Inbox or FeedReader: The Results of a Reading Experiment

November 13, 2008 · by Joanna Paterson · in

I’ve been reading blogs in a feedreader pretty much since I started blogging.

But a post from the laid back productivity blogger Nick Cernis got me thinking twice about this habit. In Ditch the Digital Itch: Drop Feed Readers Today he argues that:

What started as an idea to push new content to interested readers has now become a giant time suck: a pull on our energy and resources. Feed readers are attention-seekers, time-hoggers, virtually benefit-free, hard to promote or evangelise, and almost impossible to scale and keep up with as our subscriptions and interests grow.

His suggestion is to switch from reading in a feed reader to getting new posts from your favourite blogs delivered straight to your inbox.

My initial reaction to this was resistance.  I was used to reading in a feed.  I found it a quick and efficient way to read a lot of blogs – or at least to skim and scan them so I could keep on top of what was going on.  Plus why would I want to clutter up my inbox with a whole lot of additional material?

Yet I could see from the (very mixed) reaction to his post that a lot of people had shifted to reading via their inboxes.  And conversations on Twitter confirmed that this was becoming an increasingly popular way to subscribe to a blog.

So in the interests of experimentation I decided to give it a go.  I signed up to read by e-mail wherever I could and they’ve been flying into my inbox ever since.  (I guess I didn’t make the experiment absolute though, because I didn’t stop reading in a feed reader.  I was double tracking, partly because there were some blogs I wanted to follow that I couldn’t get by e-mail.  More on that below.)

This is what I learned:

  • It was surprisingly hard to find a sign up box on some sites.  On some blogs I couldn’t find an e-mail option at all.
  • Most posts arrive a day after they’ve been published on the site.  That means if you go over to comment you can feel a little bit behind – especially if a new post has already gone up to push it off the front page.  This shouldn’t really matter, but I found that it did, for me, especially for the blogs where I’m most likely to comment
  • I like skimming, quickly.  I can then decide if a post is worth reading more slowly, or going to visit the site to comment.  Rapid skimming was easier to do in a feed reader than from my inbox
  • If I went for any length of time off line my inbox would grow to terrifying proportions.  I guess I could use filters so posts went somewhere out of the immediate inbox, but I still find it easier to skim, delete, and prioritise from the feedreader
  • If I had to select a few posts from my bulging inbox I’d go by the most intriguing headline, and delete the rest.
  • Reading from the inbox makes a post seem physically closer to you.  This has some benefits: it can seem more like a personal, almost intimate message.  This worked particularly well for short, simple and easy to read posts.
  • The sense of proximity made me feel physically overwhelmed by posts that were long, with inadequate signposts, or chunky paragraphs.  I felt like I wanted to push the text further away so I could get a better overview of what I was reading.

At the end of the experiment I concluded that my desire to skim read a lot of blogs meant I should stick with my feed reading habit.  I’m now in the process of unsubscribing from my e-mail sign up to all those blogs. (If you get a notification that I’ve left you I’m still reading, just not by e-mail.) I’m going to stick with one by e-mail – the Morning Coffee version of Levite Chronicles, because for some reason it does seem to add something to my reading experience.

These are personal and subjective reactions.  I suspect we all chose to read in different ways, and there’s  no ‘right’ way to do it.  But there are some implications for you as writers and publishers that are worth thinking about.

Lessons for Bloggers:

1. If you haven’t got an easy and obvious e-mail sign up, get one now.  Otherwise you could be losing readers.

2. Write headlines that will make sense and jump out when your reader is scanning their inbox

3. Break up your posts: use signposts, headers and really short paragraphs.  Much, much shorter than you would use offline.

4. Keep your posts short and to the point.

5. Experiment with your own reading habits.  You might find that an alternative suits you better.

Have you experimented with the way you read blogs recently?  What have you learned about your reading preferences as a result?  Can you see any implicaitons for the way you write and manage your own blog?

PS If you haven’t yet discovered the pleasure and delight of reading via a feedreader here’s a link to a plain English video that explains how they work

Photo Credit: mac stillness by shapeshift on flickr