Perhaps The Most Ironic Post Title You'll Read All Day
Nick Bradbury on blog post titles:
As people subscribe to more feeds, the more they stop reading every unread item and instead just skim the titles looking for something that interests them. If you use boring titles for your posts, skimmers like myself are likely to skip right over them.
Ever since I did my media fast experiment, my Google Reader unread count has floated somewhere between 875 and >1000. Since I switched to more selective reading, I use List View instead of Expanded View and post titles more than anything push me to actually read an item. Another thing to be careful about - titles that are too news-y. If your post title reads, "XYZ Corp Announces ABC", then you need to go back to the writing board, so to speak. For one, a title like that often sums up enough of the entire post to suffice. In addition, a post title like that screams "Press Release regurgitation" and suggests that more of the same basic information that I probably read before. In this case, even "Thoughts on XYZ's ABC Announcement" is slightly better because it signals that you put more thought into the post than simply picking original-sounding synonyms to cover up the fact that not much, if anything, was added.
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