Disagreeing with my colleagues

I respect Robert Scoble and Jeff Jarvis a lot. They're both brilliant, entertaining guys, who's blogs I read consistently. But on this day, I'll respectfully disagree with assertions both have made about the web subculture. Both being cool cats, I don't think they'd mind me playing the role of contrarian a little.

Scoble says companies without RSS feeds should fire their webmasters, because it limits the visibility such concerns will have. True. In a utopian world every data source would have a feed to which we could subscribe for future aggregation/notification/access, but not everyone needs one at the moment. Startups have to prove their well enough grounded in their core competency before they tell the world how great they are. I'd rather force people to visit my site repeatedly for awhile while I legitimized my service, than have them subscribe to a feed that rarely gets updated.

Jeff's beef is with online aggregator services like My Yahoo! and Google Reader, who he says are holding his RSS statistics hostage by failing to report subscriber numbers for cached feeds. His argument has not surprisingly drawn a growing list of supporters, and I'm largely with him, except on one point: the business end. Hey, I'm concerned about the viewership and size of audience for my blogs and podcasts, too, but I won't start biting the hand that feeds me and talk smack about free services. If you want hard numbers, get ready to put up cash to get them.

Just my $0.02.