Before getting to the 40th version of Hmm quickies I wanted to share some more RSS reading stats that I’ve gathered over the last six months or so. These thoughts are usually most relevant when creating these quickie posts which are my way of saying I came across a bunch of different things I wanted to share but only had a little bit to say on the subject at the time.

If you don’t own and/or contribute to a blog you can safely skip down to the quickies section bolded below as you probably won’t be interested in the rest of the behind the scenes DVD filler. For those who actually like blogging about blog reading, it’s meal time.

What makes a power RSS reader?
For those new (sometimes I forget that there are new readers coming here every day) I would probably be classified as a power RSS reader in that I scan hundreds of posts — sometimes 1,000+ — every workday. On a really busy workday it is easily more than 1,000 posts. I’m not in the league of those super power RSS readers who claim (or actually do) have more than 1,000 RSS subscriptions. I bow to their superior RSS skills.

The most subscribed I’ve ever been is in the 400+ feeds range. At the time I felt I couldn’t keep up with that many so I went through a major cleaning and have since learned about an efficient system that helps me scan and read through a significant number of posts every day. The system I’m currently using allows me to sift through nearly 200 feeds daily without getting swamped or taking too much time. I feel like the number could be 250 or even 300+ without burying me, but that hasn’t been tested yet. With a couple vacations and AFK time I did get as much as nearly 10,000 posts behind, but I was able to get caught back up without surrendering to the reblog equivalent of “mark all as read.”

It took a little over five months to happen (March 20, 2006 - September 6, 2006, results pictured above), but I finally have clicked my way to the 10,000 published mark in ReBlog. Something marked as “published” means that I’ve found it interesting enough to read past scanning the headline and a few sentences. Some quick stats:

• Roughly 9% of all posts I’ve scanned get marked as publish and read. This number has gone down from a little over 10% during the summer period. Just as there is usually a summer traffic slowdown to sites (this site actually gained traffic though), the quality of posts I read during the summer seems to have declined as well.
• I have to click ‘publish’ or ‘archive’ for every post in my reader which means that over the course of 5+ months I’ve clicked (made) a decision on well over 75,000 posts in my reader alone. 75,000 / 5 months = 15,000 clicks a month (approximately) or about 500 posts per day 30 days per month. I should reach the 100,000 post mark by Halloween if the current pace of feeds with posts continues
• marking something as “archived” isn’t necessarily a thumbs down on the post, it just means one reader (me) wasn’t sucked in by the quick pitch.
• an average workday (Monday - Friday) is bringing in around 800 posts a day across my radar for a decision (publish or archive) and the numbers fall off on Saturday (the worst posting day) and improve slightly for the second worst posting day of the week Sunday
• A small percentage, around 5-7% of these posts have become linked in this and other blogs where I contribute. It used to be higher, but over the summer as mentioned above it seems like the noise to signal rate has increased. I didn’t cut many feeds during that time, so hopefully now that summer is over the percentage will increase.
• Top 5 feeds I’ve marked posts as publish: Digg 1,757, Lifehacker 541, CNET News 537, Delicious Popular 441, Slashdot 292. As an individual, I wouldn’t try emulating any of these sites, because they are all group written and post way too frequently and with diverse content. The content from the individual authors at each publication would be much, much smaller but possibly of higher quality. It would be interesting to look at the number of marked published from individual bloggers and compare. Maybe I’ll do that when the published number hits 100,000.
• I created a screencast showing how quickly decisions are made on posts and what criteria used. Meant to be helpful to writers for how to better draw (one, at least) reader’s attention.

Which of my posts are you marking publish?
This is information for the blogs I subscribe to that I’d like to share someday. I’ve been thinking about whipping up a mod for Reblog where feeds that I subscribe to could receive this information updated once per day. I don’t want to unlock (it’s behind an htaccess protected gateway at the moment) reblog feed which is a stream and republishes the feed’s entire post. I think that is a little too splog-like for my liking. Instead, an RSS feed with the raw stats, headline and link could be a good syndication format for this data and be helpful for blog publishers.

As a reader this wouldn’t be of much use but to fellow writers/publishers it would show what one of their readers is actually reading. Click counts don’t tell the same story that something which is manually marked ‘publish’ does. For readers who don’t leave many comments/trackbacks but read regularly and wish I’d get more involved with what they are doing, this also could become a conversation door opener. Something like: “I noticed you are marking publish frequently on posts with ___ topic. Do you think this would make a good category or standalone blog?”

How can I get you to subscribe to my blog?
This is a question I’ve fielded a few times. There are three proven effective ways to get my attention rather quickly (attention usually followed by interest, usually followed by curiosity, usally followed by subscription based entirely on the quality of your site/blog):

1) comment and/or trackback several times from your blog to this one with some in depth commentary. I’m not talking one or two word or sentence quips, but real human dialog and feedback.

Make enough or frequent quality comments and it’s almost guaranteed (probably 90%+ chance) I’ll subscribe to your blog at some point. Even if your posts consist of mostly disagreeing or challenging my opinion. At the very least, even if I don’t subscribe to your blog, you’ll probably see some return linklove in the weekly Hmmcast or other posts where something you said made me go hmm. Thoughtful responses get my attention. Watch Hmm for posts using question marks. Those are opportunities. Really.
2) create something that gets linked by one of the feeds I subscribe to and I’ve marked publish. If you create solid enough content I will come across your site sooner or later. The numbers are with you, really.
3) share something cool. Now what I consider cool and you consider cool could be at odds, but that shouldn’t stop you from sharing. I’m a picky bastard who has been around the web block for over 10 years, but I am always looking for new, innovative sites, products and services to learn about, add to our business and my life and share with others. If you have created and shared something cool, I’ll probably find you and not far behind that will be subscribing to your blog.

Bonus Tip: You could also offer to write a guest post here or at one of our other blogs. While we haven’t ran one of those here in quite some time, guest written posts that fit the flavor of this blog and are done well are always welcome. This blog currently receives over 3,000 uniques a day on average and well over 5,000 page views a day according to server stats. Not a huge audience, but respectable as far as blogs go. Guest posts are a good way to get another writer’s attention, especially if they are well written. Also, we don’t have a problem with embedded but marked ads in post, so this could be an income opportunity as well. To get in touch with me about this, just leave a comment below that you are interested. I’ll get back to you personally.

I write and contribute guest posts to other blogs. It’s a little more rare these days than a couple years ago, but I still contribute elsewhere from time to time because I believe in sharing on other sites I like. Also, I like the writing challenge of trying to fit the flavor/theme of another blog. Sharpen the stone.

Perhaps another way (bonus bonus tip) to get my attention would be to ask me to write a guest post on your blog. Has to be in my field of interest though, I won’t contribute to blogs with topics I know little to nothing about and am not interested in learning more. I’m also not a big fan of chainmail or link schemes as search engines don’t like these practices. Ask me personally and receive a personal response, ask a bunch of people for the same thing and that’s only slightly better than spamming in my book. Don’t start our relationship off that way, please.

Being unsubscribed
But once I’m subscribed to your blog/feed than the work isn’t over keeping me as a reader. Yeah, I know, I’m a high maintenance reader, but most don’t tell you why they leave. Most just quietly unsubscribe and you hear from nevermore. Sometimes, you’ll get lucky and get somebody back that has unsubscribed but it’s far more difficult to get on the radar after a conscious decision has been made to unsub. I’ll likely unsubscribe if you do one or more of the following:

- offer more noise (ads, spam, boring posts) than signal (original content or links/reviews with useful commentary). This is also true of your website where I’ll clickthru to read most full posts. I still prefer to visit sites over reading completely in the RSS reader. With the system I’m using partial RSS feeds aren’t a huge deal like they are to some, but I despise partial feeds with a lot of noise.
- abuse me with sounds or other crap that runs onload or tries to hijack my reading experience in any way.
- stop updating regularly (or go MIA for a long period of time completely unexplained). A post a week on average might hold my interest but only if it’s a really, really good one. I subscribe to RSS for frequent updates on topics/writers of interest, not for static content. I understand and take vacations myself, I’m not talking about AFK time. I think every writer would be improved by taking enough time off.
- update too frequently. The converse is updating too often, which are feeds containing more than 10 posts per day. The top sources listed above clearly are exceptions to this rule but only because they are the work of more than one writer. If you are a single writer site/blog shoot for no more than 5-7 posts per day on average or you’ll burn out readers like me. Think about this for a minute:

7 posts per day x 30 days = 210 posts per month = 2,520 posts per year

If you have decent sized posts, say 300 words on average (for quality posts, that’s not unrealistic), that’s like 63,000+ words per month, or about the size of a short novel (also known as a novella). Hint: create multiple blogs if you have more than 5-7 posts per day output. Better to have 2 or 3 or even 4 blogs churning out 20 posts a day than one, IMO. Maybe others will disagree, but I think it’s easier for a single blogger to create multiple heavily trafficked sites rather than one super trafficked site.

This doesn’t mean you can have a day with 10 posts or even 20 or more posts (the record for this blog is 50 I believe and made during a blogathon in 2003 where the whole point was to post once every 30 minutes over a 24 hour period), but it should be the rare exception and not the average. If you are group blog or publication, then you get a pass on this one. Still, there are some big group blogs like Boing Boing that I won’t subscribe to because of post quantity. Be a filter for us, not treat us like a garbage disposal.

To end on a more positive note, I much prefer to subscribe versus unsubscribe and thus it’s easier for me to subscribe, so please help me find your blog and more importantly stay subscribed.

And now onto the quickies
- Is a Google version of the WaybackMachine coming? Garrett Rogers from ZDnet who is making a name for himself as a page source and domain registration sleuth, thinks that might be the case [source: Search Engine Journal]
- Elliot Ness from Tucows explains why they bought failed calendar system Kiko via eBay for $258,100.
- Netscape has released a Google + Netscape search mashup. Will we ever see some originality from Netscape under Jason Calacanis watch?
- With the theatrical versions of Star Wars episodes 4-6 due out next Tuesday 9/12, starwars.com has a frame by frame breakdown of the changes [thanks Cinematical]
- Windows MySQL open source frontend Webyog
- create a mobile edition of your Wordpress-powered blog with Alex King’s Wordpress Mobile plugin.
- Gmail keyboard shortcuts

- oh yeah, Scramble is on the way to Xbox Live Arcade. Now I’m looking for Star Castle for the trifecta of classic gaming nirvana (Pac-Man already available). Other classic game titles I’d like to see on XLA. Oh, and yes, we got Time Pilot. What’s your favorite Xbox Live Arcade title to date?
- On Tuesday September 12, Apple is planning a media event with the catchphrase: “It’s showtime!” The rumor mill is working overtime churning out that it’s the long awaited movies to be available via iTunes at $9.99. Also the possibility — still very much an unconfirmed rumor — of an iTunes upgrade that would allow the movies to be shown. And another rumor, remember I said we’re in overtime, that Apple might release something that will connect your TV to iTunes.

• Boris tired of the guest blogger craze
• RSS Feed cleanup part deux, 250 feeds target
• Share Your OPML already being gamed on the first day
• Answering the 10 conflict of interest questions
• Please don’t go Feedburner promo link crazy like this
• Here’s why most blogs don’t need Terms of Service