hyalineskies

On Friday afternoon, assistant editor at Macworld and blogosphere friend Cyrus Farivar IMed me with a novel thought, stating that his reading habits have changed dramatically since he started using NetNewsWire as opposed to online RSS aggregators such as Bloglines. Now, instead of searching through headlines and paragraphs for interesting content to read, he prioritises everything in order of “interestingness” (to use a Flickr term,) reading maybe ten percent of content from Gawker Media’s Wonkette and all of feeds from places like Slate and Slashdot.

It’s this type of cognitive filtering that I’ve never given much thought, yet it’s a slap in the face now: I’ve always found RSS to be extremely useful. Since the inception of a CMS-based hyalineskies, I’ve offered RSS support for the site and have watched feed usage grow continuously. I, however, have somehow (somewhat hypocritically) kept myself from using RSS in what is quite possibly my most technologically stubborn mistake possible.

I felt that there was something to be learned by viewing people’s actual websites; unstyled XML data loses the personality that is designed into the hypertext pages you read. Unstyled RSS is much like ordering pizza for delivery: although the final good is (for the most part) identical, the consumption atmosphere is entirely different. In both cases, you lose the atmosphere in exchange for convenience. The more time I spend working on others’ projects, the more I find myself valuing convenience over atmosphere, and, due to my craving for more productivity, finally subscribed to roughly twenty RSS feeds in Mozilla Thunderbird. (This is not to say that I haven’t attempted to use RSS extensively in the past; I’ve had a Bloglines account for years, but I’ve never really used it.)

Now, with Thunderbird, I find myself doing the exact same thing Cyrus explained earlier; while I read maybe 5% of Coudal and 40% of Kottke, I read everything from Subtraction and A List Apart. In fact, I find so much of Coudal’s content boring that it may not last much longer on my subscription list. I began to wonder why I visited that site at all, only to come to the conclusion that I simply liked the site’s index-page design. It was wonderful to look at and the content mundane; everyone likes to gawk at supermodels, but few are worthy of going out with you for decent conversation.

RSS, however, along with most of the Web’s unformatted XML media, is the content equivalent of what instant messaging is to conversation: a faceless medium that leaves much of the author’s appearance, skill, and personality open solely to the interpretation of the author’s content and its respective semantics.

Although it seems impersonal, we are constantly moving toward the use of XML/RSS as the main source of content on the web, with hypertext (slowly) becoming an obsolete equivalent. Dan Saffer at the excellent Adaptive Path consultancy predicted this same trend roughly a week ago, stating that “We’ll see loose collections of application parts, content, and data that don’t exist anywhere really, yet can be located, used, reused, fixed, and remixed.” The base for it all? XML.

The personal obscurity and anonymity of RSS adds yet another abstraction layer upon our content, underscoring a new problem for the blogosphere and the designer as well as mainstream media in the years to come: a necessity to create not only meaningful content, but content with personality. Your design work may be flawless, but if your content is lacking the same dynamics that your on-site Flash work is abundant in, RSS geeks are only a click away from deleting their subscription to your site. It’s much tougher to regain these users than it is for them to ignore you, and RSS, in this regard, is creating a new dilemma for Web media that requires much more emphasis upon user retention through copy, effectively shifting common web usability rules aside and opening the room for RSS usability guidelines as well.

What, then, do we, as bloggers and webmonkeys, need to do to keep our users? I’m not entirely sure, but I’ve got a good idea where we can start, and it has very little to do with design. We need to follow a few rules to keep the content itself just as interesting as the hypertext it gets packaged in on our sites.

The Nielsen approach: Keep constant content

One can always take Jakob Nielsen and his awfully plain Alertbox site a variety of different ways, and, although I think he’s a bit too dictatorial on usability most of the time, a recently-published alertbox hit the nail squarely upon the head, effectively creating the first great guideline for RSS usability: regularly post content.

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be newspaper-like about content distribution, but regular publishing is crucial to feed survival. If a user subscribes to your feed in a week when you post five entries and you subsequently halt content production for a month and a half, a reader may suspect your site to be abandoned and delete your feed.

I try to post content here twice weekly - one weekly feature early and one or two personal entries late in the week. Although I generally have these entries pre-written and slated for release on those dates, sometimes up to two weeks in advance, I will occasionally pitch in something else late (like this, for instance.) Either way, my readers can expect content here to hit their newsreaders twice weekly at the minimum, and this regularity keeps readers interested (as well as not speculating if one of my Internet memes has led to my untimely death.)

There are occasions when you may not be able to post twice a week due to writer’s block or vacation; in this case (as is the case for yours truly this week) one can either schedule an entry or add a note to the content. Keeping your site (and yourself reliable) keeps the reader, but keeping the reader informed keeps the reader’s interest.

Play with media

It’s safe to say that although your written content may be great, a block of 12-point Times New Roman can still be pretty boring to look through. Thanks to RSS 2.0, you can embed images or use the <enclosure> tag to broadcast alternate media to the reader.

If your writings are generally technically inclined, make graphics in Photoshop or Illustrator to visually outline your textual concepts; this is a common layout trick used in print media to break up the monotony and maintain legibility in large blocks of text with colourful graphs and image-based typography. Don’t go overboard, though; using too much media dramatically increases the download time as well as has the potential to create discontinuities within your text.

If you have the time and equipment, it may even be worthwhile to start a satellite podcast to your main text-based content with a different RSS feed; this way, you deliver fresh content to the reader in a new format. (If you have an obnoxious voice, mundane content, a thick accent, or are terribly awkward like I am, I don’t recommend this approach. If your site frequently deals with something related to audio, doing this is a no-brainer.)

3. Edit your content

No 1 wants 2 reed ur contant wen u rite stoopid. Just because the Internet isn’t frequently held to the same typographical and grammatical standards that print is, self-publishing online does not give you a licence to be a literary Dadaist. Follow common style and use your grammar skills; avoid Internet acronyms such as lol, omg, wtf, lmao, et cetera unless you want to sound like a twelve-year-old America Online user. Stray away from wanton use of profanity, and use semi-colons to join related sentences. Oppositely, unless your reader base is comprised solely of linguistics experts, Mensa members, and Nobel laureates, keep yourself from obscure, rarely-used adjectives and verbose Shakespearean meter. This is equally annoying and can sound awfully pretentious.

Make sure to check for typographical errors. There are spell-check plugins for most all of the major content management systems; if you are using a homebrew CMS or a spell-check isn’t available for your system, write your entries in a word processing application that has a spell-checking tool and copy/paste your content into your CMS’s web interface.

Unfortunately, if your problems are more stylistic than technical, you’ll need to do the work yourself. I personally recommend that all writers own copies of The Associated Press Stylebook and The Elements of Style. You can always take a class at your local community college if you really need help.

Let your writing be an extension of yourself

Anyone can write an emotionless technical essay, and the problem with this is that few want to read entries that are more mundane than Lorem Ipsum. Unless you’re Ben Stein, writing without emotion probably won’t get you very far. It is honestly amazing what you can tell from the colloquial writing style of a specific author: their uses of sentence structure, punctuation, and specific vocabulary speaks volumes of their cognitive processes. It is in your own style and vocabulary that the reader is able to construct a picture of your personality. If your writing style is boring and formal, people will assume that you, too, are boring and formal. If your sentence structure and word choice is too elementary, however, the reader may question your intelligence (and, therefore, your reputability as a writer.) This is sad but absolutely true.

Unless your content is targeting strict academics or those that want the English equivalent of XHTML 1.0 Strict x86 Assembly, it is essential that your writing is primarily composed of words that you would use in everyday conversation. Once again, we walk the tightrope between casual simplicity and complex construction: if your writing is too simple, you’ll sound dumb, but if your writing is too complex, you have the potential to sound awfully condescending.

Stay accessible

The second-to-last rule may be the most important: be friendly to and open with your readers. If your readers e-mail you and ask questions, reply. When my NEScover project hit BoingBoing on Monday, I was flooded with IMs and e-mails asking questions or praising me for the effort. I answered as many questions as I could and did the best I could to stay accessible. If I was sent a compliment, I replied with a thank you. I may have taken a while to respond to everyone, but I did nevertheless.

Just because RSS doesn’t have a comments form at the end does not mean that those readers should be sent one-way content. Invite them to visit your site to post comments or send you an e-mail, and be friendly even if you’ve received 110 e-mails asking the same question (with more on this circumstance below.) RSS inherently makes your content impersonal and book-like; if you want to keep readers, you will need to take the time to read what they, too, have written in response. (This goes for on-blog comments, too; if someone asks you a question or begins a counterpoint to your argument, be prepared to respond. These is nothing more annoying than offering discussion and then ignoring it; it is the Internet equivalent of starting a conversation with someone and then staying silent.)

If, for some reason, your content becomes wildly popular, you still have no excuse to ignore your readers. Once a question appears in your inbox around 20-30 times, it may be worthwhile to create a FAQ for the popular content, which saves you time and still addresses the readers’ questions. I’ve had my content on MetaFilter, Waxy, BoingBoing, Engadget, iLounge, Wired Blogs, Slate, and Joystiq, and I’ve not once ignored polite users. Don’t abandon those asking about your less-frequented content, either; you’d still alienate your audience, and negative word-of-mouth about you is a sure-fire way to have your feed thrown into the RSS trash can.

Remember the last S in RSS

RSS is Really Simple Syndication for a reason, and you should be open to the reproduction of your content on other sites. No one likes those that have nasty “no reproduction” notices at the bottom of the content. The very core of the Social Web is built on networking and interaction; heavily restricting “speech” not only violates this social structure, but it breaks the very method from which your content becomes popular: links and excerpts. Leave digital intellectual property dictatorship to the RIAA if you want readership.

If you want to keep everything in legalese, place a licence on your site. Wikipedia and most Linux documentation uses a pseudo-Marxist GNU Free Documentation Licence; if you want to keep some of your intellectual property rights, I recommend the Creative Commons set of licences. I find myself using them for most everything (with projects derived from GNU GPL roots, such as Secret Agent, and commercial licences being the exceptions.) This blog’s text uses a Creative Commons Licence.

If you do end up having a myriad of different licence arrangements, make sure you’re clear as to what is distributed under what. I have done this on a Copyright Info page, and it will help users that wish to place your content elsewhere. A Copyright Info page is also a necessity for commercial media; in a world of litigation, they need to make sure that they can reproduce the content they wish to without being sued.

The Open-Ended Debate

Obviously, this is not a definitive guide to content optimisation and maintaining readers with unstyled RSS. As with any technology, your mileage may vary. These rules have worked for me in the past and make intuitive sense to most writers.

Also, don’t forget the caveat of unpredictability: tomorrow, RSS could be all but replaced by a new, trendy format, although unlikely, to which these rules may not fully apply. For now, however, we need to work with what we have and the content that goes into the unstructured web. We can leave the discussion to e-mails and comments.