You know when you write an email message and click 'Send' to immediately feel like you shouldn't have done it? It's like an instant remorse thing. With email you still can recall the message (some times), or ask the recipient to forget about it, to not forward it, etc.
Blogs are very dangerous in regards to that because they give you the *false* impression that you can control its content.
What I mean is that once you publish a blog post, it is like sending an email to the world in which you cannot recall, delete or hide it! You might think you can, but here is how you works.
You write your blog post and click Publish;
If your blog software or service is any good, it will immediately notify blog search engines like Google Reader, BlogLines, Technorati and others.
These blog engines, for the most part, receive that notification and will retrieve the feed of your blog with your new entry.
They will index, store and display that blog entry to anybody that visits their site and is reading or searching your feed -- forever!
The problem is that between steps 2 and 4 it could be as fast as one second (or less), and even if you regret posting about it and go back and delete that entry, you'll never be fast enough.
Now, deleting the blog post is actually the worse thing that you can do.
Most blog engines will replace existing entries with their updated versions. So, if instead of deleting the blog post (which blog engines have no way of knowing that you deleted) you modify the text that existed before, you have a higher chance of people not seeing that content.
This is not going to work for people that are subscribing to your content via some e-mail service, because they will have two emails on their inbox, one with the original content, one with the modified content. Although, I think most people will read just the last version of a blog post, so your chances of people not seeing are still better than not doing that or deleting the post.
I just wrote about the traps of writing a blog post and thinking that you can delete it later (short answer: no you cannot erase from the Internet).
The problem with RSS is that is not a fully implemented protocol to notify content changes in a blog. If you think about a change notification system, you usually have three types of notifications: Add, Modify and Delete. RSS only supports the first two.
To be correct, RSS only supports "Add", but with the "dc:dateModified" extension it also supports "Modify" notifications.
Since RSS doesn't have "Delete", there is no way for you to control what Feed Readers or Search Engines are displaying to users.
Page vs. Blog Post
If you have a regular page on your website called "mypage.htm" you have many way to control Search Engine behavior. You have robots.txt, you have META tags to prevent search engine from Caching it (or even indexing it), and you can always delete that page and the next time a search engine crawler comes looking for it the page will be gone and it will be removed from the index.
With blog entries, you don't have that. Bloglines, admirably, is working on ways to improve that but allowing users to control how search engines will surface blog content, but that is about it.
What is missing..
RSS needs to improve by providing the following:
Support for "deleted" post;
Support for Search Engine control (nocache, noindex, nofollow) on a per-post basis that can also be used to change the settings of old blog posts (not only the last X posts).
Some type of authentication so blogs can control what is served. At least an "anonymous" vs. "authenticated" granularity.
Support for Time-To-Live and real support for "Don't Publish Before [Date]".
I'm not a top expert on RSS/Atom, but I'm implementing a service that makes vast use of RSS and we need a better way for users to control their content.
I want the users of Sampa to be able to control if a blog post is for "family" only, and any member of the family can be using any RSS Reader and just enter their authentication info for that blog.
We are going to present to a Seattle VC tomorrow morning. I've done that quite a few times.
The interesting dynamic of presenting your business plan to a VC (or any professional investor) is that for you is a big deal, for them, is just another Startup.
For the Startup, it takes days if not weeks preparing for the presentation. Documentation, financial projections, balance sheet, slides, support docs, etc.
For them, you are probably the 18th Startup asking for money this month, out of which half were completely stupid ideas, and at least one of them resambles your business. Though.
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that makes vast use of RSS and we need a better way for users to control their content.
January, 2008