Incomplete web feeds, the bane of aggregated life
Woe unto the world. Good Morning Silicon Valley’s blog, which has some of the funniest headlines above the stories of the dumbest tech execs - for example, one of their tales about Sony’s rootkit messups was headline “And we would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids” - has moved from a full feed to a partial feed.
Agh. I hate partial feeds. I don’t follow them, for the main part. After all, what does a partial post in my newsreader tell me? That the page has updated, and that it might be worth going over there, but on the other hand, who knows? Not many people are good enough at writing to the constraints of the few hundred characters that you feel compelled to go to the page, rather than move on to the next (full?) feed in your aggregator. You don’t get told if the article is enormously long (in the blog, it’s not).
Why have they done this? At best it only halves the amount of data they’re putting out, and it’s only TEXT for God’s sake. It ruins the whole experience. I’ve created a folder in NetNewsWire called “partial feeds” for those who don’t deign to let me read what they’re blogging. One of my first decisions on setting up this blog was to make it full-feed. (It’s an option on Wordpress.)
Yes, I know. (1) They want people to come and see the adverts. Well, why not put the ads into the RSS feed? (2) The Guardian does partial feeds. Not much I can do about that at present.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Microsoft insider who hates it, Tivo hates customers, and how conscious are cockroaches? (17 September 2005; score: 44.01%)
- Must get more RSS feeds... must get more.. (17 January 2006; score: 37.87%)
- CSS twiddle means more readable in XP? (11 August 2005; score: 36.39%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
November 18th, 2005 at 12:54 pm
Yup. Adverts. Money. Rules everything.
November 18th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Put ads in a feed (or on a page) and I will use greasemonkey or adblock or whatever it takes so that I don’t have to look at them. Simple really, and if you try and force me to look at the ads, I’ll just stop reading the page.
November 19th, 2005 at 5:50 pm
It’s not just that the ads need pageviews, although that is an issue… there’s also that a minority of readers also refuse to read feeds with RSS (a similar-sized minority to those who have a thing about excerpt-only feeds?). I doubt we could win.
Perhaps more relevantly, pageview counts, when content is free, are useful - perhaps vital - for justifying that free content. I daresay publishers could offer a premium full text version (daringfireball does this, afaik) but I’m willing to bet you’d get tiny, tiny takeup.
November 19th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
I’m sure we’ll discuss this more, Neil, but - for the readers who go to the web page, nothing changes by having full feeds. They go to the page, they see the ads, they count as pageviews.
As for pageviews, you have a precise count of who’s pulling your RSS feeds. If you put an ad in with it, surely you can argue that the ad *must* at least be being seen.
Yes, DF does have a premium full-text version (as does Drunkenblog); I subscribe to the former, though more for the Linked List. (And the T-shirt side benefit. It’s a cool T-shirt.)
Which leaves us status quo ante as far as this argument goes, I think.
November 20th, 2005 at 12:36 am
I don’t see how you can have a precise count of who’s pulling your RSS feeds! If an aggregator like Bloglines pulls it, you have no idea how many people are reading it. (Yes, I know bloglines tells you how many subscribers there are). The same is true if there are caches around - your page may get lots of calls which are all fielded by caches, particularly if your update cycle is longish. Now, you could of course send out cache-control headers to make sure that cacheing doesn’t happen, but do you? (BTW you can have a lot of fun with a cache performance validator trying to get the best score out of it : it is really quite hard to get the highest level from dynamically generated pages.)
November 29th, 2005 at 12:30 pm
Stop me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the real reason full feeds are going away because spam sites are just running full XML feeds next to adsense and depriving publishers of cash?