Thank you for the link, Mark. Very good piece in defining the attributes of a blog. Would you add RSS as a feature of blogs as well? Some blogs do not have them but I think would. What do you think?

Justin, Thanks for the comment and I also must congratulate you on your own post on the subject which I thought was excellent.

I think that RSS is hugely important and that all blogs should be using it - I debated whether to add it to the list and decided against it merely because I felt that it was an associated technology, a distribution layer if you like as I outline in this post on blogs and newsletters.

On reflection though, perhaps I was wrong not to include it because of its importance which is only going to increase … and quickly, I believe. Many thanks for pointing this out.

Justin beat me to it! I would agree that a blog without RSS is about as useful as the page with pdf’s.

Mel, Thanks for your comment. Out of interest, do you therefore consider RSS more important on a blog than the ability to leave comments?

Mark,

I am sure Mel will express a view but I will give mine.

I think leaving comments is more important than RSS because of the interactive nature of comments which I feel is a fundamental aspect of web 2.0 etc.

When I started blogging, I did not have a RSS feed.
Gosh those were the days…

Justin

A cop out answer - but it depends! Comments are fine on blogs where a dialogue is useful (for instance - here) but I have seen many examples of comments out of control and conversations which really ought to have taken place on email. On the other hand some of the uber-bloggers (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/ springs to mind and there are others) don’t have comments - but they DO have a mechanism for getting in touch (email). I’m guessing what I am saying is that if a dialogue (public or private) can take place then it’s a blog.

The RSS thing is something that has really moved on in the last year or so for me. I had my very first blog over at tripod and I still think they don’t have RSS - but it didn’t bother me at the time. Now however, if a site I come across doesn’t have RSS I don’t bother with it. I have around 300 feeds in my reader at any one time (it’s a fairly fluid list and I’m ruthless at axing - limited attention and time, but also add whenever I find something interesting). I’m becoming really dependent on RSS. For instance, I knew that yourself and justin had replied to the comment because I track comments using CoComment and the RSS feed popped up in Bloglines this morning. I would otherwise never have remembered to come back and check what else had been written. Automation via RSS - it’s the future!

That is very helpful for me Mel and increases my understanding of the issue.

Mel and Justin - firstly thank you both for your comments which have been very useful. I also wanted to state my position on this and apologies for the delay in doing so.

While I should state that I would never run a blog without RSS, I don’t believe that intrinsically it is as important as the comments function. Why? Because RSS is essentially an aid, something which makes our lives easier by delivering the information we want straight to us from the sites/blogs/newsfeeds that we are interested in. The comments function, however, allows me, as a visitor, to express my opinion and add to the overall conversation that is happening. As such, I think that it facilitates “many to many” communication better than RSS which is a “one to many” broadcast and so is more valuable.

Those that turn comments off on their blogs (and Seth Godin is one that was discussed) do so for various reasons as you point out. Yes, email still exists as a communications method but at a “one to one” level and I believe that this detracts from the ‘community’ and ‘network’ elements that blogs promote. As we have here on a small scale - 3 of us participating in the converstaion could not happen without comments.

Could it happen without RSS and particularly CoComments using RSS? Yes, but you’d be right to say that it probably wouldn’t have. (The whole CoComments issue is hugely interesting but that’s probably best left for another post). And as for automation using RSS … oh yes! Marketing through RSS … yes as well! Lots of things to look out for in those areas in the months ahead.

Thank you both again.