RSS is a complete and utter joke!
Since most of us are clever about some things but dumb about others, a side-benefit of blogging is getting to hang out with ultra-smart people. I think about an issue, write a post, and publish it. Sometimes there’s no reaction. But at other times—such as with this RSS thread—a bunch of people who know more about it or have thought more deeply about it respond. They may or may not agree with what I’ve written or with each other but the end result is always the same: I learn a lot.
In the comments to my most recent RSS post, Meryl Yourish quickly dismisses the heads/decks/leads suggestion (“A workable change would be to have a tag that indicates head, deck, or lead, put the tag in your blog as you write it, and extract it to the RSS feed.”) before returning to her earlier argument: only the quality of the writing matters. This time she focuses on a skill that was drummed into beginning print journalists: how to write catchy headlines and enticing first paragraphs.
Meryl’s advice is too good to leave buried in the comments:
Write that headline. It may seem difficult at first, but headline-writing is one of those arts that gets better with practice. I’ve never met anyone of whom it could be said, “That person is a born headline writer!” (That’s another one you owe me, Delacour.) The software can’t do it for you, Jonathon, unless you tell it what you want as your head/deck/lead. Radio could default the first paragraph to be the lead; it should be, in any case. If you haven’t told your reader what’s up by the end of the first paragraph, you’ve probably lost their interest.
This is why those ink-stained old-style journalists still have more than a little to teach webloggers: Just because our medium is new doesn’t mean that it can’t—or shouldn’t—use tried-and-true writing techniques. Headline writing, except perhaps for page one, was never the publisher’s responsibility. Editors and reporters, and on some publications, the headline writers, all contribute to that catchy phrase that gets us to read their story.
Next Burningbird turns the RSS argument on its head. After discussing the doubtful value of Google as a weblog buzz-generator and then the futility of relying on web statistics to gauge the efficacy of one’s writing, she re-examines RSS:
RSS newsfeeds are a terrific way of getting news headlines, but they’re not a great way of discovering new weblog content unless the weblog is nothing more than a source of unique news or accidentally stands out in same way. Even if we follow Jon Udell’s Heads, ducks, and leads approach to structuring what shows in an RSS news aggregator, ultimately the information all blends into one amorphous pile of effluvium.
So, asks Burningbird, if Google, weblog statistics and RSS all fail when applied to weblogs, what kind of technology works?
The hypertext link!
Wielded within the context of a weblog posting such as this, a hypertext link introduces you not only to the content, but also the context of that content. When you visit the content through the link, you stay to read the content because you didn’t arrive at it based on some accidental combination of words or because you closed your eyes and clicked on a steady stream from a news aggregator.
Well, that’s kind of obvious, you might say. No, not obvious at all. Burningbird’s concern is for “the community associated with [a weblog] posting.” She argues, correctly I believe, that carefully chosen hypertext links not only add context to the content of a post but also nurture the web of interrelationships between “the clans sitting around St. Elmo’s fire” (to borrow her beautiful metaphor).
Felicitous hypertext linking is just as important to good Web writing as a graceful prose style, snappy headlines, and compelling lead paragraphs. Victor told me this morning that my posts didn’t contain enough links. In a comment on my post about digression, Phil Wolff took up the refrain:
There weren’t 25 hrefs embedded in your writing. I didn’t know where to link! How am I supposed to tell when to leave your essay if you don’t guide me to digressions?
I have to confess that I’d been considering digression within the posts I write. But what else are hypertext links than the Web’s most natural form of digression?
Then Phil recanted:
Just so used to people writing with links all over the place that I forgot that authors actually don’t need them to communicate. Like hearing an a capella version of a heavily produced song, back to the melody and voice.
I’m not confused. The solution, as happens so frequently, lies somewhere in between the extremes. In any case, I can stop worrying about RSS now. And get back to writing and linking.
You're coming perilously close to catching me complaining about the attitude too many bloggers have towards old-school journalism. It really annoys me to see some disdain the print media out-of-hand, and only my unwillingness to get into a huge multi-blog flamewar has prevented me from blogging my anti-anti-journalism article.
Posted by: Meryl Yourish on 11 March 2002 at 07:46 AMDisdain BAD print journalism, and I agree with you one hundred percent. Disdain it because it is "ink-stained" instead of digital, and all you're doing is showing your ignorance of _both_ media.
The best blogging techniques will take the best lessons print journalism has to offer, and merge them with the best of the new medium. Hypertext links are finally beginning to fulfill the promise we saw when they were first introduced. They serve the same purpose as hard-copy footnotes, but it's a lot easier to open a link in a new browser window than to turn to the page at the end of the chapter.
Hm. Promises fulfilled. The web is a living, breathing medium, and I can watch it as it grows up--and even have a say in the way it grows. Now that's a wonderful thing.