GUEST POST: Blogs just went real-time

Pubsubhubbub.

No, this blog hasn’t been hacked; nor am I typing gibberish. Pubsubhubbub, or PuSH as it also helpfully known, is a new protocol which is moving blogs into real-time.

PuSH allows services that subscribe to a blog, mainly readers like Google Reader, to get new posts almost instantly. So when you hit the publish button your post is pushed out to all your blog subscribers. Previously, RSS readers sent periodic requests to blogs, asking whether there were any updates and retrieving new posts. Inevitably this led to a lag between a post being published and subscribers reading it.

Wordpress (the leading blogging platform) has installed this protocol on all the blogs it currently hosts (some 10.5 million; these are the blogs with the wordpress.com suffix) so that new posts from these blogs are pushed to blog readers. For those who use Wordpress on self-hosted blogs (many million more), there is now a plug-in they can install to do so as well.

So now we’ve deciphered the  gibberish, what does this actually mean?

Well, it means several things; some good, some not so good.

The good

• Blogs go real-time. This is great as the lag between an event and your posted response has narrowed. You want your blog to be part of the debate before it is an obsolete trending topic on Twitter, or old hat with your colleagues, partners and clients.

• Share and share alike. Again the advantage of real-time feeds is that your readers can then go on to share a post they like within minutes on social bookmarking or networking sites, meaning your blog is central to the evolving discussion.

The not so good

• Publish and be damned! There is no going back now. If you have a Wordpress blog or install the PuSH plug-in, your post is out there as soon as you hit the button. If you’ve made mistakes, want to change it around or retract part of it there is no longer a lag which allows you to do so before others read it.

• Reputation, reputation, reputation. If RSS readers are gulping down your posts at breakneck speed,  there is less time to respond if an issue that is damaging to your reputation, or that of your business, emerges and is circulated.

As bloggers, we are often instructed to think before we post. Now, it seems, that advice is more pertinent than ever.

Joel Turner is an account director at digital PR specialist Tinderbox Media.

Image credit: dark_ghetto28