RSS is designed to benefit the subscriber not the author.
Saturday, December 23, 2006RSS is designed to benefit the subscriber not the author. That's why RSS feeds that show the whole content of each blog post work best. I've seen a lot of arguments by people who have the opinion that they should only publish the titles or a summary of their posts in their RSS feed, so that subscribers must click through to read the whole post. This reduces RSS to the level of "subscribe to get the latest news updates", various versions of which we have had on the web for years and years.
An example of a justifications for this: "I spend a lot of time creating my website and I want people to visit and see all my hard work". In my opinion most of the value of a blog is in the content and forcing your readers to click through just to read it has already placed them on the back foot; not a good position from which to appreciate your blog design anyway. If you have the whole content of your blog posts in your RSS then readers will make the decision themselves - maybe they want to comment, or maybe the design of your blog improves the readability of your content over what they get in their RSS readers. Both are positive reasons for readers to want to click through.
Of course some blog owners also want exposure for their Google ads. My opinion of Google ads has dropped quite a lot recently. Firstly I'm tired of the 'captive audience' style of marketing generally; I'm just not interested. Secondly I'm starting to find Google ads a little unfriendly, kind of like the uncomfortable feeling you get when you visit an acquaintance and they start telling you about this great new party plan product selling scheme they just became part of.
Thomas Vander Wal describes 'The Come To Me Web', and he is right on the money, but he says this from the readers point of view not the author!
2 Comments
You probably know this already Andrew, but I'm one of the guilty ones. Orginally this was to ensure people actually visited my site and saw it as intended, although nothing to do with adverts, as I've never added any! I just wanted people to see how pretty it was ;o)
Thinking about it now I see the argument against this. However. As you also no doubt know my site is Domino-based and so including the whole content in the RSS is a no go area for various technical reasons.
I've seen other (Domino) sites that include a HTML-stripped abstract of the post. These I find really confusing, as it often leads to much confusion.
Anyway, I don't see my readers as users, as much as I see them as consumers. As consumers they have no right to moan and I'll do what the hell I like ... ;-)
Jake
Hi Jake, I remember a post you did a while back about the RSS feed on your site and the conversation it started was quite varied.
I too have platform limitations and my feed isn't that great either!
But I really think the age of content being tied to a website is slowly disappearing.