Posts from TechMeme

We are treading quite close to real work on this fun friday topic, but it will be good fun anyway.

I haven't read a newspaper in at least a decade. We still get one delivered to our home and the Gotham Gal reads it religiously. She also is a crossword addict so that may play a part in her loyalty to paper, ink stains, and the morning read.

But I do read news pretty much non stop throughout the day. Most of my news comes from Twitter. After that, I like vertical news aggregators. Real Clear Politics for political stuff. Hacker News for tech stuff. ESPN for sports. Techmeme for tech business. Linkfest for business/stock news.

I don't use any sort of RSS reader or tool to read news. I just read it all day on the web, on my phone, and on my iPad. I have bookmarked these sites and I just visit them and read, click, read, follow, read, and I go wherever the web takes me.

How about you?

Yesterday Techmeme launched a redesign. I like it. Nicely done Gabe.

I thought I'd use this news as a jumping off point to talk about my favorite feature on Techmeme. When a news event happens, I like to see various pundits' take on it without having to click thru and read every post.

Techmeme has always done this better than any other news service. Let's take this news that Twitter can now comply with local censorship laws and takedown notices without taking down a tweet globally (good news in my mind).

It looks like this in Techmeme:

But if you click on the down arrow on the left of the news item, you get a "blown out" version of the news story which looks like this:

Granted that these are only headlines and they can't and don't give you a full sense of the take that each of these writers has on the news. But a quick scan of the tone and tenor of the headlines will tell you quite a bit. And when you've got 30 seconds to take a quick look at what's going on in the tech world, that's worth a lot.

I use this feature often. At least once a day. Many times way more than that.

For tech news, I've tried pretty much everything new that comes along, and for the past four or five years now, nothing beats the duo of Techmeme and Hacker News for me. Each has its benefits and together, you can get a great sense of what is going on in tech in real-time all the time. Thanks Gabe and Paul for building these services and maintaining them.

I immediately thought of that great Monty Python skit when I read a series of posts in the past week declaring RSS "dead." If you look at the number of refers/visits coming from RSS, you might conclude that services like Facebook and Twitter are taking over the role of content syndication from RSS. That's essentially what MG Siegler concludes by looking at TechCrunch data in this post.

But as some of the commenters on that TechCrunch post point out, many RSS users consume the content in the reader and don't click thru. That's certainly what goes on with AVC content. Here are AVC's Feedburner stats for the past 30 days:

The blue line is "reach" meaning the number of unique people every day who open an AVC post in their RSS reader. It was almost 10k yesterday and it averaged 7,730 per day over the past month.

Here is AVC's web traffic over the same period:

So AVC averages about the same number of web visits every day that it gets RSS opens (about 7,500 per day).

Not dead yet.

A few other things worth noting. The direct visits of ~80k per month include a substanital amount of Twitter third party client traffic that doesn't report to Google Analytics as Twitter traffic. That's been a missing piece of the analytics picture for a long time and I wish someone (Twitter and Google??) would fix it.

AVC gets about 2,500 visits a day from RSS. That means about 1/3 of the people who open a post in their reader end up clicking through and visiting the blog. I suspect the desire to engage in the comments drives that.

The twin tech news aggregators, Techmeme and Hacker News, drive a ton of traffic to AVC. Thanks Paul and Gabe!

Bottom line is that RSS is alive and well in the AVC community. While I do agree that Twitter and Facebook have gained significantly in terms of driving traffic across the web, for technology oriented audiences, RSS is still a critically important distribution platform and is very much alive and well.