How important is RSS to blogging?

[Image: Dilbert]RSS has been one of the central technologies to blogging since the very beginning. It’s one of the things that makes blogs stand out so clearly from sites that are simply “frequently updated web pages.”

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the news and information on the internet now without using some sort of RSS aggregator, or at least using a service that ports RSS feeds into daily digest e-mails. In most respects, blogging wouldn’t be blogging without RSS.

Which is why I’m always surprised when people cut their RSS feeds. It’s like neutering your pet. It makes your blog so much less potent when you essentially cut off a huge portion of your distribution.

Imagine a newspaper deciding that it was going to deliver only a list of their headlines, and if people wanted to read the articles they would have to go visit the downtown office.

The most recent example of this is The Dilbert Blog, which is in my blogroll and which I read religiously for years. About a month and a half ago Scott Adams decided that since he wanted to make money on ads and people were reading his blog via the feed instead of via the site (and therefore skipping the ads), he would truncate the feed so that people would have to visit his site to read the blog.

The end result: I’ve read only four of his posts since then. FOUR. That’s about 10% of something where I used to read 100%.

And here’s the kicker: it’s not the ads. It’s the convenience. I have to go the site. Wait for it to load. I can’t read it with the rest of the blogs I read, I have to make a separate window, spend extra effort to read that blog individually. I can’t use google gears to read it in offline mode.

Basically, I have to drive over to Dilbert offices to read the damn thing. And it’s just not worth it anymore.

Stuff your RSS feed with ads, please, but don’t truncate your RSS feed. It defeats the whole purpose of blogging.