It appears that Bloglines have managed to solve the issue with feeds not updating accordingly. This from their news page:

Some folks might have noticed that specific feeds were not updating recently on Bloglines, and we wanted to update you and fill you in on what’s been going on. We have figured out what the glitch has been. Over the weekend, a fix was released on Bloglines to resolve the issue. All feeds should now be updating and back to normal

Now Mark Fletcher can stick to his old service and won’t have to move to Google Reader!

Wow, this must be embarrassing to the Bloglines team, when founder Mark Fletcher (who sold Bloglines to Ask.com in 2005) is considering to move to Google Reader for his RSS fix:

Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.

Found via TechCrunch, who has one of several feeds that just won’t update in Bloglines. Hopefully they’ll get their act together soon, otherwise the web is likely to loose one of the few competitors to Google Reader…

For many blogs the bulk of their content comes not from their posts, but from their comments. It is not uncommon for a blog to have only a few hundred words of text per post, perhaps even less, and many thousands of words in comments.

For bloggers, this is a very good deal. Not only do comments promote a sense of community, add value to the site and encourage repeat visitors, it also adds a great deal of search engine-friendly content that helps to grow the blog.

But the power of comments has caused many bloggers to be worried about what rights they have over them. What happens if a spammer begins to scrape the comment feed? What if a commenter changes his or her mind and asks for the post removed? What happens if I move to another site or service?

Unfortunately, these are not simple questions but they are important ones for bloggers to be aware of, especially since disputes over comments are happening more and more frequently. read more

When you post your blog content, what do you want to happen?

• Adsense clicks?
• Comments and reactions?
• Attention and traffic?
• Links and SEO boost?

There are many motivations for writing content, and how you approach blogging has to suit your goals. read more

Oh my. David Peralty of XFEP is annoyed with e-mail newsletters that are just rehashes of the RSS feed. I publish one of those myself, and without the “special notes” David mentions, using Feedburner. David says:

You should be happy that I subscribe to your RSS feed rather than punish me by making me get the same information two different ways so that you look like you have twice as many subscribers.

Agreed, and some blogs most certainly push newsletters for no reason other than to pimp the subscriber count, like David reasons. However, there’s another thing to take into consideration. If you don’t push your e-mail newsletter, how will the RSS un-savvy of your readership subscribe to your blog? read more

A question came up during this WTF Blog Design Clutter series asking how many feed icons to we need on our blogs. We looked at feed clutter on your blog but how many is too many and which ones do you need?

How many do you think you need?

The two most popular feed types are RSS and Atom. That’s it. How many feed icons do you have on your blog? Hmm?

These are the types of feed, the code that generates the feeds based upon XML formats. From here, there are different types of content that can go into the feed, various off-site alternatives for handling your feeds (called feed subscription services), and many colorful, cluttering feed icons that promote all the different feed readers. read more

In How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% on Copyblogger, author Willy Franzen had a light bulb moment when he realized that by asking our readers to subscribe to our blogs, we were actually asking them for money.

A week and a half ago I had a sudden realization. Subscriptions generally cost money. Think about that for a second. It’s jarring, especially if you’ve spent the past few months or even years incessantly asking your readers to subscribe…

Are you being completely clear with your word choice? When you ask your readers to subscribe, are you asking them to do the virtual version of writing their name underneath? Or are you asking them to agree to pay you a sum of money?

This is a great example of the WTF Blog Design Clutter. The words you use to entice someone to “buy” your free service can confuse readers. By changing the words, Franzen saw a huge increase in feed and email subscriptions.
read more