Keep Yourself Updated
Gone are days, I used to read newspapers and magazines. The availability of Internet opens a plethora of information sources. The content comes to your doorstep free of cost as well. No more hassles of dumping piles of old newspapers and magazines.
If you do not subscribe to RSS feeds yet, it is high time you do. If this sounds too geeky, take a look at the Wikipedia article first. Websites that offer frequently updated content is likely to publish RSS feeds. Using these feeds you read about what's happening around the world without visiting websites. If you subscribe to lot of e-mail newsletters, you know how difficult it is to manage them. Subscribing, unsubscribing and managing spam add to the inconvenience.
RSS feeds solve this problem. First and foremost, you have to download and install a feed reader on your computer. In the last post I mentioned a few names. I recommend Thunderbird. You can configure your e-mail accounts and also subscribe to RSS feeds using the "News and Blogs" feature in Thunderbird. Use Google to find the feeds you want and add them to your RSS feed reader. You don't have to visit those websites again to see what is updated. Look for the feed icon as displayed to the right of the above paragraph and click on it to visit the feed URL.
You can subscribe to my blog using the URL - http://sudheer.net/rss.xml
If you are looking for a step by step instruction to add an RSS feed to Thunderbird, here's a link.
Among other updates, I have started writing the initial draft for my E-book. I played with GIMP for a while to create the header image you see on the site.
RSS feeds are great, but I think that if no one needs visit your site again it can be a negative thing, but at least people are updated with the latest blogs which is the most important thing :)
From the publisher's point of view, it is indeed a challenge to lose page hits because of RSS. IMO, there is no choice but to offer RSS feeds to our loyal readers.
Recently, my brother had hired a photographer for a day for an event in another town. Photographers in that town aren't advanced enough to use digital cameras. They still use the old school films. I went to the studio the next day to collect the pictures. When I inquired about the negatives(the film), the photographer simply wouldn't give them to me. He said, he had forgotten the films at another shop.
Fortunately, my brother had told the salesman in the studio that they have to hand over the negatives/film at no additional cost. And they had agreed. The salesman recalled the terms and gave me the negatives/film. Later, the photographer told me that they usually don't give the negatives/film to their customers to create vendor lock-in. If that is the case, I will never hire photographers that don't give me the negatives/films.
People have choice. Bloggers can be compared to the photographer in the above real life incident. The blog readers are like the customers. If they don't get what they want, they will move.
What are the ways we, bloggers, can overcome this challenge?