The BBC's Editors blog links to currybetdotnet - and illustrates one of the downsides of RSS

I've had a massive influx of visitors to currybetdotnet over the last couple of weeks, partially fuelled by some links to my piece about the BBC iPlayer DRM debate, and partially due to the fact that my article about the Daily Mail's self-censorship is featuring highly on Google for various combinations of 'big brother' with words like breasts, nipple and topless.

Also in the mix were some referrers directly from bbc.co.uk.

It took me a while poking about in the new interface of Google Analytics to find out where they were coming from, and eventually tracked it to be from a smattering of pages from The Editors blog.

They have a panel in the right-hand side of their page which links out to sites that have linked to the blog, and my article about how the BBC was leading other 'official' news blogs in Bloglines subscription figures featured there.

I'm fairly certain that panel wasn't there at the launch of the Editors Blog - roughly a year ago - but I couldn't say for sure. I consume the site via RSS, and so I only ever visit if one of the snippets in the feed entices me to click-through.

And then, by the time I've reached the site, I know that I've reached exactly the right page, and I'm already in a task-focused mode of reading the whole article.

All of the furniture, navigation and features, include the external links to other blogs, recede into the distance.

Now, I'm a huge advocate of publishing absolutely everything in RSS or other machine-readable formats, but this neatly illustrated one of the problems for consumers and publishers of getting your web content almost exclusively by RSS.

I'd never seen this panel before.

I've simply no idea when they introduced this feature.

More importantly, as a subscriber to the site's RSS feed, I miss out on it because I can't subscribe to that particular micro-content on the page.

So, note to self, (and to anyone else who has a significant proportion of their regular visitors using RSS feed versions of the site), if I introduce any significant feature changes to currybetdotnet or 'A lemon tree of our own' - I should make a blog post about it to get people to come and look!