Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Change Blog Software and Lose RSS Subscribers?

Change Blog Software and Lose RSS Subscribers?

I was cruising through my blogroll today, catching up on reading blog posts and removing some blogs I haven’t been reading lately, when I realized I was still subscribed to Robert Scoble’s old RSS feed. In October, Robert migrated to the WordPress platform. Migrating a site to a new platform is a big job, and frequently one fraught with problems for blog readers. For instance, permalink URLs are often no longer valid. Archives are sometimes lost. Sometimes photos get stripped out… it all depends on how well the migration goes. One things always changes, however, and that’s the RSS or Atom feed URL. This means you need to migrate all your RSS feed subscribers to the new feed. You can see in this screenshot of my Scobleizer subscription through Bloglines, that Robert says he had 9,000 Bloglines subscribers—and more than a month after his reminder to subscribe to the new feed, he still has 8,292 subscribers to a now defunct feed. (OK, now he has 8,291, because I took myself off that feed.)

Frankly, this is alarming. Are all those people subscribed to the new feed? Are folks just not reading Scoble? (Oh, come on, everyone reads Scoble religiously, right?) Or did they, like me, subscribe to the new feed and forget to take themselves off the old? Whatever the reason, it’s likely that Scoble has lost a certain number of readers simply because he made a technology change.

There is a workaround solution for this—setup your feed with Feedburner. You’ll get a feed in all the many RSS/Atom flavors, and a Feedburner feed URL. Change blog software and, as long as you update Feedburner, your users won’t have to do a thing to continue reading your words o’ wisdom.

Of course, it would also be nice if blog software developers (at least those producing the kind you install on your own server) came up with a common syntax and location for the feed URL, so that switching to a new platform had a little less impact, but I suppose ensuring better compatibility with a competitor’s product isn’t necessarily a great business strategy.

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/02 at 01:44 PM • Blogging Tips -- Blogging Tools

Comments

Hi Susannah greta article recently I Bought a pr 5 blog I own the domain!
I knew that if I bouoght a good blog site like bloglines, their would be no excuse for me not to Blog If you any time could you rate blogurple or have any comments
Keep up the good buzz
Aaron R, Hawaii Aloha

Posted by Aaron R, on 12/10/06 at 12:28 AM