Nick Halstead, CEO, October 15th
Over the weekend Scoble and TechCrunch discovered that they could find out numbers of readers for any blog according to google reader (ProBlogger showed the way) and went about putting together unofficial lists. The lists really are showing something we already know, that the blogosphere readership is dominated by techies. This is a shame because the blogosphere does contain amazing content across a massive range of subjects and in a lot of cases these voices are rarely heard.
The problem that these Google Reader stats are showing up is that the accessibility for the non-tech is way too confusing. At FOWA I was briefly interviewed by intruders.tv about fav.or.it and this is exactly what I talked about.
Posted in General
and wasn't tagged.
You said that fav.or.it will come with a bunch of pre-loaded RSS feeds to help people understand blogosphere and so on: I thought that fav.or.it can be used as a standard RSS reader, am I missing something or am I right?
I’m sorry, I’m one of the techies that will immediately erase the pre-loaded feeds and that will look for the OPML import: what I’m really interested in is the “conversational” feature because there isn’t a smart way to follow comments’ flow yet (email alerts are sooo 1.0, comments’ RSS feeds aren’t smart and CoComment sucks).
fav.or.it does not work like your ‘typical’ reader, so when we say ‘pre-loaded’ it does not mean that you get given a list of feeds to read, it means we have 10’s of thousands of blogs being aggregated, and you read them in a new way. You can if you want import your OPML and we will setup bookmarks (slices) to each of those feeds, but that would be missing the point of fav.or.it, we want you to read about subject matter and not have to worry about the place it came from, so you can choose a category (or a ranger of other filters) to read about subject matter you are interested in.
The point here is that we want to make finding great content accessible, for those who already have a list of feeds great, for those who don’t fav.or.it lets them find it without having to understand RSS/feeds/readers which is the barrier at the moment.
ok, thanks for the reply, now I get it.
Along with the lasts question asked by Davide will you eventually accept any blogs feed into your database?
“The lists really are showing something we already know, that the blogosphere readership is dominated by techies.”
I think it’s very hard to deduct that from the numbers of blogreaders per blog via Google Reader. I for one don’t use Google Reader, yet I do read blogs. I must not be the only one.
I don’t think you can link Google Reader directly with ‘the blogosphere readership’ like that. Or as the ProBlogger article you link to states: “Keep in mind that the numbers are not total subscriber numbers – just those subscribing via Google Reader”.
Perhaps the techie half of us use Google Reader while the rest of us don’t?
I use Google Reader for feeds, Feedburner and Bloglines for subscription info about my blog. While Google Reader does list subscribers, all of them show widely differing info in reporting where my subscriptions are coming from.
http://faramine.info/cialis/cialis-online-pharmacist.php