From
Dave Slusher the evil genius and his post titled
excerpted RSS feeds
- When I read postings in my RSS reader, it takes effectively no time to move from item to item because they have all already been downloaded before I look at them.
- When I open the webpage of an item from that feed it takes time, usually from 1 to 10 seconds per item.
- When I sit down to read my feeds, I typically have between 40 and 200 individual items in there. At an average load time of 3 seconds per item , that would add from 2 to 10 minutes to my reading time just in waiting for pages to load if everyone did this.
- Most excerpted feeds are really excerpted. Here’s a real world example of something that came down a feed, the information I was given to decide whether I want to pursue reading this or not:
While Wharton claims he may now have been “assimilated” into the culture of Action Greensboro, I seriously doubt it. While I, too, attended last night’s follow-up meetin
- If you knew how often I looked at the first 18 words of your post and decided that although I care enough to subscribe to your RSS feed I don’t care enough to chase this post down, it would probably hurt your feelings. Sorry kids, you have to make tough calls in this life.
- I’m actually becoming a full-text hardass again, and by the end of the week will be purging out all the excerpted feeds from my newsreader. If you don’t care enough to make it easy on me trying to follow lots of information, I don’t care enough to read your stuff. That’s harsh, but quid pro quo often is.
My first thoughts are right on Dave, I'm with you but I cant quite bring myself to be that Harsh. For example, Microsoft watch from Mary Jo Foley. I cant unsubscribe because its really timey content. I mean compare it to the unofficial microsoft weblog's content. Enough said… In the mainstream RSS space you just have to expect headline descriptions, very few dare do full text, and so it would be difficult to just remove them all. Some others feeds worth mentioning include infosync which is not the full text but damm putting medium resoultion pictures in with the description is a great idea. I would say its one of the most beautiful feeds you can get if your a gadget geek. Saying all that, they could take the route of Inhabitat, which has beautiful pictures and full text.
So generally, I agree with Dave, but I wont be so harsh. Its all about the content.
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