RSS … Web? Blog?

Source: Blogging for Dummies (Book) (2006)
Original Title: But what about my site?

All this focus on RSS and reading blog entries in newsreaders makes it sound as if Web sites are becoming irrelevant. What is the fate of a lovingly designed blog with a beautiful, colorful atmosphere and careful navigational design? ……. If everyone is going to end up reading you blog off-site, in a cold, black-and white newsreader, what’s the point of creating good pages?

Frankly, this gloomy perspective has some truth. But not total truth. ……. It’s important to me to avoid visiting sites as much as possible. But newsreaders do let you click through to the page on which any entry resides, and there are good reasons to do so. First, you cannot write a comment on somebody’s blog in a newsreader, you must go to the blog. Second, you cannot see all the typical blog elements that surround each entry, such as the blogroll, the archive directory, and entry categories. Third, some bloggers and other information providers put partial entries in the feed, so you must click through to the entry page to read the full entry.

It is too soon to predict that RSS will completely obliterate Web sites or just blog sites. It is possible, and if that day comes, perhaps RSS will be far more dressed up than it is today, with graphics and other elements that currently are not syndicated with the feeds. Communication elements, such as comments, would certainly have to be included. ….. The days of templates and colorful navigation sidebars might be numbered, but we are far from that reality now.

market2garden: I already use feed aggregators (My Yahoo & Bloglines), easier and faster reading. Centralise my online reading indeed saves me a lot of time. For those web sites, such as online forums and other similar set up, direct visit will be less frequent. So are these web site going to be obsolete?