Many people are predicting a bandwidth crunch as RSS usage accelerates. Already, I've heard stories from people of how subscribers to their RSS feeds have pushed their bandwidth usage up so high that they either have to pay huge amounts for extra bandwidth or take the feeds offline. What can we do to stave off catastrophe? A variety of approaches will be required. Today I'll address one of them: blogging responsibly.

What do I mean by blogging responsibly? Three things:

First, be concise. I'm reminded of the scene in "A River Runs Through It" where the son has written an essay. His father (who is home schooling him) reads it and says, "Good, now rewrite it, half as long." Learning to express ideas without wasting words (and thus bytes) will be a prized skill as blogging and syndication become more popular, not only for the bandwidth it will save, but because as people subscribe to more feeds, they'll have less time to read each post.

Second, stick to one topic per blog. Some people put everything they write into one blog and just tell the reader "if you don't want to see it all, don't subscribe". That's their choice, but it is definitely going to limit their readership. I've unsubscribed from blogs with too low a signal to noise ratio, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. A blog with a feed is not like a blog without a feed. In a blog without a feed, you may want to post on various topics, because your visitors might prefer to download everything in one click, even though they get a lot of junk they're not interested in. With a feed, it works the other way around. The additional effort your reader expends subscribing to multiple feeds is refunded on the very first day when they don't have to waste a lot of time skipping the things they're not interested in.

Third, don't include everything you've ever posted in your life in your feed. Amazingly, I've seen RSS feeds with hundreds, if not thousands, of items. I guess if that's how people want to spend their bandwidth, that's up to them, but it seems a little crazy to me. The old recommendation was that a feed contain a maximum of 15 items. While there's no hard upper limit for responsible blogging, unless you're adding new items at least once an hour, 15 is probably in the right neighborhood.

If you're going to join the RSS party, please remember: bandwidth kills. Blog responsibly.