WTF is up with Google Reader today? It’s taken me twice as long to read my feeds. I tried rebooting, using Chrome and restarting FF. No change. Slow and buggy.
It’s taken me over 65 minutes to write my first post of the day. I’d allotted 45 minutes for two posts. That totally sucks balls.
I’ve been in that situation.
The situation is this. Do you publish full entries in your RSS feed, or you publish excerpts? The only reason why people only publish excerpts is to force readers to visit their sites, usually it’s tied to some ad scheme.
Let me tell you this.
I read/skim about 500-800 blog posts daily, most of the time for my job as a freelance blogger. I still read blog posts for fun. However, if a site only publishes excerpts, I won’t follow through to their site to read the complete post. It happens from time to time. I usually just skim the excerpt and move on.
There are notable exceptions, but if a blog creates a lot of content, it’s also hard to keep up. For example, 3QDaily. I’ve been skimming it for a while, and I do read some pieces, but the site just generates too much material to read the posts fully everyday. The opposite of this is The Smart Set. I’ve managed to read fully all of the essays ever since I started reading the site.
Shyftr is a service that aggregates different types of feeds. The main difference from other such types of services, is that it enables users to comment on those feed items away from where it originally came. Kind of like if you could post your comments directly through Google Reader, without posting them on the original blog or site.
Who owns this post? Are pageviews still relevant? Should blog content creators be upset? Is Shyftr crossing the line? Let it all just go?
The good, the bad and the quite ugly news of Shyftr.
The name of the service is quite appropriate. It shifts your audience away from your blog. Über bloggers don’t really care and are quick to dismiss it, but what about the little guys who aren’t yet making 6 or 7 figure salaries?
I don’t like Shyftr.
Here is the complete list of Google Reader shortcuts. At any time in Google Reader, you can press the ‘?’ button to have them appear.
