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Whether you want to call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0 or prefer to not use buzzwords at all, it's safe to say that the Web of today is changing. The advent of blogging and feed aggregation has greatly influenced the way we spend our time on the web. More and more people rely on newsfeeds for their latest information and the blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months, but is this all such a great thing? What dangers do technologies like RSS bring with them, and are we even aware of them?

For a lot of people, site traffic is a fun thing. ShortStat gives the statistics-addicts a plethora of data on their own site's statistics, Alexa can show you how well you're doing compared to others in terms of traffic, and to satisfy those that still can't get enough, more and more services like Technorati offer you an overview of sites linking to you and how.

But the nice thing about the web is not its endless amount of statistics. It's the content. It's content that has made the web so popular, because you can find anything you'd like on there. It's content that will bring visitors to your site. Yet, many things are happening around this content thing. For one, RSS and Atom feeds send your content from your site to every corner of the web that will request it, something that Dave Shea recently discussed in his article on Template Design. Especially this bit is key:

You just don't get attached to a post sitting in Bloglines the same way you once might have clipped a newspaper article and hung it on your fridge.

Undoubtedly, many of my readers will be reading this post in Bloglines or their own favorite newsreader of choice as well, thus eliminating the context of my content. Right now, with my site being in a state of perpetual Live Redesign, I can't say that I mind that too much. The aesthetics of this site, as it is right now while I write this entry, have little to add to the context of my content. The design doesn't dictate that I'm some extraordinarily skilled designer, which would put a touch of perspective (my point of view and position) on the content. Nor does it show that I'm some programming wizard who knows Javascript like the back of his hand, something that could just as simply enhance the content by adding a perspective and point of view to it.

Nevertheless, my content is my content, and this site is my site, and both of them reflect, in several ways, who I am. More so when put together, rather than separated. If you read this entire post in a feedreader, you don't get any indication whatsoever of what my personality is like, other than from the words. No blue environment of my site that will tell you that I like the color blue, have a preference to soft tints and shades and like playing with typography for the various headings of a document. This is something you'll always miss when you read someone's content out of context, or as I'd like to say, out of its original habitat.

There are worse things going on besides that, however, and it can be summed up in three words: reliance on dependability.

Reliance on dependability

Getting back for a moment to that traffic thing I grazed upon earlier, any self-proclaimed or fanbase-hailed expert on the web will tell you, rightfully, that content creates traffic. That's the closest you can get to a rule of thumb on traffic, excluding the less admirable way of spamming yourself across every digital crevice you can squeeze your website link in.

So there you are, creating content and watching as, sooner or later, visitors pour in, causing a snowball effect like never before. Satisfied, you give your exhausted fingers a break and sit back with a sheepish grin on your face.

To please your newfound audience and keep them coming back to your site, you offer them a feed or two which notify their subscribers - people who have your feed in their feedreader of choice - of any and all updates to your site.

Time passes and at some point, you notice that your visitor statistics have been declining steadily over the past month. What's wrong, you wonder. After all, you're still producing that excellent new content every so often. "Why are people leaving," you think. Turns out, your feed was broken.

"Hold on there, buddy, that can't be it. Surely the subscribers would've just checked the site on their own then, or even notify me of my broken feed, right?" Wrong.

People that use the web in all of its 2.0-glory, meaning people who have a feedreader filled with dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of feeds, don't actually go check up on you when you "disappear." Sure, some of them will, but not most of them, unless you're a second Boing Boing. After all, who would notice one site suddenly not showing up in a long list of sites that changes every hour on average?

What's happening here is that people rely on their new technology to be dependable, and in turn, that means that they actually rely on your feeds to be dependable. Is your feed not showing up in the "New feeds" section? Then you obviously just haven't updated, right?

There are exceptions to this situation, of course. Your feed could get updated constantly, but be broken thanks to XML-related issues. Some feedreaders, if not most, will notify the user of such a broken feed. Bloglines does it with a red exclamation mark, for instance. This, at least, signals the user that something was updated, but the feedreader can't quite figure out just what the heck you did with your feed.

Yet whether your feed files are simply not updated or malformed, the ever-present danger is that people will simply forget about you when you don't constantly show up in their face all the time. You may still get a steady stream of visitors, thanks to other sites linking to content on your site and the other sites still getting new traffic all the time, but your loyal followers are just getting disappointed by your reduced update frequency. Worst case scenario: they completely forget about you until, by chance, they are reminded of you again at some point. This actually happened to me with Sinfest, a comic I used to read daily until its feed got broken and I completely lost track of it for two months. I'm a busy person, but so are all your visitors. At least, you'd do well to expect that they are.

Cause and effect

The Merovingian echoes through my mind and I realize just how right he was. It's all a matter of cause and effect. In this case, the effect is that people rely, almost blindly at times, on the dependability of today's technology. That your site doesn't get as much traffic when your feed is broken is a side result; it's not nearly important enough (sorry) to shift cause and effect to, respectively, people's reliance and your traffic.

So what's the cause then, you wonder? Well, our improved technology itself.

Andrei Herasimchuk wrote about the potential dangers in usability culture almost a year ago, explaining in a most excellent manner how the "don't make me think" concept could end up creating more usability problems than it solves, in the long run.

The topic of improved usability and the lazy nature of mankind is slightly out of scope for this article, but not in the least less relevant. Today's society is fast-paced, hardcore, bigger, better and faster. People don't have the time to do all the micromanagement anymore, and all our new technologies home in on that. Things are constantly being improved so that you don't have to spend as much time anymore on things, so that your experience is improved. Feeds are a great example of this, as they allow you to keep track of all your favorite sites in a very easy, very convenient, central location: your feedreader.

As happy as I am about technology moving forward constantly, I have my concerns about it. One of the effects of these new technologies is that your content becomes isolated from your own "existance," separating it from your site and putting it into a hardly-tangible place that is, well, everywhere and nowhere. You have (almost) no way of knowing where, exactly, your content is these days, who is reading it, in what kind of environment they're reading it, and what for effect that has on the impact of your content.

Certain things get lost in this transition to the new Web, and the context of content is one of them. It may not be the most important thing (as that would be the content itself), but it can definitely make a difference. If I'm reading some article on design, I'd like to know that the person writing it is, in fact, a skilled designer. And like I said before, I'm a busy person - and so are you.

Should we all be concerned about this? Yes, probably. But not so much that you should drop your full-entry feeds at the spur of the moment. It's more important that, as we go, we ask ourselves where this is going, and if we can accept what's coming to us. Can you accept that your content will be read out of context, that your faithful visitors may forget about you if something is broken and you don't notice it right away, or that we're collectively getting "lazier" (for lack of a better word) thanks to the increasingly high demands of society? If so, you'll be fine. Just be aware of the changes, and in particular, all of the effects that they bring, or else you might just find yourself unpleasantly surprised in the future.

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