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POLITICS | Noah Brier

A Political Blog That Wasn't

March 29, 2005 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 4 COMMENTS

The other day I wrote about some marketing "blogs" that had no RSS feed. Well, thanks to a hot to from The Reverend, I have another feedless blog.

The thing is, this one isn't a marketing blog, it's a political one. Turns out Illinois Senator Barack Obama has started a blog. In his first entry he explains why:

Today I am starting a new blog that I hope will help you keep up to date on the happenings of Congress and the issues that are important to people throughout Illinois.

Check back to this site regularly for more updates.

Alright, now at least the excuse with a marketing website could possibly be (and I don't condone this) that customers aren't interested in marketing RSS feeds, but Barack and Co., what's your excuse? WHERE'S YOUR RSS?

It's called a blog, it looks like a blog and its express purpose is to keep people up to date. But then he adds the kicker line: "check back to this site regularly." Why should I? Why don't you just add a feed? It would allow your constituents to keep up with what you're doing without requiring them to keep visiting the site. This is why RSS exists. It's a match made in heaven. So where is it?

I just don't get it. Let me reiterate my rule (via Scoble's rule): "If you do a marketing blog and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired."

This is even more than just a marketing blog (although that's definitely part of it), it also provides relevant political information. So where's the feed?

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COMMENTS

1barbara

Hey, this is our guy -- let's give him the benefit of the doubt! Maybe he doesn't know about RSS -- why don't you ask him?

March 29, 2005

2Noah Brier

Fair enough, I wrote them an email. I still think if you set up a blog you should know this stuff.

March 29, 2005

3Scott Rafer

Noah, how do we use del.icio.us for this? either you set one up user name at del.icio.us/needsafeed so that you can moderate or just use http://del.icio.us/tag/needsafeed and let people chime in completely democratically (but open to craphounds).

March 30, 2005

4Noah Brier

Scott, glad to report I followed your advice and wrote about it here.

March 30, 2005