Search Engines || Information Architecture

Search engine journal brings in discussion the case of Craiglist blocking Oodle from republishing its feed.
Motive? Loosing visitors.

This problem doesn’t apply only to this case. In our days publishers are more and more driven by revenues and when doing this they start using some gurilla tactics for protecting their regular visitors. This is not always in the advantage of the end user.

Let me name a few guerilla tactics that big and small publishers are using and that I find annoying:

• Publish an abstract of the feed. By doing this they imagine that it acts like a strong teaser that will atract visitors. Nothing could be more far away from the truth. If I am reading let’s say 100 daily updated feeds I really don’t have time to check all the half posts. And lately the teasers are for garbage content. If you write an interesting post then you could be sure that at least a significant part of your readers will drop by to comment.
• Using RSS advertising. One of the worst ideeas at this moment. Contextual advertising doesn’t blend into the content and is everything else but not contextual. Amazon ads by Feedburner fit into the same category. I used some I gave up. For a 3% clickthrough rate is not worthing. A 3% clicktrough rate doesn’t mean profit, no matter you have 10.000 subscribers. It means that 9.7000 of your readers find your advertising crap. If you are a small publisher you will just drive away your small base of users.
• Publish anything for the sake of publishing. Not speaking here about personal blogs. You can write as much as you want about your cat. I am speaking here about proffesional blogs. If I am reading a profesional blogs. If you consider yourself a powerful blogger at least be empathic with your readers and think for a second that they might have read the same thing. If you cannot add an in depth review or unique analysis try to find an original subject or go have a walk in the park. It’s good for health

Those are just a few mistakes but the list is far from by complete. Before writing this I have unsubscribed from around 10 “proffesional feeds”. If you want the publishers to change the way are treating you, you should do the same.

Want to see an example of a good publisher? Check “Creating passionate users“. An excellent blog with:

• Great articles every time
• Full feed
• No bullshit “contextual advertising”