If you can’t engage them, beat them redux

The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh (who is a really nice bloke) has written a rant on why full text RSS feeds “suck”. It’s 8PM, I’m supposed to be spending time with the most neglected person in my life, and I haven’t…

It’s definitely possible to have an indication that there’s a conversation going on.

RSS 1.0 (which is the version that GU are using) defines the mod_annotation module which allows the individual items to contain the URL where discussion of the item takes place. It should be simple for Ben to add this to the GU blog RSS feeds. Of course, it’s possible that common RSS readers don’t take any notice of it
It’s even possible to have the complete list of comments in the RSS feed. Take a look at the RSS feeds that Robin is producing over at http://perfect.co.uk/ (e.g. http://www.perfect.co.uk/comments.xml ).

As someone who is happiest reading his RSS feeds in Bloglines, I’m a big fan of full RSS feeds. The fuller the better in my opinion. The only one of your points that rings true to me is point two. Much as I dislike them, I realise that ads are a necessary evil and we’ll only see more and more of them in RSS feeds over the next year.

I vote for 2, 3, and half of 4.

Page impressions (for ego and ads) are indeed what it make it all worth while. I’d tell you how many times a day I check my blog stats, but — like a doctor listening to an alcoholic saying how much they drink — you’d only double it to get an accurate answer.

You certainly don’t want people to nick your work. Those for who this matters most, I suspect, will be those with ads — the commercial content producers.

I agree with half of 4 because I find it depends on the feed. For a feed in which I often find relevant content, and which has one post every couple of days, I want the full text. It’s much easier to read. But for those which produce a lot of content, of which only some is of interest, I want summaries, because otherwise it’s a pain to have to scroll down the whole page to scan the news.

So, 2.5/4 from me — but you only needed to score 1/4 to win the argument, so thumbs up.

I’m in the full-text feeds camp.

Feeds get read in NetNewsWire on my Powerbook, and about half the time I’m reading them I’ll be without a network connection; on a train, between meetings, etc.

It’s much easier to read and flag a full-text feed for later follow-up (including checking the comments) than to make a sensible decision about flagging a frustratingly short snippet for later download and reading.

It is also, of course, possible to provide feeds of the comments if you want to.

I also like having access to articles I’ve already read, whether I’m on- or offline, as my own posts may well come a day or two after I’ve read a number of pieces, to which I’d then like to refer people. It’s easier to do that if the text that resonated with me in whatever way is available to me when I’m writing my own post.

Oh, and with about 500 subscriptions in NNW, I’ve not seen the slow-down problem to which you refer… ?

My tuppence: I’m not convinced either way… because (heresy!) I’m not yet convinced by RSS.

I mean, I know it’s great in principle, but nobody’s done anything with it that makes me go “wow”. There’s nothing about using it that excites me. I like websites. RSS is just a bit, well, characterless.

Anyway, I suppose I’d prefer to be able to choose full text or extracts as I wanted. That way I could stay in my bunker or not, and the arguments above (and those elsewhere) would be fairly redundant. There’s not much choice either way at the moment, and that’s one thing that should change over time.

I’ll admit that nine times out of ten, my RSS aggregator doesn’t need to do more than give me a snip - I know from a few lines if it’s something I want to read and off I go to the web browser to pull it up properly.

HOWEVER.

A “proper” RSS feed is a great thing if you want the posts without being subjected to the comments, or, as is often the case in the Wide Wide World Of Webcomics, the site’s interface is such horrendously undercooked ass that pulling the content through RSS is the only way to get at it in a sane, well organized fashion that doesn’t induce hair pulling.

So. I love the reformatting options (let’s be honest, some of the worst sites on the web are the shiteheaps chunked out by so-called “web designers”), but by and large I use it for what it’s best at - checking sites when they’re updated, as opposed to when they haven’t been.