There are many advantages of using Twitter to spread your message. I have written before about the fact that in some respects Twitter seems to have superseded social bookmarking sites like Delicious. The reason? Twitter has an upper hand in any activity where you want to alert people right away to something you want to share right now.

But this immediacy comes at the expense of its long-term value. Trying to find an old tweet is a nightmare; an impossibility even. You can’t tag tweets — at least without substantially eating into your stringent 140 character limit. And the use of URL shortening services necessitated by Twitter’s character limit comes with its own bucketful of problems.

So should a newspaper completely ditch RSS feeds in favour of Twitter, as Malcolm Coles seems to suggest? Hell no.

His first argument is the strangest of the lot. He points out that many RSS feeds provided by newspapers appear to have few subscribers, and maintains that this is a weakness of RSS.

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK …

Never heard of the long tail? Having few subscribers to an RSS feed isn’t a weakness. In fact, it plays to the strengths of RSS feeds as the ideal way to disseminate niche content. For me, the problem with newspapers’ approaches to RSS feeds is the complete opposite. As I have written before, they don’t offer enough RSS feeds.

You can scoff at the fact that The Guardian publishes more RSS feeds than there are people living in the UK. But the cost of doing so is pretty small, especially if the feed doesn’t actually have that many takers (because then it uses up less bandwidth). Indeed, as Jon Bounds notes in the comments to the article, in a decent CMS it will take longer (i.e. be more costly) to switch an RSS feed off rather than leave it on.

What potential alternative does a newspaper have if it decides to give up on RSS? Twitter seems to be the big suggestion. Would a Melanie Phillips Twitter account run by the Daily Mail have more than 11 followers on Twitter? Maybe, but the majority of them would probably be robots advertising mucky webcam shows.

For Malcolm Coles, Twitter would be better because you can see which stories are the best by seeing what is retweeted. Retweets are extra good because they promote a newspaper’s content. But people will tweet and retweet about articles they like anyway, whether it comes from an official newspaper Twitter account or not. And to be honest, I could do without my Twitter stream being filled with yet more junky retweets.

According to Malcolm Coles, you can also provide more context in Twitter because “There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline.” But you can provide the whole article in an RSS feed if you want to, as The Guardian (whose RSS feeds are by far the most popular) has demonstrated. The inability to provide context is in fact Twitter’s greatest weakness. Even a social bookmarking site like Delicious gives you 1,000 characters to play with, not just 140.

It is true that you can have a conversation about stories on Twitter, which you can’t do with RSS feeds. Conversation is practically the raison d’être of Twitter though, so this is not exactly a surprise. All that this underlines is the fact that Twitter and RSS are two very different kinds of tools. One cannot be comfortably substituted for the other.

Malcolm Coles says that the newspapers agree with him because they do not bother to promote their RSS feeds properly. He says that they “have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.”

This ignores the fact that newspapers have never actively promoted RSS feeds. Promotions of RSS feeds haven’t just recently been relegated to the footers. If anything, they have just been promoted there. My last post about newspapers’ RSS feeds outlined my exasperation over the fact that their implementation is sloppy and amateurish, and it is nigh-on impossible to find out if the RSS feed you’re looking for even exists, never mind where it is.

Perhaps, indeed, the newspapers’ failure to properly promote their RSS feeds this is the reason why Melanie Phillips only has eleven subscribers in Google Reader. Maybe Malcolm Coles sees this as a chicken-and-egg scenario, but in this case I definitely know which came first.

The real problem is not that RSS has failed for newspapers. It’s that newspapers have failed at RSS. This is demonstrated by the fact that in the comments, Malcolm Coles ends up relying on the unreliability of the Express’s RSS feeds, rather than any inherent weaknesses in the RSS format itself, in his attempts to support his arguments. If the Express’s RSS feeds are broken and poorly promoted, that’s the Express’s fault, not RSS’s fault.

Dan Thornton in the comments hits the nail on the head:

Personally, if newspapers turned off RSS, I suspect they’d never see me visit their sites again – I use Twitter as a real time stream of information, but my RSS Reader is a library of sources I’ve invested time nad effort in reading regularly and getting to know. One doesn’t replace the other – they co-exist.

Wendy’s in a ‘spin’ again

It should have been third time lucky for Wendy Alexander and a head of communications for the Labour Group. First, Brian Lironi left within days of Wendy’s coronation. Then Babyface Marr spectacularly resigned last week after a bout of political Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, the third man, Gavin Yates is in a spin after his blog postings were reported by the Sunday Post and Sunday Herald.

In his blog (which has since been closed down, a fine example of bolting the stable door), he praised Alex Salmond as ‘a politician at the top of his game’ and lauded the SNP Government’s achievements in it’s first 100 days. Now we shall see if this ‘journalist’ will change his tune now Labour is paying for his pipes.

Today, the Tartan Hero stable finds its door bolted firmly shut. A message simply reads: “the blog at tartanhero.blogspot.com has been removed.” His blog posts are now being reported in The Herald.

It seems as though “Tartan Hero” has become the Tartan Feartie, scared of his own views. For the man the SNP were pinning their hopes on for the Glasgow North East by-election has now withdrawn from the contest, apparently afraid that his blog “would return to haunt him”.

We have seen this sort of thing before of course. As Tartan Hero’s post says, one of Wendy Alexander’s spin doctors, Gavin Yates, closed down his blog and deleted it. As I pointed out at the time, if you want to hide your blog then deleting it is pretty futile. You leave traces of yourself all over the place, and deleting your blog only brings attention to the fact that you might have something to hide.

In the case of Gavin Yates, I was still able to access all of his archives which were sitting in my Google Reader account. Anyone can access old RSS feeds in Google Reader as long as they were subscribed to the website while it was still being published.

This week The Herald says that “traces” of the Tartan Hero blog have been retrieved by Mr Thoms’s political opponents. In my Google Reader account I have found a bit more than “traces”. I have access to the full content of 684 of his articles. I think this is a very substantial proportion of his archives.

In the words of Lallands Peat Worrier, he has been “Indygalled“! We can add his name to the list which includes Gavin Yates (whom, ironically, he gloated about), “Indygal” Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale.

Anne McLaughlin’s blog made the news when she became an MSP. Journalists trawled her archives looking for anything vaguely juicy, and they found a few interesting comments about (and a few photographs of) other politicians, but not much more. After some of the offending content was deleted, and a brief hiatus, she continued blogging and the whole thing blew over.

Kezia Dugdale also took some time off her blog after deciding it was “far too risky a past-time”. I think she got in hot water a couple of times about some of the things she published. Now with a promise that she will “be a bit smarter” with her blogging activities, it remains one of the very best Scottish Labour blogs going.

Tartan Hero was not among my personal favourites (although I guess I should be grateful to him for once rather inexplicably deciding that this was the second best Scottish political blog!). But it was clearly a very popular blog and appeared to attract quite a wide audience. His opinions didn’t do him any harm then.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there is anything in Tartan Hero’s archives which is worth getting too excited about, which makes the deletion all the more strange in my view. The Herald hints at worries about this views on gay rights and Catholic schools. Jeff (apparently with the scoop!) also pinpointed Catholic schools as a potential issue.

The thing is, Tartan Hero was always had quite a provocative style. The views were not particularly extreme, but they were forthright and strongly expressed.

It seems strange to me that a politician would get cold feet over political views they so vehemently expressed just a year or two ago. It can’t be a surprise that his writing would find itself in the spotlight. Indeed, that was surely the intention.

It is true that in the rough-and-tumble world of party politics, one’s character and history faces a different type of scrutiny, and the game is not often played very fairly. But Grant Thoms is surely an intelligent person who has presumably had his sights set on becoming a Parliamentarian for a while now. None of this can be a surprise to him and he will surely have seen it coming.

So the deletion of his blog does make me scratch my head a bit. Moreover, it looks particularly silly given what he wrote when Gavin Yates deleted his blog.

As I said the last time I tackled this issue, no doubt if someone tried hard enough they’d find plenty of material on my blog to use against me. After all, as a mere 22 23-year-old scamp who has been blogging since 2002, I have left a fairly thorough record of my opinions going back to the age of 16.

It’s not that my opinions as a 16-year-old were particularly invalid or wrong, but a lot of them will have changed. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that I have written something in the past that could be taken out of context and used against me.

I’d like to trust people to be responsible about it, but I wonder if it’s possible. Certainly, it is a sad reflection of the state of politics that astute bloggers feel the need to cover up their writing for fear of it being used against them and thwarting their political careers.

At least Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale have not been put off for good and have been able to continue blogging in the long run. I wonder if one day soon a modified version of Tartan Hero will return to the blogosphere.

The most well-known example is Google Cache, which is the copy of each document on the web that Google uses to assess whether or not it is helpful to your search. This can also be used by anyone who wants to see what used to be on a page that has since been deleted or changed, if Google’s bot visited the page at the right time.

Another example is the Wayback Machine which literally visits web pages and archives them. Forever. Internet users can — to a point — browse the web as it was even in the mid-1990s. For example, here is the Microsoft website as it was in 1996.

But it is not just huge central databases like Google that can thwart self-censors. Everyday internet users are doing it all the time. Thanks to the popularity of RSS, there is now little chance that anyone who publishes an RSS feed will ever be able to hide their content. Anyone who is subscribed to your RSS feed has access to that content for as long as they want.

If you use a desktop-based RSS reader the files will actually be on your computer. But I use Google Reader, and I have access to every single blog post written by Gavin Yates since the 29^th of May 2007. It looks like the Sunday Herald have as well, and possibly more.

Gavin Yates is Wendy Alexander’s new head of communications, a job which seems to be somewhat of a poisoned chalice. Brian Lironi left the post just a few days after Wendy Alexander took office, seemingly because he was fed up with the new Scottish Labour leader.

Then last week Matthew Marr was given the heave-ho after a drunken performance at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards (a bit oxymoronic if you ask me). Particular attention was given to the fact that Mr Marr called Alex Salmond a cunt. While a lot of bloggers pointed out that he was probably right, it’s not very good conduct and you would expect much better behaviour from such an important Labour official.

And while Mr Marr was keen to point out that the incident was “entirely out of character”, bloggers lined up to say that it was in character. Mr Eugenides was “reliably informed”, while Osama Saeed and Mark McDonald have both been at the receiving end of one of Marr’s verbal outbursts.

Now Gavin Yates has run into difficulties before he’s even started. Some of what he wrote on his blog has been less than flattering about Labour and Wendy Alexander, as the Sunday Herald story points out.

The thing is, this needn’t be a problem. Surely a bit of reality, a bit of honesty, is what Wendy Alexander and Scottish Labour really need. I do wonder, though, if the culture within the party means that only yes-men are tolerated. This is presumably what drove Gavin Yates to delete his blog. Yet, as usual, it is the cover-up rather than the original ‘crime’ which makes this an embarrassing episode for Labour.

As Will P points out, Gavin Yates’s excuse does not make sense.

My comments have been taken out of context. I wrote them as a journalist in July and they do not reflect my own views. I think Wendy Alexander is a winner as is Andy Kerr.

A blog that doesn’t reflect your own views? Whose views do they reflect then? Nor was this just a few posts in July as he tries to make out. He was critical of Labour as recently as September.

But as I say, there really is nothing particularly damning about the blog posts themselves. Skimming through the archives of his blog, the criticisms he made of Labour were mostly sensible and constructive. He didn’t say anything that is truly embarrassing.

Like I say, it could have been seen as a much-needed dose of reality for the Scottish Labour elite. In fact, his blog posts demonstrate that he has a pretty good idea of the SNP’s strengths as well as Labour’s weaknesses. This ought to bode well for him in his new post.

It is the fact that Gavin Yates felt the need to delete his blog that makes it the story. It has become the forbidden fruit. But in this day and age, once you publish something on the web, there is no going back. I alone have access to 48 of his posts, just by making a few clicks in Google Reader. By deleting his blog, Gavin Yates has created a lot of interest in what he wrote — and access to it is by no means impossible.

Another blogger, Kezia Dugdale, filled the post on an temporary basis. She made the very wise decision of keeping her blog going (although there is seemingly never any danger of her going off-message). Gavin Yates should have taken note. Keeping your blog up there will do less harm than trying to remove it — because actually removing it is impossible.

It is amusing to think that for all the hype about bloggers and their ability to scrutinise, it could be your own blog, rather than other people’s, that is the most dangerous.

I have a request for those people who publish RSS feeds. Make them full feeds!

I know there is a supposedly a debate about whether partial or full feeds work best. Well, that is not really the right way to put it. Everybody knows that full feeds work better than partial feeds. I mean, it is like saying that a sandwich is better than the crumbs. It’s just obvious.

But some website owners are, for some reason, sniffy about full feeds. Some people publish partial feeds for relatively superficial reasons, for instance because they can’t bear for any readers to be reading it in an environment other than their lovingly handcrafted web page design. Others have more serious suspicions: that full feeds rob them of page views and rob them of advertising revenue.

Earlier this year, the rather good Freakonomics blog moved to The New York Times website. At the same time, the full feeds were snatched away from the blog’s many readers. Apparently, it is NYTimes policy.

Immediately there was an angry reaction from readers. It (mostly) wasn’t from readers concerned about NYTimes itself or even due to the fact that the URLs had changed, that there was an entirely new navigation system to accustomise to, or anything like that. They were almost all from people who were angry that the full feed had overnight turned into a partial feed. Many readers even said they were unsubscribing.

The comments to the initial post were just the start of it. Several subsequent threads descended into similar “outraged of Bloglinesville” mobs, and it has become a recurring topic on the blog ever since. This is one plus side — at least the authors are open about the problems and the reasons why they can no longer offer a full feed.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to get angry, I would guess that I have read a lot less of the Freakonomics blog since the move. This is entirely down to the fact that it no longer offers a full feed.

I am aware that a lot of people simply cannot believe that (or understand why) full feeds generate as many clickthroughs as (or sometimes even more clickthroughs than) partial feeds do. It doesn’t seem to make sense, right? If people can read the entire content without leaving their RSS reader, why on earth would they visit the website?

But it doesn’t work like that. FeedBurner say so — and they would know. To me, it is just common sense. I have been reading RSS feeds for a few years now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of the reasons why partial feeds just do not work.

Think about why people use RSS feeds as opposed to visiting the different web sites all the time. It’s obvious: people who use RSS feeds do so because it makes it easier and quicker to read everything they want to read.

So immediately we have run into the problem with partial feeds — they do the precise opposite of what the reader wants. They make it more difficult and slower to read what you want to read. If you have begun reading and want to read the rest of the content, it involves clicking through and waiting for the (probably bloated) web page to load. It is a needless, unwanted, time wasting, inefficient hassle.

That explains why readers generally don’t like partial feeds. But what about the clickthrough rate? First of all, it is worth pointing out that page views are falling out of favour as a meaningful web metric thanks to the increasing use of Ajax and other kinds of magic. In a funny way, more page views usually means it’s a worse website. (Ask users of MySpace and Facebook about the navigation of those sites, and see which site has the happiest users.)

But let us say that page views (and certainly visits) are a good thing. So why should you use full feeds? Once again, for me it is down to convenience. I use RSS feeds because it allows me to squeeze more reading into a shorter space of time. Imagine sitting there in front Google Reader. You have a list of items waiting to be read. So you get on with it and start scrolling through, scanning for anything interesting.

By now, you may have realised why partial feeds do not automatically generate clickthroughs. It is because there is less of the content for me to scan-read and evaluate. Typically, a partial feed will contain the headline and the first couple of dozen words. This simply is not enough to give me as a reader an idea of how good the rest of the article is. Neither is it long enough for the author to sell the article.

There is one site that falls victim to this more than any other if you ask me. Tim Worstall, one of the most widely-respected British bloggers. His RSS feeds simply do not do his blog justice.

I will sit there with Google Reader and scroll through the many posts he has written that day, and all too often I find myself not being enticed by a single one of them. That is not because they are not interesting. It’s because his partial feeds simply do not give me any confidence that clicking through to read the rest of the post will be worth my time.

If Tim Worstall writes ten posts in a day (which is my conservative estimate of what he averages), he is asking me to read ten summaries, click ten times, wait for ten web pages to slowly load, then read ten full posts. What a waste of time!

This is especially annoying if the partial feed stops in the middle of a sentence, which is almost every time. When the partial feed stops at the end of a sentence, then there is the confusion over whether I had read the full post (just a really short one), or if it was just a fluke that the feed finished in a neat position.

If Tim Worstall provided full feeds in the first place, I could have just read them all there instead of going through all of that hassle. Who knows, I might even have clicked through and left a comment. I might have bookmarked one of his posts in Delicious, letting other people know how good the post is. I might even have blogged about it. I might even have clicked on an advert!

As it is, I just scroll through the summaries and ignore them all. I have, in the past, unsubscribed from his blog because of the frustration over this. I recently subscribed again, but can’t say I read a good deal more of his blog as a result.

Some other blogs provide “summaries” instead of partial feeds. This is where, instead of the first few words of the post, the author has instead specially written a summary designed for the feed. The problem with this is that sometimes it is made up of a random paragraph taken from the middle of the article. Even worse, it might give away the conclusion before I have even read what it was the conclusion for!

If I am enticed by such a summary, I will click through and find myself reading the post and thinking, “This isn’t what I thought I was reading.” Then I will come across that paragraph in the middle. Ah, and that introduction in the summary? I have found out that it was actually a conclusion. It is like forcing somebody to read the last page of the novel before reading the rest of it!

There is another more fundamental reason why people should offer full feeds. It is just plain rude not to. RSS subscribers are your most dedicated readers. They are people who have decided that your content is good enough to have it effectively delivered straight to them on a regular basis.

Yet, how are these dedicated readers paid back? By getting a mangled fraction of the content that they asked for. It is like subscribing to your favourite magazine only to find the publisher sending out cuttings rather than the whole magazine. What a way to treat your regular readers!

I can hear the howls already: “What about all of the beautiful adverts that I have lovingly placed on my blog / newspaper / whatever? If I offer full feeds, nobody will look at the adverts and I won’t make any money!” Again, there are several responses.

I have already explained why full feeds do not lead to a reduction in clickthroughs. So people will see your adverts just as much as they always did.

There is an even more obvious answer: what is stopping you putting adverts on your feed? Plenty of big websites already do this. It is perfectly possible. People who are refusing to offer full feeds because “they don’t contain my adverts” are simply shoving their heads in the sand.

Even if there was a legitimate concern about adverts, it has to be remembered that your regular readers (the sort who would subscribe to your RSS feed) are the very people who are the least likely to click on the adverts anyway.

Let us not forget also that a lot of adverts are not even designed for human eyes as much as they are designed for SEO. These kinds of adverts would not even mind not being seen (just as long as Googlebot sees it).

Maybe you are concerned about stats. Let’s face it, as bloggers we all are. We want to know how many people are reading. What would be the point if you had no way of knowing if people were reading or not. Gordon McLean (whose recent post on RSS is an interesting read) falls into this group.

Admittedly, this is one downside to RSS as it becomes impossible to find out precisely how many people are reading. Mind you, web stats are not generally the most reliable things anyway. Run four different stats counters and you are bound to get four different — sometimes wildly varying — figures. RSS further muddies the waters.

As it happens, I recently moved over to having this blog’s feeds provided by Feedburner (combined with the absolutely vital FeedSmith WordPress plugin), partly because it would give me some fairly accurate (but not precise) statistics. I was pleasantly surprised to find that around 140–150 people are subscribed to this blog. (Hello to you good people. I hope you are enjoying the full feed!)

Beforehand I had vague ideas of who was reading this blog’s webpages and why. But I had no idea of how many people were actually subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed. But now I do have some fairly interesting and meaningful stats about my RSS feed. So even the stats issue with RSS feeds is resolved to an extent.

All of this is not to say that partial feeds do not have their place. For instance, they are perfect for news websites. This is because of the way they work. We are used to just scanning through a front page containing only a headline and a (very) brief summary of each story. From here we choose which stories we want to read. This is how news websites work, and partial feeds can reflect this.

Blogs, however, do not work in this way. Very few blogs offer just a summary of each post on the front page. The blog format does not usually lend itself well to this approach. Rather, the vast majority of blogs’ front pages contain either the full content of the most recent posts, or at least a huge chunk of them.

As far as I can see, there is no reason why the vast majority of web sites should be forcing their most dedicated users to put up with shoddy, sub-standard partial feeds. For me, the fears that website owners have surrounding full feeds are mostly unfounded.

Perhaps the most important is the reintroduction of the Best of page, which I hinted at a couple of months ago. This is just to attract attention to some of the notable posts I have written in the past. There is a huge number of archived posts here, so it is impossible for people to find the really good ones. Hopefully the Best of page will make it a bit easier.

The first section of the Best of page is what was there before I took it down. These are not posts that I have chosen, but posts that have attracted some kind of attention beyond what is normal. They have either been mentioned in the mainstream media, the Britblog Roundup (or a similarly prestigious blogging showcase) or used as a citation in Wikipedia. So if you’re a relatively new reader, why not check out some of these older posts?

If you scroll beyond that list, you will see something absolutely brand spanking new. After years of dithering about it, I have finally installed a post ratings plugin (WP-PostRatings).

I was looking for something a bit more like a thumbs-up / thumbs-down system, but I couldn’t find one, so we have a star ratings system (although I’m using squares because the stars look crap against the dark background). So please feel free to rate my posts as you read them — it only takes a click.

To encourage people, I have rated the posts on the front page, but I will probably step back from rating my own posts in the long term. If this system gives good results, I might place the list on the sidebar rather than in the middle of the Best of page.

The only problem with the ratings plugin is that it adds substantially to the clutter at the bottom of the post. I do make efforts to keep the clutter to a minimum in general, but I can’t think how else I can add the ratings system without cluttering it up.

I needed something better than what I had before, which was the ‘most popular posts’ list. This is calculated mostly on page views (but also things like comments and trackbacks). Unfortunately, this means that far from highlighting the best posts, it actually merely shows the posts that Google likes the most. This means that some of the posts on the list are not only not-good, but they are actually actively bad. I will keep the feature there, but it’s not a very good list.

The same goes for the ‘most commented on’ posts. Comments are great, but any threads that get more than about 15 or 20 soon descend into crazy flame wars, loon magnetism, and generally generate more heat than light. It’s probably not the side of this blog that I should be putting out there.

I have also finally got round to redesigning the 404 page. Unfortunately it is cluttered with adverts, which I’m not sure about. I can’t really be bothered getting rid of them yet, so I might just leave it as it is. But at least now it actually matches with the rest of the pages on the blog!

I still have not got round to designing a theme for people who do not like the current one (I plan to let visitors choose which they prefer between two). I might not get round to it in the end.

I probably have not stopped tinkering, because tinkering is like eating Pringles and the itch that gets worse the more you scratch it. But I thought I would just point out what I have done so far because [moment of honesty coming up] I can’t be arsed writing about anything else at the moment.

Update: I knew there was something I forgot! A few weeks back I changed the links page so that it automatically contains every blog that I read in Google Reader. So if I’m reading your blog, it’s on the links page. It’s quite good to not have to worry about updating the links manually now. The internet truly is making us a bunch of lazy bastards.

If you’re wondering how it works and want to add it to your own blog, all of the information is here.

(Incidentally, if you are wondering about Scottish political blogs, I keep most of them in a separate folder for me to concentrate on for the roundup. So many of these blogs will not appear on my links page yet, even if I read them.)

Duncan… is still too modest (frustratingly so) to nominate his own posts when someone else is fronting the Roundup…

While I would like to boast about how awesome I am because of my modesty, the truth is that I never nominate any of my own posts for two reasons.

The first reason is just because of the way I nominate posts in general. During the week I read blogs using Google Reader, and I use the star feature to store posts that catch my eye. At the end of the week, I collect them all up and write the roundup or send my suggestions from there.

But because I do not subscribe to my blog’s feed, none of my own posts get starred. Besides, which posts of my own would I star? Which leads on to my next point.

I can never tell whether one of my own posts is going to be good. I have had my fingers burnt too often, writing what I thought would be awesomely popular crowd-pleasing posts only for many to sink like a brick in a pond.

This week, for instance, one of my posts has featured in the Britblog Roundup — for the first time in ages. When I saw this week’s Britblog Roundup appear on my Technorati watchlist, I thought I had a pretty good idea which post had made it.

I was certain that the featured post would be the one about the BBC. I was surprised to find out that it was actually the post about F1′s espionage malarkey. It also made James Higham’s excellent Blogfocus.

And there was me thinking that everybody just skipped the F1 posts! Goes to show what I know. And that’s the reason why I don’t nominate my own posts.

On a slightly related note, I am planning on resurrecting the ‘best of’ page. The page (which still exists in its old form here) always looked like a load of self-congratulatory wank, which is why I stopped updating it a year ago.

But those people that go around giving people tips on how to make loads of money by sitting on your arse blogging say it’s a good idea to draw attention to some of your older posts. Makes sense I guess, particularly since I often do not have the energy to blog as much as I used to.

These things take time though, as I will now have to try and remember or otherwise find out which of my posts have made it onto Britblog, Blogfocus and the like in the past year. But when I’m finished it will either appear in the sidebar or as a link at the top.

I have had an up and down relationship with RSS. When I first started using it I thought it was a great way to just surf the web more quickly. No more visiting blogs to find that they hadn’t updated. No more visiting news sites to find that there is no news.

The problem is, once you have subscribed to more than a few dozen RSS feeds, it simply doesn’t work like that. I try to keep track of hundreds of blogs, plus a few other websites. So every day when I arrive home, or even when I wake up in the morning, I find myself trying to work my way through hundreds of articles, many of which probably won’t interest me all that much.

What was once a nifty way to keep track of several websites has become somewhat oppressive. The whole exercise of reading blogs has become a perverse game — how quickly can I get that ‘unread’ count down to zero?

Google Reader likes to psychologically beat you with a stick with not just one but several unread counts on prominent display. Worst of all, it stops telling you exactly what your unread count is once it’s gone above 100. This usually happens at least once a day, and if I’m particularly busy some individual feeds (particularly Boing Boing) have even gone over 100 by themselves!

The worst thing about this is that you just don’t know how far over 100 you are. It could be 110, or it could be 2,000. A truly daunting prospect — it’s scary just to start working through them all.

Now at weekends I “catch up” on the RSS feeds I was too busy to read during the week. But because there are so many I end up just scrolling through them all without paying much attention.

The situation has got even worse recently, as I now keep a separate folder of feeds of Scottish political blogs for roundup purposes. Going through every single one of these articles before Saturday evening is a top priority for me every week now. But sometimes I suspect that I probably would have found as many great blog posts if I had just spent some spare time surfing around during the week.

On the one hand, RSS is undoubtedly an indispensable tool. But sometimes I can’t help but wonder if RSS has affected the way I consume blogs for the worse. In the most perverse instances I visit a website and see an interesting article, but I think, “I’ll read that later in Google Reader.” Then, a few days later, I find myself scrolling past that very article without giving it much thought.

I’m thinking of limiting the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to. I have been hitting the unsubscribe button much more often for several months now. But I find myself subscribing to other blogs even more quickly.

Perhaps it would be best for me to go back to reading a lot of blogs the old fashioned way. Even putting aside the issues over tyrannical unread counts, old fashioned blog surfing is good fun. It’s great just to explore what’s out there, to click random links in blogrolls, to actually read the comments (and occasionally leave a comment myself!) and so on.

I’ve already reverted to reading news websites the old fashioned way. Often I would wake up and find about a hundred stories from BBC News and Scotsman.com waiting to be read. I soon found that I had the skimming-and-not-reading problem, and it wasn’t long before I just unsubscribed from all of the news feeds.

It would probably be quite different if I, say, wanted to catch up with news on my mobile phone while I was on the train or something. RSS is perfect for that sort of thing, and it would also mean I wasn’t deluged so much when I finally arrived home. But for me personally, that is no good because I have a pretty bog standard hand-me-down phone that wouldn’t be up to the job.

You won’t find me ditching RSS altogether any time soon. I will continue to read most blogs via RSS, even if it is a bit overwhelming. But for me, RSS works best for websites that don’t update very often. There is no denying that if you subscribe to just a few blogs or just a few news sites, the whole thing becomes a bit overwhelming.

Here is what Robin Hamman thought:

There’s something about hitting the 200 unread posts per blog limit on bloglines that fills me with dread – and leads to bizarre incidents where I have to close my eyes and click on feeds randomly because I just can’t face missing all that content knowingly.

It’s the same with me and my scroll-skimming. When it gets to that sort of stage, I have to ask myself, “Is this really the best way to be going about this?”

I think it is best to remember some advice I read on another blog (unfortunately I have forgotten which one). The basic gist was, don’t be afraid of unsubscribing. After all, you probably won’t miss anything that good. If it really is that good, you will probably eventually hear about it anyway.

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with surfing the web the old fashioned way, sans-RSS. Neil McIntosh considered the issue recently in relation to the fact that not many people have actually taken to RSS, with an interesting discussion in the comments.

But come on. Why did you even use the X button anyway. Did you not realise that middle clicking on a tab closes it?

Infact, middle clicking is probably one of the greatest things about Firefox, yet nobody seems to know anything about it. Middle clicking on a link makes it open in a new tab. That’s right. Those webmasters forcing links to open in a new window or in the same tab and suck it. I have control over where my links open.

It’s so great, yet nobody else seems to do it. It’s not very well-known. I think I discovered it by accident. But I thought it was so great that I now click just about every link with the scroll wheel, even if I’m not bothered about keeping the current tab open. You know why? Because I can easily close the tab by middle clicking on it.

See how great this is? I think this is the real reason why I don’t use IE. My beloved middle clicking would be gone.

Do I get too excited about a mouse button?

Update: One thing that sucks about Firefox 2 is the spell checker. Colour is wrong. Labour is wrong. Realise is wrong. Defense is right. What sort of fucked up dictionary are these people using?! Amusingly, also wrong are ‘img’ ‘src’ and ‘jpg’. Doh! Wait a minute. ‘Doh’ is aswell! And so is aswell! I should just switch this spell checker off, shouldn’t I?

Update again: By the way, I love the fact that I can set it to subscribe to RSS feeds using Google Reader (or any other feed reader I want). Nice!

Update: Found out, via Gordon McLean, how to get rid of that Go button. I had been wondering about that! Now, does anybody know how to get rid of the search go button (with the magnifying glass)?

I’ve been a user of Bloglines pretty much ever since I started heavily using RSS feeds. Which is probably getting on for a couple of years. I was pretty happy with it. Sure, sometimes it is a bit slow to update feeds, and it is down more often than I would like. But all-in-all Bloglines is pretty impressive. There were just one or two things missing.

Google Reader used to be pretty much universally regarded as a duff product. When I first tried it when it initially launched it was chronically slow, ugly and generally clunky. I stayed well clear. But last week it was given a major spring clean so I thought I would try using it as an experiment over the weekend. I haven’t visited Bloglines since.

While the old Google Reader stank of a company beginning to rest on its laurels, it now looks as though they are proactively grabbing RSS by the scruff of the neck and making it seem interesting to normal people who don’t know their RSS from their elbow (sorry to whoever I stole that joke from; sorry for even telling it).

Describing it as “Your inbox for the web”? Why did nobody think of that before?! And as everybody else has noted, the email connection doesn’t end there. Google Reader’s new look is more than a nod towards the Gmail interface. A great improvement.

And there are a whole lot of nifty features that I have fallen in love with. Okay, that ‘next’ browser button is a bit of a gimmick. It’s not good if you’ve got about 200 blogs to read. You don’t know what’s coming next. Some blogs take bloody ages to load (this is one of the plus points of RSS). And if you wanted to do something like star or share it a post (more on those later) after reading it via the ‘next’ button it would be a right pain.

The next button is quite fun. You don’t know what you’re gonna get. It’s like a lucky bag. Which can be fun, I guess. It’s good if you’ve emptied your ‘inbox’ (as we now seem to be calling it) and you just want a quick way to see what’s been written in the past few minutes. It does seem to be a little bit quirky — sometimes it takes you straight to the actual post, other times it takes you to the blog’s front page. It’s not a major problem though.

The OPML import worked smoothly, and all of my RSS feeds appeared in the same folders (or is that labels? tags? More on that again in a bit) as in Bloglines. And one of the first things I noticed was that when I clicked on a folder the entries appeared in (reverse) chronological order, just like blogs. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for Bloglines to do.

In Bloglines if I click on my ‘Blogs’ folder, each blog is listed alphabetically with (as far as I could tell) no way to change it. If you want to be up to date it’s a poor system. The most recent stories are buried in among everything else. What a pain! Google Reader has recognised this. Top marks.

If I were to suggest an improvement, it would be an option for posts to appear in (non-reverse) chronological order. Maybe, perhaps if you wanted to see how a story developed, you would prefer to read the oldest posts first. At the moment I am scrolling all the way down, and by the end I could be reading stuff that is over a day old which feels a bit pointless.

Another cool feature, although not too impressive or unique, is automatic refreshing. It’s useful, but Bloglines also implemented this feature very recently.

In Bloglines, if you open a huge folder, everything in that folder is automatically marked as read, even if you haven’t come close to seeing it. If I was interrupted then I would have to manually mark each post as unread, which took a bloody age. Google Reader has an amazingly smart, yet simple, solution. Posts are only marked as read as you scroll past them. So I can safely click away from any open folder safe in the knowledge that everything that I haven’t read will still be there.

Another nifty interface feature is the option to change how you view your feeds. You can select ‘list’ view, where entries appear exactly as emails appear in Gmail. Then there is ‘expanded’ view which follows the familiar Bloglines-style approach. Although I would always prefer expanded view for reading blogs, list view is fantastic if you just want to skim headlines.

One thing that frustrates me about the feature, though, is that (as far as I can tell) there is no way to view one folder in list view and another in expanded view. I would like to read the Digg feed in list view because there are a lot entries that I don’t want to read, but I would prefer everything else to be shown in expanded view. It would be good if there was a way for me to set it up this way so that I didn’t have to keep on switching between the views.

Another feature borrowed from Gmail is the ability to ‘star’ items. If I find an entry particularly useful for whatever reason, clicking the star icon will leave it easily accessible in the ‘starred’ section. Once again, this was a bit of a pain in Bloglines. If I didn’t want to save it to del.icio.us I just had to make it as unread. Google Reader’s ‘starring’ system is much tidier. This is proving useful for roundup purposes.

A feature that shares equal billing with ‘starring’ is the ability to ‘share’ items. I’m not really sure what the point of this is supposed to be. It seems like it’s trying to do something similar to del.icio.us, but it’s much more basic and a bit rubbish really. As an example, I’ve decided to ‘share’ my last blog post on my shared items page. As you can see, it’s not up to much. It just reminds me of those blogs where all of the posts have been plagiarised. I’m not really sure what the point of this feature is.

Now on to my complaints! You can expect things to be a bit hairy because it’s still a Google Labs product, but there are still a lot of improvements to be made. Firstly, there still seem to be a few loading quirks / bugs / issues. Sometimes I find myself staring at the Google Labs fizzing conical flask for an eternity. Often the ‘updated subscriptions’ panel doesn’t update so it says that I have unread items even though I’ve read them.

Tags / labels / folders also need improvement. For a start, they seem to have three different names for the same thing now. That’s unless I haven’t understood some kind of subtle difference between tags and folders. I also can’t find an easy way to create a new folder. The only way seems to be to tag a post and then go to ‘manage subscriptions’ to put things into the relevant folder. What a pain.

Why can’t you just create a folder in the ‘manage subscriptions’ section or even when you’re reading a feed? There is a dropdown menu for each feed that only contains one option: unsubcribe. Why not put it there?

All-in-all, though, Google Reader is now fantastic. The only thing I really miss from Bloglines is the Firefox plugin, although I’m sure a Google Reader one will appear soon enough. There are still a few rough patches, but I’m happy enough with it for me to be using it all the time now. Good work, Google.

Update: Another great thing I’ve just remembered about Google Reader is that images from posts made on Blogger are actually appearing, which they never did in Bloglines. That’s probably just Google being crafty, but I like it.