I love Bloglines. It's a browser-based RSS feeds aggregator that almost singlehandedly proves the case that web applications can be better than desktop-based ones. I say this in the context of Joel Spolsky's already classic essay on why web browser apps are winning the war against so-called rich or smart clients. "The new API is HTML" quoth Joel. There were some good follow-up articles too, including one by John Gruber that I read today called The Location Field Is the New Command Line. The pros and cons of both sides have been hashed out often before, including by me. In a nutshell: browser-based apps are easier to use, don't require installation, and probably most importantly of all are accessible on any computer hooked up to the Internet. Rich clients can offer better (richer/smarter) functionality and are not constrained by the limitations of the browser. So there are trade-offs both ways.
The other pro for web-based apps is that you can access your data from any device hooked up to the Internet. As we use our PDA's and mobile phones more and more to create, communicate and collaborate (the 3 C's as far as I'm concerned), we'll see increased benefits to having our data available in one location - the web server.
Bloglines has recently undergone a facelift and added some more features to its service. One of the most interesting to me, because I requested it back in February, is that you can now view how many people subscribe to your RSS feed. I'm surprised nobody has said much about this, because it's potentially a launching pad to a community-based stats network (read my Feb post for more details). My own subscriber stats have jumped from 32 in February to 79 as of today. And I hasten to add it's not just my stats - Mark Pilgrim's subscriber number was 839 in February, but now it's 2100! So in both cases our number of subscribers has more than doubled in just 5 months.
I think this is a reflection of how much Bloglines the service has grown - it's undoubtedly the number 1 browser-based RSS Aggregator out there and possibly even the top aggregator overall including the smart clients (that's debatable). But I think it's also a reflection of how popular blogging is getting among "normal" people - i.e. not just geeks. And in this respect, one of Bloglines' best features is a "one-click" method of signing up and getting started in the blogging world - there's no software installation required. Incidentally, that's why I added a "Subscribe with Bloglines" button to my menu last week - to make it as easy as possible for normal people to subscribe to my RSS feed. I'm sure normal people don't want to see my ugly XML code and Bloglines hides those details as much as possible (except it doesn't appear to have RSS feed auto-discovery yet).
On the subject of subscriber stats, we can also start to put numbers on the so-called A List phenomenon. It's pretty much accepted now that blogging popularity is distrubuted as a power law - whereby a small number of bloggers get a large number of readers, while the majority of bloggers get a small number of readers. So let's check out the Bloglines subscriber stats of the A-Listers that I subscribe to:
Jason Kottke: 2184
Dave Winer: 2652
Mark Pilgrim: 2100
Anil Dash: 884
Tim Bray: 1517
Mitch Kapor: 924
Lawrence Lessig: 2794
Jon Udell: 1619
Those are just web technology A-Listers, nevertheless it seems that 1500 Bloglines subscribers is a good cut-off point. This would mean Anil Dash and Mitch Kapor wouldn't be classified as A-List (I'm kind of surprised Dash doesn't have more subscribers, maybe it's because he doesn't post that often and when he does it's usually not techy stuff...certainly not like the good old days when he wrote about microcontent clients and so forth). Of course this figure, 1500, will steadily increase over time as Bloglines and blogging both gain popularity.
For research purposes, I decided to briefly subscribe to the 10 "most influential reporters and bloggers on the web" according to Blogrunner back in March 2004 . Here's what I found:
001. Glenn Reynolds instapundit.com --> 1737 Bloglines subscribers
002. Andrew Sullivan www.andrewsullivan.com - daily dish and The New Republic --> No
RSS feed!!?
003. Kevin Drum Political Animal (ex-Calpundit) --> 742
004. Joshua Micah Marshall Talking Points Memo: By Joshua Micah Marshall -->
1964
005. Tim Blair Tim Blair --> 164
006. Dana Milbank The Washington Post --> couldn't find an RSS feed
007. Michele A Small Victory --> 52(!)
008. Kos Daily Kos --> couldn't find an RSS feed
009. Eugene Volokh The Volokh Conspiracy --> 125 + 50 (headline and full content
feeds)
010. Atrios Eschaton --> 1361
Well, some surprises there! Only 3 of them have over 1000 Bloglines subscribers. Not being familiar with any of the above 10 weblogs, when I did a quick browse of them this evening I came away with 2 impressions: 1) RSS feeds were either hard to find or in 3 cases non-existent; 2) they mostly blog about politics.
I don't want this to seem like I'm obsessing over subscriber stats. There are drawbacks to knowing how many subscribers bloggers have. And funnily enough this was one of the themes I explored in the short story I published last week, called Sylvian and The System. It's a futuristic look at what blogging may be like in 20-30 years time.
Basically my story was a glimpse into a world where people operate avatars that contribute content/information into a Web-like structure called The System, which is ruled by popularity/reputation. The dominant ranking method is a tool called "Popster", which I likened to a Billboard Top 40 of the Blogosphere. Now to my mind, this is not far from the "A-List" phenomenon that we currently have right now in the blogosphere. My story was in a sense cranking that idea up a few notches and exploring the possible consequences. If you're a regular reader of my weblog, I'd encourage you to read Sylvian and The System. As pioneer bloggers at the beginning of the 21st century, I'd genuinely like to know your reaction to the ideas I explored in that story.
Which brings me back to the possible drawbacks of Bloglines' subscriber stats. One is obviously that popularity (or number of subscribers) may become the main goal for bloggers. But does a need for popularity affect your content? Will we strive to produce "mainstream" content to appeal to a large number of readers?
For example my publishing a 2700-word work of fiction to my weblog is likely to alienate some of my subscribers, those that don't like to read fiction ("just the facts ma'am"). I think it was a risky move for me to publish Sylvian and The System, because it's not the type of content that some - maybe even a majority - of my readers signed up for when they subscribed to my RSS feed. I'd go as far to say that if I continued to publish just fiction on my weblog, my Bloglines subscriber count would decrease pretty quickly.
I myself enjoy reading "risky" (or perhaps non-conventional is a better term) content in weblogs. Often those blogs have low subscriber stats - but then they're not "mainstream" in content. Perhaps that is the point I'm trying to make - that getting popular does require some mainstreaming of your content.
There is good to be had in Bloglines subscriber count too. Here's a revelation: community and collaboration are more important to me than I let on. I often say that publishing and creativity are the most important aspects of blogging to me. While that's still true, I enjoy being part of a community of like-minded people and I think we can make some interesting deductions about who is influential in our little communities by looking at Bloglines stats. Notice I didn't say important, I said influential - which is to say, these are people that I consider to be on the same 'level' as me intellectually but often have more influence than me in the community. e.g. Marc Canter has 417 subscribers, Sébastien Paquet has 563, Lilia Efimova has 744, Dina Mehta has 134, Paolo Valdemarin 149. There are many others I could mention. I don't mean to embarrass anyone, but these people are pretty influential in the social software/new school tools community - a community which I like to think I'm a part of.
There are some people who have fewer subscribers than me who I'd consider to be influential in the quality of their ideas. So don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying subscriber count is a good indication of quality. But it is one measure of influence in a community, although the list of supposedly influential political bloggers I analysed above perhaps refutes that.
What's your take on all this?
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As a wanna-be geek who couldn't get his head around xml rss codes, Bloglines was my saviour. Its search for feeds via url feature enabled me to sign up many cool blogs before I figured out what all that code was for - just type in the url, it finds the xml, rdf, whatever, click subscribe and you're on the list.
Web app makeovers seem to be all the rage right now. Blogger has done some great things with its usability and interface. And I like what Bloglines has done too. I think we are witnessing these the growth of these tools from clunky beta models to refined mature programs, which is yet another sign that blogging is growing, getting bigger and entering the mainstream (for good or bad? - we shall shape and see.)
Posted by: liam | July 18, 2004 2:33 AM
Regarding the second part of your post - I think a lot of new bloggers immediately ask "What should I be reading?" and inevitably end up finding the "A List" and that shapes their intitial idea of what blogging is. People who have been raised reading an "A List" of traditional media (Time magazine, CNN, etc) tend to seek the same when they blog. "Wow, they've got 1500 inbound links, what they say must be important." For me that sells short the potential of weblogs.
I've never subscribed to an A-List blog for long and I can't really say why. The content is always fresh and cutting edge, but I guess I don't like the feeling of knowing that I'm reading what "everyone else" is reading online. When I arrive at a new blog and see the list of usual suspects on their blogroll, I think to myself that this person isn't really exploring blogs. They are simply defaulting to what they feel they should be reading.
Traditional media is also defined by the Power Law (and massive advertising budgets), and while I do agree it exists with blogs, I think the real potential lies in other models - like the "Fractal Blogosphere" you discussed a while back. Therein lies the real power of these things.
Posted by: liam | July 18, 2004 2:50 AM
** The fictional story
I enjoyed that fictional piece - Since Weblogs, even if they focus on certain topics, are still personal sites, I consider it normal that you don't only get the stuff you subscribed for. IMHO it's a good thing, tangents often lead to interesting topics I may otherwise not have discovered.
I don't think I would call it "risky", even though some people (who can be quiet vocal) may disapprove of such postings.
** Bloglines publishing numbers
It's interesting. Certainly for the Publisher, maybe also for the visitors. But it is nothing to get excited above, IMHO. Don't forget that the numbers _may_ well tell more about demographics or types of Bloglines-users than they may about the actual publishers. Yes, Webapps are nice, and yes, many people have written that they will surpass desktop apps (for certain niche-markets) - but we've had people pushing and making prohecies about ASP (Application Service Providers) before, and all of those have AFAIK vanished and not even closely lived up to their promises. Let's not carried away here. ;)
Mark posted an aggregator statsitc at the end of 2003: http://www.diveintomark.org/archives/2003/12/01/aggregators
A lot has happened since, sure, but I don't think people are leaving desktop-aggregators for online-services by the horde as of today. I know I am not.
** Popularity, Influence & Community
Popularity or "Influence" as you call it is a very fuzzy concept IMHO. Because how do you define the audience, or the "community" for which a publisher is "popular/influential". It is very subjective. I don't think anybody would call all people that use E-Mail or a web-browser a community. And IMHO "weblogs" have started to go that way, too. It's mostly a description of the technical medium, personally I don't think there is a cohesive, social element that groups all users of that technical medium together (At least not anymore than talking about "the internet-community" as a whole).
And when you start trying to define "community" (in the context of weblogs) you usually end up either with a circular definition or something so broad it doesn't really help.
** Streamlining Content
> But does a need for popularity affect your
> content? Will we strive to produce "mainstream"
> content to appeal to a large number of readers?
Douglas Adams in "God's Debris" (read it, if you haven't already) when arguing that the brain is a delusion generator writes the following:
>"Has anyone ever advised you to be yourself?"
>
>I said I'd heard that a lot.
>
>"What does it mean to be yourself?" he asked. "If
>it means to do what you think you ought to do,
>then you're doing that already. If it means to
>act like you're exempt from society's influence,
>that's the worst advice in the world; you
>probably would stop bathing and wearing clothes.
>The advice to 'be yourself' is nonsense. But our
>brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is
>more comfortable to believe we have a strategy
>for life than to believe we have no idea how to
>behave."
To a certain degree, everybody "streamlines" her/his communication to a (perceived) receiver/an audience - otherwise there's no point in communication.
There were and will always be people who like being popular, and if they have something to offer, then let them be(come) popular. What is there to argue against? (This is reminiscent of talking about "credibility" when applied to [not so] popular artists/musicians.) Likewise there were and will always people that don't give a *cough* about being popular.
I don't think that those numbers will change much of the behaviour we see. Maybe it will help some people to have a better metric to work with, and do what they were already doing... ;)
Posted by: Sencer | July 18, 2004 4:29 AM
It might be interesting to hear a critique of using bloglines subscriber stats versus other measures of popularity such as Technorati, access logs, the blogging ecosystem, and other such techniques.
Posted by: Andrew | July 19, 2004 8:19 AM
Liam, you're right - Bloglines does in fact have a "search for feeds via url feature". That's halfway there re the "RSS autodiscovery" feature I talked about. It'd be 100% there if you could just type in a site's name - eg Read/Write Web - and it'd bring up the RSS feed.
Sencer, good thoughts too. I'm not getting carried away with the potential for web-based apps, but right here right now I find them more useful than desktop apps - due to accessibility from anywhere, different devices, etc. Things will get real interesting in this space when Micrsoft goes live with Longhorn, which will be a desktop-based (some say non-Web based!) system where - for example- you would have the choice of an Outlook-style RSS Aggregator. So even though web apps have the advantage (for me anyway) now, I expect a significant challenge from "rich clients" in the near future.
Re defining community, I agree that it's subjective. But that's the whole point of weblogs, that it enables "loosely-coupled" communities/networks to occur. So yes, I don't think the subscriber numbers themselves are very important as a qualitative measure (I've never thought that, for the record - look back at my earlier posts). But it's still a very interesting thing to study - how popularity affects your content. I don't have the answers btw, I'm just exploring... And Sencer, I like your comparison to music "credibility". eg Nirvana, who became popular despite not aiming to be popular. I've always been (perhaps morbidly?) fascinated by the friction that this caused in Nirvana's music and in Kurt Cobain's life.
Andrew, I agree with your point that web stats are pretty unreliable on the whole and we'd likely see different measures of popularity using Technorati etc.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 19, 2004 9:36 AM
The feed for The Daily Kos is http://www.dailykos.com/index.rdf, and currently has 1023 subscribers.
Posted by: Bryan Price | July 21, 2004 12:13 PM
Thanks for that Bryan. Curiously, the RSS feed for Daily Kos is not linked anywhere on their homepage! I even did a search on their site, and it was linked in one really obscure place:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/4/7/2268/53197
No wonder political blogs don't figure highly in Bloglines subscriber stats, no one can find their feeds!
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 21, 2004 1:27 PM
As a blogger who never seems to get any attention, I don't know what to say.
I think my stuff is more interesting than lots of the stuff I read. One problem is that it covers a lot of ground,
from blogging ("The world's attention today." http://russabbott.blogspot.com/2004/07/worlds-attention-today.html)
to politics (The real real story of the vote on the intolerance amendment: reframing worked: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/2004/07/real-real-story-of-vote-on-intolerance.html)
to pictures (Fierce Blue: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/2004/07/fierce-blue.html)
to whatever, for example, the nature of the soul (Are we born dualists? And if so, should we be concerned? http://russabbott.blogspot.com/2004/07/are-we-born-dualists-and-if-so-should.html).
I'd like to know what you think.
Posted by: Russ Abbott | July 21, 2004 7:22 PM
The most popular Bloglines blogs in Basque, Sustatu and Sarean have 28 and 27 subscribers each. I find it amazing that they're in a 1-100 proportion to the most popular in English. Basque is just the language of 0.6 m people, and the number or Basque bloggers is still minimal.
Posted by: Luistxo | July 21, 2004 7:30 PM
Russ, hey you must be doing something right because you've got a cat picture on your blog (Fierce Blue)! I don't even have a cat... You're right though, a topic-focused blog has a better chance of picking up subscribers. Maybe because it takes a little longer to find one's community when one has diverse interests.
Luistxo, great to hear about Basque blogging. Have you checked out this blog:
http://blogalization.info/reorganization
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 21, 2004 11:42 PM