Obscurity is still your biggest threat

There’s an old quote from Tim O’Reilly that I really love, and it seems to be getting better with age. Tim simply said:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

While you can worry about people copying your content or stealing your ideas, your far bigger concern is having no one care at all.

I’ve seen this come up recently in two different places.

Full RSS or no?

The first was from a friend of mine in the WordPress community. I respect her work, and simply disagreed on this issue, so I won’t call her out directly.

Her post was essentially “don’t let people steal your content” and was a list of all of the ways you can lock it down. She took it further by encouraging people to only post partial content anywhere (including email and RSS feeds), to force them to click through to your site to read everything.

That can work to some degree to stop theft, but by forcing people to click you’re making it easier for people to ignore you. You’ll stop most of the spammers, but you’re also risking greater obscurity.

Rick Kitagawa

I see the opposite with Rick Kitagawa, one of the coaches in my recent altMBA experience.

Rick publishes a blog post every day. However, you can consume it wherever you want and you don’t need to click through to his site to read it — he just wants…