Are you sick and tired of people telling you to publish a newsfeed? I sure am. So today, I'm going to give you a break and discuss why you shouldn't publish a newsfeed. Feel free to use these arguments to tell people to shut up and mind their own business.

1) It's too much trouble to set up. People will claim that it's quick and easy, but they're exaggerating and not respecting your priorities. Remember all the other things they claimed were quick and easy which turned out to be a major headache? The problem isn't that getting started isn't fairly simple, it's all the little details that have to be worked out before you're really ready to go. Sure, setting up a blog is probably quick. But then you have to tweak the template to make it match your website or at the very least, look decent. You don't have time to do that, nor should you spend your money hiring a web designer to do it. You have priorities, and blogs and newsfeeds aren't very high on the list.

2) It takes too much time to maintain it. You have to post new things to it all the time, and once again, that's just not a high enough priority.

3) They use too much bandwidth. People will subscribe to your feed and load it at least once an hour. Some will even load it more often. Because they also subscribe to 14.8 trillion other newsfeeds, yours will get buried and never read, but you'll still have to pay for the bandwidth they use to download it, over and over again. Your bandwidth costs will skyrocket.

4) It's too early to choose a format for it. There are about 3.7 billion versions of RSS, and then there's this "Atom" everyone's talking about that's supposed to be the big kahuna, but it's not even to version 1.0 yet. Maybe it'll never get there, and then where will you be if you support it? You shouldn't just pick a format and then switch later if a different one comes into vogue, because everybody who's subscribed to your old feed (and loading it every fifteen minutes) will scream bloody murder. You don't want to support all of the formats, because that just drives up the maintenance costs in a billion ways. Plus, if one format is really better than the others (eg. lower bandwidth requirements), Moore's Law says that everyone will subscribe to the other one for a year and a half. Or is that Murphy's Law?

5) If you've got a newsfeed, everyone will read it and not come to your site--especially if you put full content in the feed like everyone keeps bugging you to do. You've already spent a boat load of money getting your website all whiz-banged--don't waste it.

6) Not that many people actually subscribe to newsfeeds yet. Only about a quarter of the propeller heads are even talking about them. They say it's the next wave, but it doesn't seem to have left their little tide pool yet.

7) Blogs and newsfeeds will give you a hacker image. Stay professional. Don't publish a newsfeed.

8) Microsoft isn't crushing everyone in the newsfeed industry under their heel, so it must not be that important.

Stick to your guns. The newsfeed fad will pass and people will stop bugging you. Just hold out till then.