The Steve Rubel Stream

An unsurprising study out of Hubspot this morning reveals that email subscribers to many blogs factor in 12x larger than those who read through RSS. I am not seeing this in my own stats however. Only 1.5% of you read site feed via email. Still, I keep thinking about where RSS reading is going these days. I love the technology but have begun to explore other opt

Here are two fresh interviews that might be of interest. The first covers blogging's place in a microblog world. The second captures the essence of my productivity system, how I work and the tools I use

 

Earlier this week I appeared on Canadian TV (specifically BNN.ca) where I discussed blogging vs. lifestreaming with Lainey Lui of Laineygossip.com and eTalk. During the interview I maintained that it's difficult today to build a profitable blog since many of the big niches are taken. Lainey disagreed. What's your view?

Want to know what's cool and emerging? Me too. That's why I subscribe to dozens of blog feeds from cool companies large and small. They include all the Google blogs, the Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebbook blog and many more.

Akiva: "I keep thinking that I need to get back to blogging but then I think of how it seems like a step backward from what I'm doing here. Is the only difference really a personal domain and the ability to have longer posts? I have a thousand subscribers here; why start over?"

Great thread on Friendfeed. Seems to me like he doesn't need to start over since he can use Posterous to optimize all his hubs. I suspect other platforms will follow. If you're on my site, I have embedded it below.

A little over five years ago, sites like Typepad, Blogger and WordPress dazzled by empowering anyone to instantaneously share his or her thoughts with the world; My how times change. Today, however, in a world where thousands of status updates and tweets whiz by our screens every hour, blogging arguably feels slow.

So is blogging dead? It depends on who you ask. After all, TMZ and Mashable are blogs and they’re doing quite well. However, it’s definitely time for a closer examination of the blog – where it sits today and where it’s going.

Over on Mashable we are exploring this further by setting up a mind map that can be edited by anyone who signs up for MindMeister. Please edit it! Tell us what are we missing here. How can we paint a more comprehensive view of where blogging is going? Help us shape the right picture and we’ll report back on what we learned. It's also embedded above.

Robert Scoble is back to blogging, investing more time and attention this week there as opposed to Twitter and Friendfeed. He linked to me this week, which sparked my curiosity and encouraged me to dig into my Google Analytics archives to see a) how my traffic drivers have changed and b) what, if any, broader trends can be discerned.

For the purpose of this experiment I looked at two times when one of the web's most influential voices - then and now - linked to me: his post from earlier this week and another from December 27, 2006. While not entirely scientific, what they have in common is that a) Robert put the link at the top of the post and that b) both came during holiday weeks when web traffic typically slows. (In theory, to really test this I should track referrals from Scoble's Friendfeed/Twitter accounts - I suspect that they drive tons of traffic. However, that's hard to do given the way the sites are structured. Perhaps we can use Bitly stats to run a test)

Here's are my three takeaways from this little experiment (I am discounting the links from my old blog to this new one. It's an anomaly since I just switched) ...

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• Blogs Aren't Dead, They're Just Fragmenting (newcommbiz.com)
• When blogging less becomes more (trishussey.com)
• Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head (mashable.com)
• Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing (regulargeek.com)

My move from a blog to a lifestream format has elicited two kinds of responses so far: approvers and doubters. I don't think this has anything to do with me, but rather it's  reflection of how we're adjusting to the broader shift in media.

The web is slowly moving from an architecture of pages, to one that looks like a stream. Such models favor immediacy over reflection.

This was something John Borthwick from betaworks and I discussed this morning over breakfast. It's definitely front and center in his mind. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Tumblr and Posterous are all platforms that embrace the stream metaphor. Blogs, RSS, static news stories are remnants from the era of pages.

The stream is where the web is going. Does this mean thoughtful analysis is dead? No. However, the ubiquity of the stream and the tools to filter it, the increasing consumption of content on mobile devices and finite attention spans means there's a greater focus today on immediacy than reflection. This was a major factor in why I shifted how I publish and embraced a tool that lets me contribute more in a streamed format, yet still have a home base on the web.

Perhaps I am wrong, but it feels like those who are most critical of the transition from blogging to lifestreaming perhaps are not ready to embrace such a format. Maybe there's room for everything. What's your view?