Last week, I wrote a post titled "Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed" that garnered a bit of attention. The entire post was written from the point of view of someone opposed to and annoyed by newsfeeds as a way of introducing the kinds of objections people might raise. It seems I should have included a note to clarify my actual position, because I got a bit of incoming traffic from the blogs of people who apparently thought I was being serious.

On the other hand, if being controversial brings in traffic, perhaps I should use that strategy more often!

As advocates of newsfeeds and blogging, there are a number of areas where we have the opportunity to improve the experience and make them accessible to a wider variety of people. Today, I'll address the issues I raised last week.

1) With tools like Blogger, setting up a blog is pretty easy these days. But until you've done it, you don't know that, so even when we tell people it's easy, they don't necessarily believe it. I'm not sure how to address this issue other than to get a few non-techies to do it, and then they can convince others that it's easy.

2) It does take time to post to a blog (or generate other types of feeds). For some people, it's not a high enough priority to be worth the time. We just need to accept that. On the other hand, some people are posting information to their website regularly, but they just haven't caught the vision of how they could make a newsfeed out of it and what the benefits would be. If we can develop easy ways for people to generate newsfeeds by doing what they're already doing, more people will publish feeds.

3) Newsfeeds can eat a lot of bandwidth if they get too popular. Hopefully the Atom API will help us address this issue. The Info Bite API certainly will...when I get time to build it. We need to explore a variety of methods of dealing with this issue. I'm sure I'll post more on that later.

4) There are a lot of version numbers for RSS, which make things look messy till you understand that there are really just two major varieties. Throwing Atom into the mix does make things more complex. Do you publish both or standardize on one? Do you eventually drop support for one? One idea that has occurred to me is to build an extension that could work with all of the formats which would enable the feed to suggest the publisher's preferred version of the feed to the reader. Feed readers upon seeing that could suggest to the subscriber that they switch to the other one and automate the process of changing their subscription if they decide to do so.

5) Whether to post full content in a feed or not is a hot issue in some corners. Some readers (though not all) want full content, but many publishers would rather use feeds to drive traffic to their website. I for one intend to publish only partial content (possibly with the option of a paid subscription to a full content feed).

6) Newsfeeds seem like a tidal wave to those of us who are involved with them, but it's good for us to recognize that most people still have no idea what they are. This is partly just because new things take time to grow. But it's also partly because we haven't yet made them user-friendly enough. Acquiring and installing a feed reader and subscribing to feeds needs to be made as easy as possible.

7) Do people think bloggers are mostly hackers or black hats? My impression is that some people think so. We might want to address that perception. Is it too late to pick a less slang-sounding name than "blogging"? If the tool developers can some up with and push a different name, it could probably be done.

8) Microsoft is coming with a reader. I imagine they'll also build feed publishing tools. The fact that they're not here yet may be an indication that the industry is still young, but that's how every new idea starts. The time will come.