You know, I lament the rise of the RSS feed and the use of blog aggregators. I know I use them, and I can see that a few of my regular readers use them, but the rise of Bloglines and Google Reader aren’t pleasing to me.
Yes, it’s much handier to have a single point of reference for the few dozen blogs that I like to read, without clicking my way through all of them; yes, it’s neater and yes, it does mean that the price of being bloody stupid is reduced. But there are two main things that displease me about them.
- I find myself commenting less. Probably because I don’t visit other sites as much, meaning that the comments that others write don’t inspire me to vomit words onto other people’s property.
- My stats are taking a serious beating…
Yes, I know it’s petty and vain, but I don’t care. The linky love is a good thing.
So I mourn the rise of Google Reader. At the same time as using it myself. I point out the hypocrisy, so you don’t have to.
Oh how I agree. My own stats have dropped dramatically since Google Reader became ubiquitous. I picked this up over there but see! I dropped over here for a comment anyway.
Another sadness is, that using GR, readers miss out on the carefully designed and lovingly created web pages that bloggers have. And the comments.
Although, sometimes, that is a good thing.
As for your last, with that I agree. Some sites are truly woeful to try and read, what with the javascript all over the show and small text.
And as for missing the comments, I got my first properly abusive one in ages recently. These are the things you miss out on through aggregators.
You have your stats on show for all to see. Shameless.
Yeah, I only do it for the stats. Now that I’ve moved and have no time to write, stats are woeful. Bah.