A common way of reading blogs is to suscribe to their RSS feeds, so you read all new content via your chosen RSS Aggregator (eg Google Reader) rather than having to visit each of your favourite blogs in turn to check for new posts.
But wouldn’t it be better still if blog-readers could subscribe to (i.e. follow) a Twitter account, associated with each blog, that will tweet each time there is a new post to read on that blog and provide a link to it? People are increasingly living in Twitter, so your Twitter stream is a good place to get alerts about new blog-posts.
This is actually pretty easy to set up, at least if you only follow a few blogs. You need to create a Twitter account for each blog you want to follow, to act as a conduit. There is an example here. bbcnickrobinson is not Nick Robinson’s Twitter account. It was actually created by ChannelFlip’s Wil Harris for his own use. Wil used a web application called twitterfeed to connect the RSS feed from Nick Robinson’s blog on the BBC website to bbcnickrobinson. Then, every time Nick Robinson puts up a new post on his BBC blog, it appears in the associated RSS feed, gets picked up by twitterfeed and is regurgitated as a tweet on bbcnickrobinson. Wil follows bbcnickrobinson (from his own proper Twitter account) so sees the tweet in his Twitter stream, and can follow a link from there to read Nick’s new blogpost.
Anyone can use this arrangement to follow any number of blogs via Twitter, but it gets impractical to create lots of these conduit Twitter accounts and connect them all up via twitterfeed. For one thing you will run out of email addresses. You need a different one for each Twitter account you set up.
Far better if each blogger creates a conduit Twitter account themselves, and connects it to their blog via twitterfeed, for all their readers to follow.
I have done this with my two main blogs. The Twitter account for this blog is here. The account for my photography blog, exposures, is here.
If you’re a blogger, give this idea a go. And no, I don’t work for or have shares in twitterfeed.
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