tfl: The Flatiron Life

I just noticed that the trends page of Google Reader tells you how obscure the feeds you are reading are. This is your feeds ordered by how few people subscribe to them in Reader. It is possible that these feeds are wildly successful, just not with people who have the good sense to use one of the most popular and best feed readers. Possible, but I think unlikely.

I have a lot of feeds where I am the only person who subscribes to them. Most of them I understand somewhat.

I am am the only person who is looking for comment made on my pictures in flickr. As I think you have to be logged in to flickr as me to have access to a private url to get that one, I am glad I am the only subscriber.

I would like to see more people subscribing to Rachel’s, Rob’s, Dana and Kris’, and Zach’s photos. However it does not seem unreasonable that I am the only one or two who is.

There are some blogs that I think should find a wider audience and I am want to call them out.

One of them is the blog for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. (Yes, that is the same Pulitzer family as the Pulitzer Prize.) The Pulitzer is a great little museum in St. Louis and the employer of my cousin-in-law Rachel. It is an interesting daily dose of what it is like behind the scenes at an Art Museam. The posts are not long nor dense and the authors are very responsive to questions.

Make me not the only subscriber! Check out the blog and if you find yourself in STL go to the museum.

More obscurity to come…

tyler Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 21:12

This only tells you how many people subscribe to them in Google Reader - not from iGoogle, Firefox, Safari, Mac Mail or any other RSS application. So I wouldn’t say it’s that accurate of a representation of RSS subscribers. I can’t say the % of people RSS users who use Reader, but I can say I don’t know many who do - most (including me) seem to use igoogle or other proprietary apps.

If anyone wants to know who is subscribing to their feeds, they should check out Feedburner..which will hopefully be integrated with Analytics at some point since they are owned by Google now.

Rachel Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 21:22

Thanks Jay-Jay! I have to admit, I’m terrible at remembering to a) subscribe and b) keep up with my subscriptions. I usually end up just typing in the urls of my fave blogs, but subscribing is so much nicer. This post has inspired me to get back in it.

P.S. Do you guys know why there’s two versions for google — igoogle and google reader? I have both going, which adds to the disorganization that I need to sort out…

Jacob Tomaw Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 5:07

There are lots of options for reading feeds and iGoogle might be the most popular. I found this study from May that shows Bloglines is the most popular with Google Reader just behind it. However, the study did not include the customizable homepages like iGoogle.

No matter Readers popularity, I imagine that users of Reader can be taken as an accurate sample of all subscribers. This would make the relative obscurity in Reader the same as the general relative obscurity. I may not be the lone subscriber to the Pulitzer in the world, but compared to other relatively less obscure blogs I subscribe to, I think it deserves more readers.

Katie Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 12:35

So excited. I didn’t know I could subscribe to flickr, thanks for the tip….
Also, my google reader feeds are more obscure than your gooogle reader feeds! Ok that isn’t true, but I can see that becoming a new barometer of COOL

tfl: The Flatiron Life » Blog Archive » Firefox is the OS Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 13:42

[...] asks in comments, Do you guys know why there’s two versions for Google — iGoogle and Google Reader? [...]

Be Obscure No More: I

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