Is RSS too simple? Syndication and Web 3.0

For years, we have relied on RSS technology to deliver our blog posts. Feeds delivered to your reader, delivering our outstanding content, witty rebuttals, and beautiful photos. And, we’ve developed a very narrow definition of what it means to have a blog following.

In case you don’t spend all your free time reading about Internet trends (doesn’t everyone?), I thought I’d include a little information about Web 3.0. Web 3.0 can mean a number of things, depending on what web function is involved… but the part that is most applicable here is the concept of the open web. Think open API, OpenID, and application interoperability (ie connecting to Facebook).

Nova Spivak, grandson of the great Peter Drucker, offers several points to define the third decade of the web. But one of them really caught my attention. Is he transformation of the Web from a network of siled applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

I have often taken this to be a very literal statement… that we will be able to find our tribe anywhere we have registered. My Facebook friends, my Twitter Tweeter, my Plurk friends, they’ll all be visible when I log in to a site that participates in this open cross-platform connection.

But recently, I’ve started thinking about Web 3.0 as a philosophical understanding, not just a practical application. And it occurs to me that we’ve been trying to keep blogging and blog syndication in a Web 2.0 box, while it’s clearly trying to evolve. We have defined our followers, our syndication, even our comments in such a way that we ignore the value of satellite communities found on social networking sites.

I started thinking about this while evaluating my analytics for several of my blogs. I was able to see tremendous growth in visitors, but not the corresponding numbers subscribed to the feed. And for a while, I really worried about the whole thing. My traffic was not “sticky”, I did not have enough comments, my bounce rate was too high… how could this be?

As I set aside the traditional quantifiers for blog success, I saw a different paradigm taking shape. I started looking at the sites that referenced my blog and saw that there were some pretty consistent patterns. I started thinking of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Plurk as my “real” readers. Instead of subscribing directly to my feed, my followers on those platforms used my microposts as feeds. And after reading the articles, I would go back to the various reference sites to comment and discuss.

I started seeing regular readers and commenters on multiple platforms having multiple follow-up conversations. I began to wonder why they didn’t “count” as subscribers…and why this type of engagement wasn’t counted in overall blog performance metrics.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve reached a point where measuring the number of subscribers to an RSS feed is too simplistic a way to analyze the impact of a blog. And counting comments per post no longer gives us a sense of reader engagement. Instead, we need to build measurement systems that consider the number of followers on social media platforms as part of the community of the blog in question.

By letting go of our rigid definition of blogging success, we can bring this trusted social media tool to Web 3.0. Rather than assume that the blog isn’t as effective as it once was, let’s consider that our effectiveness standards haven’t advanced far enough to capture the decentralization of social media engagement.