Please don’t go Feedburner promo link crazy like this |
The following is a single post in my RSS Reader using Feedburner this morning with seemingly every possible option — actually, I’m sure there are more — turned on in the post:
This post reminded me of my experience with another post from a different blog in my RSS reader recently and there are Things Not To Do lessons from both posts for fellow bloggers: 10 (deadly sins) ads in a single RSS feed post, get out of here.
The above screenshot contains one picture and seven words. That’s all the content in the post. Now check out the other links, most of which are promotional, and which number nearly 20+:
76 tag links: design, chair, library, books, made in Italy, Bibliochaise. Head’s up, tag whores: I can see this going under ‘books’ and ‘chair’ which probably lead to other posts, but why the other five tags for readers? ‘Made in Italy’? If we want to run Technorati tag searches this badly then we can launch them ourselves. Very few posts warrant more than three tags. There are almost more tags used here than words in the post. If you need that many tags, sorry it’s just tag spamming. Solution: hide that stuff so it only shows for authors.- email this
- add to del.icio.us
- Digg this
- Find related feeds. What is going to be related to a post like this? It’s been sullied by a bunch of promotional links.
- Add to Technorati Favorites
- Meneame. How many readers will know what this actually means? For that matter what most of the “___ this” links are used for?
- Subscribe by email
- Seed this. Propagate, that’s the spirit.
- Furl this
- Spurl this
- This item is from “Random Good Stuff” Should be titled “Non-random Unrelated Links.” Here is how you can run down the source of this post, if you are really interested.
- Advertise in this feed. And become the proud sponsor of link #30+?
- Alexa rank. So readers need to know this … why? What does it have to do with the post?
- (not linked) This feed has 1187 subscribers. As readers, why do we need to know this? Congratulations on your 4 digit RSS penis. Yes, all your readers are envious.
- Slashdot this
- Add to blogroll
- Blog this. Blog what, how many promotional links you have in this post? Ok, here you go.
- Track co.mments. I’m sure a post like this will get tons of comments.
- Include this in Outlook. What about readers who don’t use Outlook? Might want to add: Include this in (insert every email program). Why not?
- Digg this. A second time! Are you freaking kidding? I guess Digg has become so popular that banging the reader with this request twice will increase the odds of getting dug.
- Fark this. Need to replace the ‘a’ and the ‘r’ with a ‘u’ and a ‘c’.
How about one more for the road:
- Unsubscribe this. Done.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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You can actually write your own FeedFlare plugins, so there may not even be a limit to how far you could go with this. I have seen two different ‘Digg this’ plugins, so that may be where they got those from.
I agree that FeedFlare links should be limited and useful to the user. For instance, even though I use co.mments a lot myself, I don’t include it in my FeedFlare because I think most users would typically want to add a comment before tracking them. I also avoid FeedFlare links that apply to the site as a whole (e.g. Add to Technorati Favorites) — these links should be specific to the post.
However I do use a lot of tags. It isn’t just to seed Technorati — my tags cross-reference topics in my blog. In fact, the tag links in my feed are links to those tags in my blog, not in Technorati. On the site itself I include both, in a relatively small font so it hopefully doesn’t take up too much real estate. I’m not sure how much users use the tags within my site, but I find them useful for finding my own posts. The tag cloud widget also links only to internal posts, and that widget has become pretty popular.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 20, 2006 @ 11:39 am PST
I’m still not sold on all this tag stuff from either a reader or webmaster perspective [remember this post?]. What was wrong with categories? I guess the same could be said about blogs and diaries (which the latter was what I started with on the web, BTW). The two terms seem synomonous from a reader perspective but even on your blog Sterling they are not.
Of course I mean no disrespect toward your WP tag plugin, Sterling. It looks like you did a nice job there, in fact from what I’ve seen. I’m just talking about tagging and tag use in general from a reader and webmaster perspective. Is this Web 2.0ish thinking? No, but I think it’s pretty clear that I’m not on board the web 2.0 meme. And from what I’ve read from your blog, you don’t seem to be that much either (please correct if I’m wrong). I guess I’m putting ‘tags’ particularly when used to identify what people do at conferences as web 2.0ish. My business card might be 1.0 but it does a fine job of spelling out what I do.
Furthermore, I don’t believe readers would use six, seven or more categories (tags) to describe a single post. Heck in cocomment the average number of tags I put for comments is three. I have no empirical evidence of what others are doing, but that’s an educated guess based on looking through various profiles on del.cio.us. I suppose one could go through the API and get some more exact number on the number of tags used average.
Ultimately, I think the emphasis should be on directing readers helpfully to more specific information through the tags/categories. If it is something only of use to the author, then it is something that should only show up for the author on the page. Not the reader, not the search engines, not the rest of the world.
For example, “Made in Italy” isn’t likely to send readers to posts about chairs made of books and Made In Italy. Instead readers would see items actually made in Italy, which when I followed that Technorati link several of the posts weren’t even in English. I can see a Made In Italy tag being useful for readers from Italy or whom choose that localization, otherwise most readers are going to be reading in English and see this as worthless.
Also there are SEO considerations here. Should the search engine look at the page/post and think it’s about a chair made of books or about all these other promotional links above? Most of what you see above is actually in the post body.
By policing our pages at least somewhat and keeping them related we make it easier for the search engines to properly categorize and return them to people who are looking for the specific information. I don’t typically create pages with the search engines in mind, but I do think about this when adding stuff that is on every post/page.
(Tags used for this comment: ‘tagging’ and ’seo’)
Comment by TDavid — July 20, 2006 @ 12:29 pm PST
Categories in WordPress are too difficult for me to manage. One long list of categories with a checkbox beside each requires a lot of scrolling and clicking, while the Jerome’s keywords plugin lets me type in the tags I want, and “creates” them on the fly if they weren’t used already. Besides that, there really isn’t much difference between tags and categories, IMHO. Since I have them anyway, I use categories for more broad classification — so a post rarely belongs in more than one or two categories. But I tag a post based on any topic it addresses — not every one, but the high spots. I also tag everyone I link to or quote. So you’ll see ‘tdavid’ in my tag cloud in a rather large font.
As far as buying into the web 2.0 thing, that really depends on what someone means when they ask that question. Collaboration, information sharing, mashups, promoting others’ content and even your own — yes. Gaming the system to grab center stage with irrelevant content — no.
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 20, 2006 @ 1:04 pm PST
How To Annoy Your Readers.
Yup, I said “readers”. We’re always talking about podcast subscribers and the feed, but let’s not forget that there has yet to be a credible study that shows over 50% of any given podcast’s listeners even use a podcatcher. Many…
Trackback by BizPodcasting — July 20, 2006 @ 1:57 pm PST
Why doesn’t he have a Play Tag with Randy button?
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — July 20, 2006 @ 2:35 pm PST
ROFLMAO, Randy — I’m surprised you haven’t written one of those for FeedBurner yet. Or HAVE you?
Comment by Sterling Camden — July 20, 2006 @ 2:51 pm PST
iM vain. But not that vain!
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — July 20, 2006 @ 3:34 pm PST
[…] and got to love the 13 FeedFlares attached to the signature. Yeah, I’ll digg this, stumble it, add to mixx, share in Facebook, yadda, yadda. […]
Pingback by Don’t send your readers temporary blog post trash » Make You Go Hmm — February 26, 2009 @ 11:46 am PST