Blogs & RSS

I've been struggling to organize my thoughts into something to write for this blog for a while now. I finally figured out what I wanted to post about when I was looking at my feeds today and saw the answer staring me in the face... RSS.

Quite frankly, blogs would not be as popular without the little orange feed buttons that make it so easy to bring this information into our daily lives in a place or using a tool that we already utilize. Overall, people do not read blogs by navigating to that page or simply bookmarking them; they use an aggregator. Unless a feed is in their aggregator, it just doesn't get read. So I think that any discussion about blogs has to also include RSS as a major factor.

But RSS can be used for a lot of other information that falls outside of the "blog" label (e.g. Table of Contents; podcasts; new books lists) so what is a blog? Does a blog have to have RSS in order to be a "blog"? Does it have to have comments? There are many uses for RSS in academia from current awareness to announcements (see above examples), but would we classify these feeds as blogs? I wonder if maybe the blogs are not the important technological wonder that needs the most brainstorming, but rather RSS which has much more versatile uses and is the fuel propelling the blog explosion. These are just a few questions and ponderings that I thought may be useful for the 27th. Your thoughts?

For a good post about the future of RSS and its aggregators look at Tech Crunch.