Syndication Only For Info-Nerds?
Syndication (a.k.a. feeds) and blogging does not have to go hand in hand. You can have a blog without a feed, even though I would not recommend it. This blog's two feeds has well over 100 Bloglines subscribers and less than 20 e-mail subscribers, to give you one picture.
But who subscribes to blogs?
I am pretty sure that no friends of mine are subscribing to any of my blogs. I know for sure that my wife and other relatives don't. In fact, not one single person that I know outside my professional life has as far as I know ever thought about syndicated content (I believe they would have asked me, in that case...). I have persuaded 10-20 clients to try it out. Info-nerds, you could say, like me. That's all.
Zephoria has noticed this too, and wonders if syndication ever will be used beyond us nerds. Zephoria's discussion focuses on youth culture but is relevent in general too, I think.
So what about corporate blogging if the use of syndicated content don't spread? Well, for intranet or extranet blogging it is not a very big deal. You will probably reach your audience regularly anyway. For external target groups it is different. If I can keep track of 200-300 information sources with my news aggregator, I only read 10-15 sources that I have to visit. It goes without saying that it is much, much harder to become a Favourite in IE than a subscription in Bloglines.
One conclusion is that you will have to be much better at blogging without widespread usage of feeds. You will have to offer something extraordinary.
Now, I don't think that Zephoria necessarily is right or that my experience will be the same in one or two years. More than anything it shows the importance of feed subscriptions being built in to applications we already use. I know many have problems with Microsoft, but I firmly believe that RSS functionality in IE or Outlook would make a huge difference.