the content down the page, and shakes the user from the usually fast process of reading a reblog. I actually don't like seeing long articles in NetNewsWire or bloglines either. When all feeds are Atom 1.0, the reblog software can be smarter about looking for <summary> and <content> blocks. Until then, unless you excerpt your magnus opus it's not getting reblogged. Some of my favorite blogs are unrebloggable because of this. (Example! This list and summary paragraph are part of an extended entry).
- Update your blog in a steady stream, not fits and starts. This is just good blogging in general. If you let your readers know that they can count on you for the same number of posts in a week, whether it's 5 or 50, they'll be more likely to come back often. But when a blog lays silent for 10 days and then floods the queue. It's also easier to reblog good content from a blog every other day or so then to reblog five in one day.
- Don't put ads in your feed. I know it's lucrative, but it sucks. It's OK for the occasional reader, but reblogging a post with ads in it is like charging an "aesthetic tax." Reblogging blurs the lines between consuming and producting content - a Gawker media property would never charge a blogger who would link to them, would they? I understand that ads are here to stay, the current user experience sucks for readers and especially for rebloggers.
- Make sure your feed works. This should go without saying, but if your feed doesn't work, your blog isn't going to be picked up for republishing. Use the feed validator. Also, make sure that items in your feed don't overzealously declare themselves "new." There's a couple feeds where all the old items appear new every day, and it discourages me from reading them at all. The eyebeam feed list generates about 1000 new posts every day, and I have no patience for archiving the same post over and over. Likewise, don't include the number of comments in your title or post body. This is a cute feature, but it forces old posts to appear as new every time there's a comment. Annoying!
- Use good descriptive titles. Should be self explanatory. Never assume your reader's attention is promised, it's constantly being earned and re-earned.
[1] This is not unlike the LiveJournal Friends page.
Recent Comments