Since finally taking the plunge with twitter, I’ve been thinking more and more about aggregators.
If you’re anything like me, you keep subscribing every time you come across a new site that’s interesting. Result? Your aggregator gets so stuffed with content that you find it increasingly difficult to give it enough time. I know many are well practiced in the art of skim-reading, but few manage this well enough not to have good posts slip under their radar.
Twitter is different though, isn’t it? With Twitter, I can be as selective as I like, and not feel huge guilt that I shut my aggregator before getting it to display ‘0 posts still to read’.
John’s sterling work on aggregating the feeds from Scotedublogs into Twitter means that I’m still getting the blog posts that people here are making, but the way I’m accessing them is completely different.
A chance discussion with Ewan last week told me that his ‘click through rate’ each time he posts a link in a tweet is an almost perfect 100% – something that few could claim with an aggregated feed – how often do you just read a post in your aggregator instead of clicking on to see the post in its original context?
Perhaps they serve quite different purposes – Twitter is so much more immediate, yet blog posting is contemplated prior to publication (unless you are me!)
Curiously, Twitter isn’t blocked in my local authority, but I know that others are not so fortunate. Without a permanent connection, then you would be missing out on a lot of information. People are only better aggregators than machines when they give the information back out again though, right?
Sorry, I’m thinking out loud again – I’d be curious to hear what people think?
