Yesterday I offered some tips about making news podcasts smart. Today, Contentious reader Carson commented, “You should create a public profile on Mediafly.com to allow people easy access to those feeds. Or, take their public RSS aggregated feed and put it on your blog, then people just need to sign up for one feed instead of all of them.”

Great idea, Carson! Thanks!

I hadn’t known about MediaFly, so I just checked it out. It is indeed a really useful tool for sharing podcasts. (Yet another example of my community collectively being much smarter and better connected than I am — perhaps my main motivation for blogging.)

So I just created a public profile on MediaFly and moved all my news headline podcast subscriptions over there. It seems to work well with my iTunes.

Anyway, here’s the feed for my collection of favorite news headline podcasts, if you want to check them out: feed://mediafly.com/RSS/Users/agahran/MyQueue/news

That’s probably the easiest way to get them all at once. Keep in mind that I try out new podcasts periodically, so the shows in that feed will vary somewhat over time.

Whadya think? Does this work for you?

Last week I learned that a friend’s serious illness has flared up, and she’ll need surgery and a few weeks’ recuperation. I’m very bummed about this, but I thought it was neat that she’d set up a page at CarePages.com.

I’d never heard of this service, but it seems like a great idea — people who are ill can set up their own private “page” that’s a combination forum and blog where they can post updates, keep in touch with friends, receive emotional support, etc. Man, I wish I’d known about this when my brother was getting leukemia treatments a couple of years ago. (Yes, he’s still in remission!)

I signed up for the CarePages and left a note for my friend. Of course, I’m going to want to keep up with other posts to her page. Normally I follow these sorts of things through my feed reader — so I searched for the feed option for her page. No luck. Although CarePages offers e-mail alerts, they don’t do feeds.

…And apparently, they have no specific plans at this point to add them. I asked their support whether they plan to add feeds, and here’s how they answered me today…

“We will pass your suggestion along to our development team, who will look into implementing your idea about RSS and Atom in the future.”

Doesn’t sound promising. Bummer. Well, I’ll take their e-mail alert in a pinch like this — but e-mail is less reliable and not really the best way to share updates.

It never ceases to baffle me when sites that involve any sort of community or publishing aspects fail to offer feeds. Judging by the Internet Archive, Carepages.com started in 2004 — well after feeds started becoming popular. I find it hard to believe that in the years since then, they haven’t bothered to add feeds. I mean, c’mon! It’s a script that automatically generates and updates an XML file for each page. I don’t assume that’s entirely trivial for this kind of service, but it’s not rocket science either.

For anyone developing any kind of site that includes community or publishing: THINK FEEDS FIRST!

Don’t treat feeds as an afterthought. They’re now a primary distribution method — not just to individual subscribers, but also for search engine indexing, mashups, aggregators and other uses. We’ve gotten past the point where this is cutting edge. Feeds are mainstream, and if you don’t offer them, you’re falling behind.

I’ve lost track of how many RSS feeds I subscribe to in my feed reader — somewhere between 100 and 200, I’m guessing. But that doesn’t matter, because despite the volume it’s surprisingly manageable and rewarding. The secret, I’ve found, is to let go of any sense of obligation to keep up with all that content.

It’s simply impossible to keep up. There’s too much stuff published online every day — hell, every minute! Why feel pressured or guily about not being able to achieve an impossible ideal?

Here’s what I do…

Four or five times a day I browse my feed reader. About half the time my goal is to keep up with my world; the other times I’m following my “beats.”

To follow my world, I first scan my “ego surfing” folder where I track references to my name, my projects, or new contributions to blog-comment conversations I’ve joined. I check this first not just because I have an ego (hey, let’s be honest), but because this is an area where I’ve found it pays for me to respond quickly.

After I’ve reviewed the latest “me news,” I click “mark all as read” for that folder.

Then, time permitting, I peruse either my “friends and colleagues” folder (where I track the blogs of people I know) or my “news” and “local” folders, to see what’s going on. For these I generally just scan the headlines. Of those, I’ll probably read just 2-5 posts out of the latest batch of fresh content. If the headline is cryptic or otherwise non-intuitive, I’ll probably pass right by — which shows the importance of writing clear, intuitive headlines for anything published online. It’s not just to lure people into reading, but to provide at least a bit of a useful update to people who won’t read the whole post.

And again, after I’ve reviewed that folder, I click the all-powerful “mark all as read” button.

In a separate folder I monitor my feeds from people I follow on Twitter, as well as my friends and groups on Facebook. That’s more efficient for me than actually taking the time to visit those sites. And when I’m done scanning, I click “mark all as read.”

Did I miss a lot of detail? Sure. Do I worry about that? No. Why? Because I know the really important news will either emerge as recurring themes in the headlines or hit me through other channels such as e-mail, phone calls, or conversations.

All of this takes me 5-15 minutes per session, typically, depending on how much is happening. So figure a half-hour per day to keep up with literally dozens of sources tracking the world from my perspective.

I also follow a variety of “beats.” A couple of times a day I’ll scan my feed folders related to projects or topics I work on daily: Contentious, E-Media Tidbits, citizen journalism, and environment/energy.

Usually I’ll give each of these folders a quick scan just before I start work on those projects — such as looking for something to cover in Tidbits or to linkblog for Contentious via del.icio.us. I do this to find something very fresh and intriguing to write about or to inform my perspective on my work. It’s basically a tool for following my “beats.”

Again, I first quickly scan the headlines. I’ll usually check out at least the summaries or first few paragraphs of 5-10 items per folder; and of these I’ll usually linkblog 2-3 per session. And when I’m done scanning, I click “mark all as read.” This takes me about 5-10 minutes per folder — generally about a half hour daily.

Finally I have a few folders that I only glance at occasionally when the mood strikes me: relationships & sex, life overhaul, PR & marketing, etc. I look at them maybe 2-3 times a week.

Add it all up, every day I spend about an hour per day scanning my personal and professional “radar” through my feed reader. I’m not trying to catch every detail; I’m just seeing what’s up. I feel zero guilt about all those posts I didn’t read. I’m not even trying to read everything. This isn’t a research project; it’s life.

Generally, the goddess of serendipity smiles on me through this process. Somehow I tend to find exactly what I need to stay connected to important news or insights from many of the people I care about — far more so than if I tried to contact them all personally or visit their sites individually.

And in my work, I find this process usually gives me just what I need to be enough ahead of the curve in many areas to justify my consulting rates while keeping me interested and energized.

Embracing serendipity, believing that I always will find what I need or can use, makes it easy to get rid of the guilt of not reading everything. It’s more about riding the current than treading water. And it’s more fun.

What do you feel or think about what’s in your feed reader? How do those emotions or perspectives affect your process (what you do) in your feed reader? Does the overall process feel rewarding or fun? Why or why not? Please comment below.

UPDATE: After I posted this, Mihai Parparita brought to my attention that he’s also seeing this spam in Google Reader. (Thanks, Mihai.) So it appears my blog may have been hacked. This totally sucks, I’ll try to figure it out. Oddly, I’m not seeing the spam in Newsfire (my preferred feed reader) or Safari. Contentious readers, I invite your help in solving this problem. And my sincere apologies while I try to get this fixed.

Here, for the record, is my original post…

———————————-

I syndicate Contentious via Bloglines, a popular free web-based feed reader. My 50 or so readers there got an unpleasant surprise yesterday — my Nov. 9 post from Blogworld Expo contained a huge chunk of spam — text and an image.

No, I have NOT started hawking Viagra.

Somehow, Bloglines allowed spam to be inserted in my feed. I don’t know how this happened. I’ve notified Bloglines of the problem, and will update this post when I hear back. But I checked my blog’s original feed, and the Feedburner version No spam there. The problem appears confined to Bloglines.

This royally peeves me. One of the great advantages to using feed readers is that it helps you avoid spam. Until now, there hasn’t been a way for someone to insert spam into a feed; the publisher alone controlled which content got syndicated, and how.

Whatever this problem is, I hope Bloglines solves it quick and permanently — or else expect a mass exodus of Bloglines users.

Stay tuned.

(Thanks to Average Jane for alerting me to this problem.)

The blog Freelance Switch just published an intriguing post, Getting Exposure On Search Engines, which addresses one of the most common questions freelance writers or other content producers have. Namely, how can I make myself easy to find online?” For freelancers especially this can be an issue of professional life and death.

The author, Shaun Crowley, offered great advice — for about five years ago.

His column overlooked entirely one key tool — feeds — that can easily outpace the results of everything else he recommended (SEO keywords, search-engine-friendly presentation, browser compatibility, inbound links, directory listings, etc.).

While Crowley did recommend that freelancers start blogging, he only addressed that in terms of a publication, not in terms of what they should do with their feed.

I’ve said it before: Learning to use feeds is a cornerstone skill for today’s online media. And that’s not just about learning to subscribe to feeds in a feed reader (although that’s a great starting point). It’s also about learning how to get your feed well connected so that it’s delivering you the most value by increasing your exposure and search engine positioning.

Here’s what everyone who wants to improve their search visibility should be doing with their feeds, and why…

1. Start using a blogging tool to deliver your content. Blogging tools are simple to use and they all generate one or more feeds automatically. So if you’re not a geek, and you want a feed so you can get better connected and more findable, start a blog. It’s the easiest solution, and ultimately it’ll do so much more for you than your fancy Dreamweaver of Flash-based site — or a brochure-style static HTML site.
2. Submit your feed to every major feed aggregator, such as Technorati, Google Blog Search, Icerocket, etc. What you want is for your feed to “ping” (automatically notify) these aggregators whenever you add new content to your site. That way,whenever you post new content it’ll immediately and automatically get indexed in those services — which means it’ll immediately start showing up in search results there, and you’ll start getting traffic. And then guess what? The search engines (Google, Yahoo) will start indexing you more frequently and ranking you more prominently!
3. Consider running your feed through Feedburner, a popular free service that adds a lot of bells and whistles to your feed to enhance its distribution and versatility.
4. Post about your publications on other sites. If your work is getting published on another site, blog that every time it happens, with a direct link. That way your blog becomes a central index of the body of your work.

…I’m not knocking Shaun’s advice. It is indeed good advice. However, you’ll save yourself a lot of work and get better results if you implement those steps above for your feed first. Then go ahead and implement whatever Shaun suggested that makes sense for your site.

In my Aug. 21 post, It’s not about your site anymore, I talked about how web sites are becoming less important for online content distribution as RSS feeds (with their many uses) are enjoying increasingly mainstream usage.

Basically, the trend is that more people are more interested in getting the content they want delivered to them wherever they prefer to be, rather than having to make a special “trip” online to someone’s site. And they’re using lots of popular tools to do just that.

Reader Steve Sergeant (of The Wildebeat, a great podcast) responded with a perspective I’ve heard often. He said:

“I agree that this is true for the bleeding-edge, early adopters, among which I count myself. …But in my experience, the average news consumer and person with a non-media job often has no idea what an RSS reader or aggregator is. Sure, an adventuresome few have discovered iTunes for podcasts or some server-side aggregator, like My Yahoo.”

While it may be true that most net users aren’t yet using feeds (or perhaps most of them are, I just haven’t found current statistics on that), earlier research and current trends indicate that feeds may have already grown far more popular than conventional wisdom might lead us to assume.

Furthermore, I think general ignorance of the key role that feeds play in supporting many of today’s most popular online-media services and experiences may be causing significant harm — especially to journalism, and thus to democracy and other forms of self-determination.

Sounds extreme, I know. Hear me out…

Back in 2005, just a couple of years after RSS feeds hit the online media scene, Neilsen Media Research published this study indicating that “11 % of weblog readers, blog site visitors who claim to read blogs regularly or occasionally, use RSS to sort through the increasing number of blogs available.”

OK, blogs were getting pretty popular in 2005, so 11% of blog readers in that year is not an insignificant number. Now, keep in mind, Nielsen’s survey probably drastically underestimated feed use because it was so poorly worded. Here’s what they asked:

Notice that they only asked about feeds from blogs — yet even in 2005 all sorts of sites (especially news and sports sites) had begun publishing feeds. So everyone who, say, subscribed to feeds from washingtonpost.com would have been missed by this survey.

Another 2005 RSS usage statistic came from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: “6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators” — about 2% of the total US population at the time, and about 3% of the 2005 estimated population of US net users.

Such small percentages do indeed represent “bleeding edge” early adopter usage, I think. Still they’re pretty respectable, considering that widespread publication of RSS feeds only really started around 2002 or 2003.

Today’s tools are much less geeky

Feed readers used to be rather geeky and clunky. Also, it wasn’t always easy to figure out which sites had feeds, and how to subscribe to them. These days, lots of people are using feeds and they don’t even know it! Nor should they — feeds have been too geeky for too long.

According to Feedburner’s Feb. 22, 2007 stats, the most common tools (by far) that people use to subscribe to feeds are MyYahoo, Google Reader, and iGoogle personalized home page. None of those tools say “RSS” prominently — they appear to shy away from that geeky acronym which has always been a needless barrier to popular adoption. For feed subscriptions, MyYahoo refers to “add content;” iGoogle says “add stuff;” and Google reader says “add subscription.” Those phrases all really mean “subscribe to a feed.”

Also, popular social networking services like Facebook and MySpace rely on feeds. Ever wonder how you get those updates on your Facebook page about your Facebook friends? You’re actually subscribed to their feeds, which syndicate their content to your Facebook page.

And finally, services like Feedblitz and Rmail syndicate feed content as e-mail alerts. So, for instance, everyone who’s getting e-mail alerts from my blog, Contentious.com, are actually reading my feed! You’re just using your e-mail client as a feed reader. Now, e-mail is not a great tool for managing and reading feeds, but it’s a start.

…So yeah, I think it’s extremely likely that:

• Feed usage has shot up dramatically since 2005.
• A lot of people (maybe even most) who are using feeds don’t know it because the readers and subscription mechanisms are far less geeky and more diverse.
• Feeds have now become pretty damn mainstream for net users, primarily because of the flexible, customized distribution options they support.

Given that, why does the “bleeding edge” reputation of feeds linger? I suspect that’s because feeds support so many popular services but rarely get the credit for it. Normally I’d say that’s fine — generally the geeky details of online tools matter less than how people use them, and to what end.

But in this case, I suspect that widespread ignorance about feeds, and lack of current research on the subject, is causing harm.

Specifically, in my field (journalism) I’m seeing news organizations crumble because they aren’t adapting their business models fast enough to the changing media landscape. Good reporters are getting laid off, and important news is going unreported, in part because news organizations are clinging to ineffective strategies like banner ads and partial-text feeds — which depend on people coming to your site in order for you to make money — rather than finding ways (like feed advertising and improving search visibility through full-text feeds) to make money in a more distributed, customized media environment.

Business basics, folks: You’ve gotta go where your customers and community are.

I dearly treasure journalism and the role it plays in a free society. Without good journalism, it’s hard to get the information we need to make decisions on our own behalf. It’s hard to judge where the collective good really lies. But journalism (at least on the scale and consistency that our large, complex society requires) needs a supporting business structure. That doesn’t mean that huge news organizations must survive or we’re all doomed. But it does mean that (regardless of news org size) the business model supporting journalism must be realistic and viable in the current environment.

That’s why I’m so concerned about ignorance about feeds, and persistent loyalty to boneheaded online-media business strategies, especially among media professionals. That’s why I criticized Freakanomics and the New York Times so strongly recently, in a venue popular with professional journalists. I’m not just getting geeky; I’m talking about the survival of journalism. I’m talking about continued access to information and analysis we need in order to get by well as individuals and as a society.

I’d really, really love to see some more current research on feed adoption rates — especially including under-the-radar options like feed-based services in social networking sites, personalized home pages, and even e-mail syndication.

I’d also like to see better information about feed-based advertising and other business models that make money through content distribution. Seriously, when I recently read this from Freakanomics’ Stephen Dubner:

“The NYT and its advertisers aren’t crazy about [offering full-text feeds]. Why? This is the fundamental point: Many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.”

…scalding tea shot out through my nose. Such willful ignorance is terribly discouraging to anyone who cares about the survival of journalism. Rather than cling to a business model (banner ads on web pages) that doesn’t really work (and don’t think the advertisers who pay the bills don’t know that), try something different! Experiment! And give your experiment a serious try for enough time to gauge its true effects.

OK, that’s enough for now. I’ll have more to say on this later, no doubt. But in the meantime, what do you think about what I’ve just said? Am I missing something important? Please comment below.

(NOTE: I’m cross-posting this from Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, since I thought Contentious readers might find it interesting as well.)

Today I received an intriguing query from my colleague Dave Poulson, associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. With his permission, I’m excerpting and answering it here.

Poulson wrote: “…I’m going to take your concept of coming up with a toolkit of basic online stuff a reporter should know and turn it into some class assignments. I’ll have them pick a beat and set up Google Reader to [subscribe to] relevant feeds. I’m not sure how I’ll evaluate the result.”

That’s a great idea, Dave! Make sure they practice subscribing to search feeds (about topics), as well as feeds from specific sources (like blogs). And here’s a short video tutorial on Google Reader I made for one of my clients. The first half of it is the bare basics, most applicable to what your students would be doing.

To evaluate this assignment, you could have student export their feed list as an OPML file and send it to you. In Google Reader, that’s under “manage subscriptions,” then “import/export” (choose the “export” option there.) You can then import that OPML file into your Google Reader (or many other feed readers) to see what they’ve subscribed to.

Poulson continues…

“Maybe the assignment will be simply to list the feeds and produce three story ideas that came from them. I already have an assignment where they must join and monitor a [discussion forum] for a week and produce three story ideas and a posting that they made to the [forum].”

That’s also a great idea. Of course, focusing on a single post doesn’t capture the core value of conversational media. Maybe in addition to asking students for story ideas, you could ask them to summarize the value of one or more discussion threads, or the culture of that forum, and to explain what they learned by participating actively. This would include links to a few posts they’ve made, not just one. Ask them to initiate threads as well as respond to threads. Get them to consider the nature of an ongoing conversation, not just treat posting as a writing assignment.

Poulson also asked for assignment ideas related to commenting on blogs. I’d recommend combining this with the Google Reader assignment — making an effort to comment on blogs they’re subscribed to. Ask them to actually read comment threads, not just blog posts. On the environment beat, Treehugger and Inhabitat often feature very lively and thoughtful discussion in the comments.

Furthermore, learning to track online conversations is very useful for journalists. You can ask students to use the dead-easy tool Co.mments to track the blog comments they make, and the responses they get. They can subscribe to their own Co.mments feed in Google Reader to easily see when their comment has received a response. (Here’s my own co.mments feed, as an example.) They can also give the instructor their Co.mments feed so the instructor can easily watch for activity.

Again, making a lone comment really doesn’t give you a sense of participating in a public conversation. I’d expect at least 5-10, personally. Probably making at least three to the same blog (even in the same thread, if it’s a lively thread).

Dave wrote, “I could have them write a wiki entry for any wiki, including ours. Is that relevant to journalism? We’re running a wiki, but I would never let a student cite a wiki as a source in a news story. I would allow them to use a wiki as a way to find links to original source material that they used in a story. Maybe that’s the assignment.”

I think you answered your own question there, Dave. However, I do think that learning how to contribute to a wiki — and use ancillary information like discussion or revision histories of specific wiki pages can impart journalistically useful context. Maybe even let them play with WikiScanner, see if they turn up any intriguing conflicts of interest.

…Those are my ideas for Dave Poulson. Do you have suggestions for him? Please comment below. And thanks for starting this discussion, Dave.

Here’s another reason why learning to use a feed reader is a cornerstone skill for truly succeeding in online media today:

It’s not about your site anymore.In fact, it hasn’t been for at least a couple of years now.

In other words: The way online media works today, you’ll probably succeed more through participation and off-site distribution (syndication) than through publishing alone.

More and more people — especially, but not exclusively, younger folk (you know, the people you hope will become your community or customers someday) — prefer to craft their own custom hubs for information and interaction. That’s what’s driving the popularity of feed-supported, syndication-oriented social media experiences like Facebook, MySpace, MyYahoo, iGoogle, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, co.mments, Twitter, and podcasting. (And, on the bleeding edge, Zude, CoComment, and Pageflakes.)

It’s kind of like furnishing your home…

You set up house in a neighborhood that suits you, with amenities you value. You want your mail, news, entertainment, and other stuff to come to you there. You want people to be able to visit you there, but you get to control who gets let in or kicked out. You select furniture, cookware, and decor that suit you, and you put things where you want them.

People are creatures of habit, and most of us like to enjoy our homes. We typically venture out for variety or experiences that actually require a physical outing, such as a hike, or grocery shopping, or a family reunion. Generally, we don’t want to have to go to a TV store just to watch “Lost,” or out to a restaurant for every meal, or to the post office to pick up our daily mail. Too much running around.

The web is getting more and more like that. Hopping from site to site grows tedious and confusing. On other sites, people move stuff around without telling you. They levy “cover charges” of one sort or another, from having to buy a cup of coffee to being bombarded with sales pitches.

It’s a comfort to have some sense of home online — where most of what you want handy on a regular basis is available to you, in a known place and configuration, either for free or at a predictable, affordable price.

Therefore, if you want to continue to reach and expand your online communities (especially if you’re in the media business) you MUST offer flexible, robust, customizeable “home delivery.” In online terms, that means syndication — either via feeds or tools like widgets, browser add-ons, or Facebook applications.

People still want your content. They may even tolerate your ads (or welcome them, if you get really smart and creative about online advertising). But they want you to deliver it to them — and leave decisions about how and when they access and use it up to them. They don’t care about your site, and perhaps they never did.

If you honor that preference by making distribution and syndication the new focus of your online business model, you’ll be well ahead of the game.

But as long as your core business model and content strategy is based on luring out people to your site, you’ll be fighting a losing battle.

Think I’m wrong? Then start using a feed reader (even a basic, totally nongeeky one, like MyYahoo) for a few weeks, and see how your media preferences and perspectives start to change. You’ll start to get frustrated by content that forces you to jump to another site. You’ll start making connections with a greater diversity of sources and people who suddenly become apparent because of their smart online distribution. Visiting too many web sites will start to seem like a hassle, no matter how great their content. Investing major resources in site design will start to look frivolous — especially if you don’t offer decent feeds or widgets yet.

I dare you.

(FOLLOWUP POST: See Feeds: Getting Pretty Mainstream) 

The popular service Feedburner, which manages and augments feeds (I use it for this blog), offers a wide range of measuring services to tell you how well you’re connecting with people via your feed.

One of its metrics, “Reach,” which is supposed to indicate active engagement by subscribers, was puzzling me. Today Feedburner tells me I have 2333 subscribers to the Feedburner version of the Contentious.com feed (including people who get my e-mail alerts via Feedblitz, which is generated from my Feedburner feed). However, my “reach” is only 206. What exactly does that mean?

I delved into it further. Bottom line: I have reason to suspect that, depending on your subscribers’ habits, Feedburner’s reach metric may be underestimating your level of audience engagement — perhaps drastically. Here’s why…

In this article (about TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs that uses Feedburner), a Feedburner staffer explained:

“While the subscriber number is a measure of how many people have opted in to receive a feed, “Reach” is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in a feed. At any given time, a certain percentage of the TechCrunch subscriber base is actively engaging with content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight for a given day. Again, to use the example of a newspaper subscription, FeedBurner’s “Reach” calculation is akin to the number of people who have opened the newspaper and actually glanced at the Sudoko puzzle, as opposed to the guy who lets his paper sit out in the rain and get soggy while he’s spending the weekend in Medicine Hat. He’s still considered a subscriber, but just can’t get to his feeds right now.”

I was relieved to learn that my reach-to-subscriber ratio wasn’t abnormally low. That article continues:

“It is not uncommon to see very popular and active feeds with a small percentage reach engagement on any given day, even in a feed where 100% of the total subscriber base is active, simply because most subscribers don’t check all of their feeds every day.”

OK, so that makes sense — I know that my feed reader polls all my feeds a few times daily, but on most days I’m just scanning headlines and only clicking to read (in the browser built into my feed reader Newsfire) a few selected headlines.

Still, I wondered how Feedburner could tell how many people viewed the content in my feed. I can understand counting clicks, but “viewing” can mean a lot of things when you’re talking about a feed.

First of all, a lot of people subscribe to feeds (especially full-text feeds, like mine) for purposes of offline reading. This is especially true for people who prefer to peruse feeds on mobile devices — they’re usually paying for minutes, so it’s costly for them to stay connected any longer than they need to. In fact, one of the main reasons I decided to switch to a full-text feed is because several Contentious readers told me they preferred offline reading and thus found my partial-content feed (which required you to click through to read the rest of a post) frustrating.

Secondly, people who subscribe to e-mail alerts often tend to read e-mail (including alerts) when they aren’t connected to the net. Those offline readers wouldn’t show up in Feedburner’s reach metric.

Finally, many people (especially those on dialup connections, and yes there still are a lot of dialup users out there) opt not to automatically download images on web pages or feeds, to speed overall access to content. Apparently, this can interfere with Feedburner’s tracking method.

How do I know that? I posted to the Feedburner support forum this morning to ask for clarification. Rick Klau responded:

“Amy, you’re right, we can only measure ‘reads’ when a user is online, and using an application which renders HTML. If they’re not rendering images, or are not online at the time, we’re not going to capture the item view.”

So consider your audience. Are many of them likely to engage in offline reading, or not download images? If so, then Feedburner’s reach metric is almost certainly underestimating engagement through your feed.

Also, remember that a lot of site traffic comes from sources other than your feed — such as inbound links, search engines, word of mouth or discussion list referrals, and more. So if you want to understand more about your audience, it’s important to use web analytics (I use Google Analytics, which is good enough for my purposes) along with feed statistics.

…But engagement isn’t all about numbers. In fact, it’s mostly about quality, not quantity. I’ll discuss that in further posts.

Thanks to Rick Klau for clarifying this issue.

Recently I wrote about my frustration about what I perceive as low adoption rates for cornerstone skills for today’s online media — especially by people who are interested in online media.

Here’s a bit more explanation about why I think learning to use a feed reader and getting experience making public comments on blogs or forums (not just e-mail lists) are so crucial to really “getting” what’s so important and powerful about online media.

It all boils down to mindset. The catch is, changing your mind isn’t all in your head. The most effective, lasting way to adapt your online-media mindset, habits, and priorities is to actually use these skills — not just know about them in a theoretical sense…

Feed reader: If you learn how to subscribe to a feed in any feed reader, even one as simple and non-geeky as MyYahoo, you start to realize the value of being connected to an ongoing but targeted flow of information — whether from a particular venue (such as a blog) or a topic (subscribing to a saved search from a feed aggregator, such as Technorati).

Using a feed reader helps you realize how findable and connected feeds can make any kind of content. You’ll start making feeds a priority in everything you publish online, and in the tools you choose (from blogging platforms to content management systems).

Also, you’ll realize how reaching your audience or community is not just about your site, so Web design starts taking a back seat to effective distribution. (I’m not excusing or encouraging bad design; I just don’t think web design continues to deserve the high priority in terms of resources and focus that many online publishers continue to grant it.)

You’ll also realize how much easier and faster it can be to track multiple information sources via feed, as opposed to e-mail or conventional Web surfing. With practice, this can help you manage your sense of information overload. And, of course, feeds are the basis of subscribing to most podcasts and vidcasts (even in iTunes).

Commenting on blogs and forums. This is technically simple in most cases — just filling in a short online form. However, for many people actually getting involved in a public conversation that’s likely discoverable via search engines (which is often not the case with e-mail lists) is a challenging but eye-opening experience.

It can be humbling but surprisingly empowering or liberating to be on a level public playing field with your readers, sources, and other communities or constituencies.

Getting in the habit of commenting on blogs and forums, following at least some comment threads or conversations that sprawl across multiple venues, or at the very least reading and responding to comments left on your stories at your own site or blog, helps you join the participatory culture of online media. It helps you realize how much you can gain from direct public engagement, and how to use it to make your work easier in some respects and more effective overall.

This in turn influences how you plan and execute your online media efforts — especially learning to embrace and feature discussion, not just treat it as a sideshow.

WHY “DOING” MATTERS MORE THAN “KNOWING”

For a lot of things about online media, simply understanding the basic concepts of what something is, how it works, and why it matters (or not, depending on the people involved), is enough. But with these cornerstone skills, simply knowing what they are in a theoretical sense rather than actually practicing them won’t get you very far.

That’s because in this case experience is what lends crucial insight. Whatever I or anyone else tells you about getting more connected through feeds and public conversations won’t really sink in, and won’t significantly enhance how you perceive and use all media (including online media). In my experience, experience itself — the “doing” — is what opens people’s minds enough that they make significant changes in how they use media to inform and engage with others.

That’s what I mean about really “getting” today’s online media. I know that I’ve offended some people by putting it that way. I’m sorry for causing that offense. I don’t mean to demean or impugn anyone’s good intentions, and the learning they’ve achieved so far. As far as I’m concerned, all learning about online media is potentially good and useful.

The point is, the highly interconnected, engaged, conversational nature of today’s online media is a matter of experience, not theory. This is not a spectator sport. By holding off from using these cornerstone skills for whatever reason (lack of time is the one I hear most commonly), you’re only making it harder on yourself and hiding your light under a barrel. This is especially true for people who have a strong interest in and passion for online media, and the future of all media.

The surprising benefit is that the slight effort it requires to learn and use these two skills — even just occasionally, not spending hours daily in this regard — is generally rewarded amply and quickly by enhancing your effectiveness in consuming media and engaging with the various communities you need to reach. In other words, it can make your work easier, save you time, and be more fun and effective.

I’ll be following up on this theme more, but I’d really like to hear what you have to think about this. Especially if you haven’t yet started practicing these two cornerstone skills, or don’t intend to. Please comment below.

(NOTE: This is an edited version of a post I made today to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)