Clarification: Please note that the “Newsfeed” is NOT the RSS feed for the regular BeyondDC blog. The Newsfeed was a totally separate publication that passed on news headlines without comment. You can see what it looked like here. The main BeyondDC blog will continue to feature the same sort of articles it always has, and will continue to be syndicated via RSS. Apologies for any confusion. My fault for not better explaining the difference.

Despite the poll in January that showed support to keep the Newsfeed, I am finding that it is increasingly difficult to keep it up. Twitter is easier to maintain and is regularly followed by about 10 times more readers than the Newsfeed. Between that and GGW’s Breakfast links (which often cover the same stories) the Newsfeed is simply obsolete.

So it will be shut down in favor of an increased presence on Twitter.

But don’t fret if you’re not a fan of Twitter. You don’t have to join to read. In fact, you can use Twitter almost exactly the same way you currently use the Newsfeed.

Readers using RSS can syndicate BeyondDC’s Twitter feed into their aggregator. If you’re one of the 54% of Newsfeed readers who accessed it via RSS, just replace the old feed URL with the this one and you will barely notice a difference.

Readers used to visiting the Newsfeed home page can simply visit BeyondDC’s Twitter profile, which is nothing but a list of BeyondDC messages, exactly like the Newsfeed home page.

I’m sorry to disrupt folks who liked things the old way, but the Newsfeed has always been problematic, and at some point there’s just too much duplication of content for it to be worth my time to keep up.