I finished reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It’s one of those books which causes your brain to constantly look for patterns in everything you do. If you haven’t picked it up yet, you really should. It’s really good.

One of the main points I took away from it was how the lowering of transaction costs caused new ways of communicating to happen as well as causing people to interact with each other and other things in different ways.

I work for a newspaper which is part of a large media company. We are definitely aware of what happens when transaction costs are lowered. The transaction cost for getting news used to be high enough that people were happy getting their news printed on paper once (maybe twice) a day, usually in the morning. Now, those costs are non-existent and the explosion of choices for finding news is proof of that. Sure, we could whine and complain about it (and lots of people do) but there isn’t a way of putting that genie back in the bottle. The transaction costs for the acquiring of news will continue to be low and the need for a daily print edition of a paper will become less and less.

I’ve been thinking about the transaction cost for RSS lately as I’m trying to get our blogs to have the full-text feed instead of just the partial. I’m sure others have figured this out before me but it finally dawned on me why this is important. The person reading the full-text feed in their RSS aggregator doesn’t just have lowered transaction costs for reading the blog but they also have lowered costs for sharing what they are reading. If someone has to read a snippet of a post, click a link and then continue reading before they even think about sending the link around, they probably won’t do it. On the other hand, if they are in the flow of reading something cool and can easily send a quick note off or put it up on del.icio.us, that’s way more likely.

If you want traffic, you need people to share links and tell others. It’s really not that hard yet we constantly miss chances to help people out.