Seems there is quite a bit of focus these days on subscription-enabled media publishing as the norm. As my MySpace page continues to increase in traffic, I wondered about the pages of my friends and the kinds of visitor numbers they were receiving.

I should point out here that I went to High School with a number of very musical people. Many seem to be on MySpace such as Mike Milazzo, John Andriani, Lee Feldman, Michael Shelley, Philip Shelley, Josh Brown, Dan Garcia, and more. Their visitor numbers are strong for relatively unknown artists. I began pondering why I, a podcast enthusiast/educator and evangelist, am still on MySpace...

Well, I LIKE that many of my friends are on MySpace. I like the somewhat standardized way I can quickly sorth through their pages to find out what's new and where they will be playing, how they are feeling, who has found them etc. It is so much faster than clicking around on a custom web site, and adds so much more of a personal touch than my feed reader would if I were just subscribing to the audio or video content alone.

My point is this... subscription is often best employed when you are certain that the media you are sharing can do most of the work for your desired goal. If you want to add other, sometimes valuable elements, consider another approach. Something simple, something that has a quick and user-friendly design with a few really strong secondary elements.Â

Let's face it, subscription is still not the holy grail many thought it would be. I've seen a few Twitter posts over the last two days from friends 'cleaning out' their feed readers and comparing it to sock drawer maintenance. Subscription is embraced by a select group, but many others surfers want more. They want to find out more about who you are, how you are doing, what you look like, who your friends are, what your interests are, they want to comment, hear back from you, network. This is social media and it is still something that is finding new fans. It ain't always only about subscription.Â