Jason Salas' WebLog

On-air and online: making people laugh, making people think, pissing people off

ASP.NET sites that kick ass

Pals with blogs

Podcasts I listen to

Is a blog without an RSS feed *really* a blog?

I just now had a very Scoble-ian thought: can a blog without an RSS feed to which people can subscribe really be considered a blog?  I've been discovering several sites lately that claim to have blogs, and they pretty much hit the mark in terms of features indicative of the medium (reverse chronoligical posts, categorized/hierarchial sorting, contact info, etc.), but no RSS feed. 

It's a real bitch when an interesting site with enough posts to captivate my attention can't be locked into my newsreader. 

Posted: Sep 26 2005, 04:21 PM by guam-aspdev | with 6 comment(s)
Filed under:

Comments

Thomas Strohmeyer said:

Jason, I'm just curious: How many rss feeds are you subscribed to in your newsreader? And what is your newsreader? I've been using Bloglines for a couple years now, I love it.
# September 26, 2005 2:38 AM

Jason Salas said:

Hi Thomas,

I generally subscribe to a lot of feeds for things from sports, software development, Flickr photostreams, rumorville, blogs, etc.

I use LiteFeeds as my RSS aggregator (www.litefeeds.com), because it's alos got a mobile component that lets me read subscribed feeds on my mobile phone (http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/archive/2005/08/04/421494.aspx). I did a podcast with the creator of LiteFeeds a couple of months ago and he explained how he built it and the importance of mobility in blogging apps(http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/archive/2005/08/06/421734.aspx).
# September 26, 2005 2:55 AM

Jamie said:

Is that not kinda like saying "Is a car still a car without aircon?" or "Is a laptop still a laptop without a DVD burner?"?

While RSS is a nice to have on a blog, a lot of people run blogs and don't have much technical knowledge. By definition a lot of sites without RSS are still blogs - maybe one day they will all conform to some standard though! :o)
# September 26, 2005 5:11 AM

Thomas Strohmeyer said:

Litefeeds huh? Looks interesting, but I don't do any browsing on my mobile phone.

I will admit, I enjoy several blogs that lack a RSS feed, but I don't tend to visit them very often, at least not like the feeds I keep track of in bloglines. They just kind of sink below my radar.
# September 26, 2005 5:36 AM

Ashutosh Nilkanth said:

Valid thought Jason. On a similar note, last week I built an experimental web-app that automatically converts a web page into a RSS feed - FeedTier ( http://feedtier.somee.com ). It just might bridge the gap.
# September 26, 2005 10:22 AM

Glenn from Vallejo said:

I use RSS Bandit to read my usual suspect blogs and my must read blogs - like Jason's blog ;-)on LiteFeeds to read from my BlackBerry. I am always saddened/furstrated when a blog I like does not have an RSS feed and only can be read from my browser. Maybe I'm suffering from techno snobbery and I need to get over it, but it's great just to fire up my RSS aggregator and read from one spot....Just my "phity cents.."

# September 28, 2005 4:40 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)