As for brand recognition, I feel a little overwhelmed with brands. I never understood it, but I’m more likely to buy something I need because it works for me, than buy something that has consistently barraged me with their brand. In fact, I think I’d avoid that brand more than not.

Meanwhile, my step-daughter sings along with commercials. She’s 12….another generational gap, I guess.

Also, it is not very difficult to recognize blogs by their writing style. I have roughly a 100 blogs in my reader, Really Important messages are rare. If a post is significant in some way, it isn’t impossible to read the name of the blog and the writer to the get the feel of the reliability of the message.

In my view the best solution is to always publish full-length posts. Shorter teasers work too, but most of the time they just annoy me.

Paul: While I agree with you that a brand can be pushed through the writing style, but it’s still not the whole brand. And you’re spot on that such writing styles are most often found in people who write for a living, and while a company may be able to hire a dedicated writer, most blogs are a singular entity typing their own thoughts and remarks into the back of a blogging engine to share.

I think there are times where it is easy to convey a style. When writing a perspective or opinion piece, it tends to be relatively easy to push a personal vibe into the flow of your writing, but something information tends to be devoid of such elements in most cases.

‘Course, that takes a lot of concentration and commitment. You have to staff a writer, or writers, who know the brand philosophy and can execute it well in the RSS medium - not something organizations pay a lot of attention to.

…. ever considered an edit comment option ?

At the and the growing list of blogs I followed pushed me into using google reader (now with 45 subscriptions). But the way I read my feeds is by quickly browsing through the headlines, and if something catches my interest, I open it in a new tab and save it for a few minutes later. when I am done browsing through some subscriptions I switch to the websites and read the articles that I had put aside.

On the idea of losing track of the author, I tend to not view all items at once, but to generally scroll through the subscriptions which do have new items. I also save my favorite type of blogs for last.

As someone that hopes to be a serious web-designer someday, I always worry about the fact that precious time and effort will go into a design and into the presentation of content that will most likely be lost on most readers.

Thanks for bringing this up, I’ve always wanted to discuss this point with someone who felt the same way when I was still stuck on visiting my sites every hour to check for updates