Beating the dead RSS feed horse
More than enough has already been written about the RSS feed full text vs. partial text debate. But I found it interesting when my friend BL Ochman posted five reasons for producing partial text feeds, I disagreed with every one of them. So, as if we can beat this horse to death a second time, let’s take a look at BL’s rationale:
You can’t add comments to a post on a feed reader. You have to visit the blog to interact with it and interactivity is a key element of blogging.
This is true, you can’t add comments to a post on a feed reader. To which I say: So what? I add comments to, I’d guess, one out of every 25 posts I read, and that may be a high guess. Do I really want to visit each and every blog in order to find that one in 25 or 30? The idea of the reader is that it saves me from having to visit these sites, which provides me the time to get through all this information. When I read a post to which I’d like to comment, I have no problem visiting that one blog in order to do so. Partial text doesn’t make it any easier or more likely that I’ll make that effort.
Although I haven’t applied it yet, there is a way to include comments in an RSS feed, which would enable readers to see all the other comments, which would help them decide whether they might want to add something to the conversation.
Finally, I’m not convinced that BL’s final observation—that commenting is integral to blogging—is true. Plenty of highly regarded blogs (e.g., Wonkette) don’t accept comments. Even Dave Winer, widely recognized as the inventor of blogs, is on the record saying that comments aren’t important. His rationale is quite simple: If you want to comment, do it on your blog and trackback to the blog about which you’re commenting. That way the links kick in and visibility is heightened.
Feed readers are not set up to allow bloggers to differentiate their blogs with graphics or design—imbuing them with personality.
That’s true, too. But what are you going to do about it? As people migrate to readers (because reader enable them to absorb far more content in less time), they’re simply not going to click over to a site to see the template design, logos, etc. This means writing—headlines and body text—becomes that much more important. We’d better learn to convey these ideas with our words. I believe more people are likely to unsubscribe from blogs that force them to visit a site than they are to click on over and look at all the pretty puffery surrounding the words.
It’s just plain ridiculous to put posts that are thousands of words long onto a device that is meant to speed up reading. In fact, if bloggers weren’t so in love with their own prose and learned to write tight and short, we’d all have a lot more time
The reason readers speed up reading is (and let’s all chant this in unison) because we don’t have to spend time surfing over to each individual site! Besides, as BL suggests, if a blog post is too long, I’m not going to read it regardless of where it resides.
To people who don’t want to read ads in RSS feeds: I hope you’re enjoying your trust funds. Some of us are trying to make a living blogging. We are keeping our content free with advertising.
I’m sympathetic. I really am. But I’m just not going to inconvenience myself in order to help somebody else make money. On the other hand, I’m not opposed to ads in the feed itself, as long as they don’t obstruct the readability of the text.
Blogs are just a content management system. Just like we can’t possibly read every book ever published, we can’t read every blog. Content is still king, and the blogs with the best content are the ones we’ll still be reading years from now.
And..? I may be dense, or tired, but I just don’t get the point here. I’m not trying to read ever blog ever written in my reader—just the several hundred I found valuable or worthwhile. And that includes BL’s What’s Next Blog. But the post has to be pretty damn compelling for me to click away from the reader to the site just to finish what I started on the reader. Why in God’s name should I have to see two different platforms to read one item?
As I’ve said before, news readers will disintermediate much of the Web. As with any such change, there will be those who resist it because they don’t want to be disintermediated? Who does? But trying to stop it is a futile endeavor. Better we learn how to adapt to it.
BL’s predictions are good ones, though. Someone will invent a reader that shows more of the blog, including comments and the comment submission form, if not the entire blog, graphics and all. And we’re already deleting most of the feeds to which we subscribe because they just don’t live up to our initial expectations.
06/14/05 | 10 Comments | Beating the dead RSS feed horse