Scott Karp and Paul Kedrosky apply the cluestick to those of us who live inside the techno-bubble. First Scott says Call it Subscribing:
Everyone understands subscribing. You’ve got your email newsletter subscriptions, your premium cable channel subscriptions, your magazine subscriptions (call now and subscribe to 52 weeks of…remember that?)
No one knows what “syndication” means, unless you’re talking about I Love Lucy reruns. Syndication is a publisher-centric, geek-centric term. For most people, it’s Really Simple Huh? Most people don’t even know that syndicate can be used as a verb!
Then Paul adds a few comments that likely apply widely:
Too little consistency. There is no uniformity about titles, titles plus summaries, or full-text feeds. I won't re-hash the debate on this subject, but let me just say if your feed isn't full-text it won't likely last long in my aggregator.
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Too many posts. To be blunt: Faced with feeds regularly containing more than six or seven unread articles I, with rare friend-driven exceptions, usually nuke the whole list.
These are a good takedown for those of us that forget how little most people care about various and sundry things that we obsess about...