Aggregators

OK, so perhaps I'm a little slow on the uptake. I've only been solidly in the blogging business for a couple of months now (although I maintained a pseudo-blog on the old version of my newly-refurbished company site), so I really didn't get what the big deal about RSS aggregators was. Folks like Julia, ScottW, and even ScottGu, were making such a fuss about aggregators, and I just didn't get it.

Then I started following the latest posts at the home page of our very own DotWebLogs, and started wondering about what kinds of posts I might've missed between views of the page. Could it be perhaps that the one post I really wanted to read was somewhere in that list, but had been bumped off before I checked the page again? Well, thanks to ScottW's most recent blog about SharpReader, I now grok that that's what aggregators are for (at least part of it). I downloaded and installed SharpReader, and while I can't compare it to other aggregators, I can say that it's simple to install (just copy the files from the ZIP where you want them), and very simple and intuitive to use, which are two of my personal hallmarks for good applications.

So, you're wondering, what's the downside? Well, now I can also say that I understand why people complain about folks who provide a short description rather than the full text of their blog in the RSS feed. It's not something I typically do (in part because I'm too lazy to write both a blog and a representative description), and now that I see what it does to an aggregator, I'm glad I don't.

Now I know the argument goes, if you provide the full blog in your RSS, how can you drive people to your site? I think there's something to this argument...BUT...I also think that if you have something sufficiently interesting to say on a consistent basis, and someone subscribes to your feed via an aggregator, perhaps they will eventually check out your site just to see what else you may have to offer (downloads, services, etc.). I also think there's more than one way to skin the traffic cat, and some of those ways don't require frustrating people who want to keep up with what you have to say.

So to sum up...aggregators are definitely cool, and a big THANK YOU to all my fellow DotNetWebLoggers for continuing to flak them until I wised up. :-)