Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Feed Hungry Minds With the birth of Blogtimore, I now have a window upon which to rant about something that has been a small annoyance.  As I have mentioned before I--much like ACW--use a news aggregator to read all of the blogs that are interesting to me.  Blogtimore is essentially an online aggregator along the lines of Bloglines or NewsGator.  The two things that bother me are sites that do not put their entire content within their feed and sites that have no feed at all.  Before going off on my rant, allow me to explain what I am speaking of for the not-so-technically-savvy members of my audience.  Feeds are actually a parsing of something called XML.  If you click on one of those orange and white XML icons , you will normally get back a bunch of code.  It is this code that aggregators like FeedDemon, Bloglines, and Blogtimore parse into readable text.  A nice summary of RSS can be found on Wikipedia.  The folks who love technology can read about its technical specifications here.  The best part about this technology--especially given its support in Firefox--is that it changes the way you surf the Internets.  You no longer need to go to CNN to see the latest headlines.  Instead, you scan the headlines in your aggregator using the RSS feed for the site in question.  But, I digress.  One of my issues is with the lack of the full text of an entry within the feed.  Part of this is dependent upon both the author of the feed's willingness to do so and the support of the underlying publishing technology.  There are arguments that one should not receive the full text in feeds so that site visits are required to read the content and continually tick up the site counter.  I would argue that with all of this content vying for attention, the site that supports full text in their feeds will win.  It becomes a matter of time: it is quicker for one to fire up an aggregator and read what they need to than it is to actually visit the site.  For me, if your feed supports full text, you rock.  If it does not, I will read your site, just not that quickly.  The larger issue I have is with sites with no RSS feed at all.  To be honest, I have become a slave to my aggregator.  As such, if a site has no RSS feed, it is not in my aggregator.  Without it in my aggregator, my eyeballs will rarely see it unless I remind myself to click-through my blogroll.  The opinions above are just mine, but I think the need will become evident over time to support full text RSS feeds.  People are increasingly bombarded with information from email and instant messaging.  So, if you can, enable the syndication of your site with full-text feeds.  I will thank you now, but many others will thank you later.  For those who regard the above rant as babbling nonsense, move along.  8:48:02 AM    comment []  trackback []