Should You Really Unlink Your Feeds?

One of the posts that made me think in the past week was called Unlink your feeds. It is a manifesto by Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon which calls for us to “stop automatically dumping [our] feeds from one account into another.”

This is contrary to the way many of us choose to operate. When I started blogging the best advice was to spread your feed around and have it appear absolutely everywhere. When lifestreaming services started appearing it was a simple matter to import my blog feed to make another location where people could keep up with my content.

Why Link Your Feeds?

There are several advantages to doing this:

• you make your content available in the location where people are
• you increase the number of mentions you get online
• as a result you might boost your social karma (if that’s important to you)

Why Linking Feeds May Be Bad

There’s no denying that a search for my name will bring up several of the social media sites where I have a presence and that’s not all bad. At the same time there are several disadvantages of having everything appear everywhere.

• your content is duplicated all over the web
• you are boring your friends and followers, particularly if they follow you in more than one location
• you are adding to the information overload (without adding anything new or useful)

I was particularly struck by the part of Tim’s manifesto that posited a better way.

He points out that each social network is different and therefore you should interact differently on each of them. His statement has a ring of truth. While my audience intersects there are some people who only appear on a single network and I have to admit that some of those people probably get short-changed. I can just about keep my head above water with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – any more would require more time than I have, so I may not interact as much with those who befriend me on some of the less active networks.

Living The Manifesto?

Perhaps that’s one reason why Tim’s manifesto struck a chord with me. The other is that I have been trying to reduce duplication on my social media accounts for the last few weeks. I have reduced the number of sources going in to Friendfeed and pared down my Facebook stream. And on my new Tumblr account I have gone one better and decided not to import any existing sources at all but to save it for something I am not posting anywhere else.

Have you read this manifesto? How do you feel about it? Has it changed the way you treat your feeds?

Written by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online
Posted on March 4th, 2010 and filed under Blogging
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