EricaJoy

In the Fullness of Feeds

Being that I’m an information junkie, I’m subscribed to tons of feeds that I read on a regular basis. A lot of tech feeds, some gossipy feeds (yes I do subscribe to Valleywag tyvm), some regional feeds, etc etc etc. Whenever I encounter a site that interests me, I subscribe to the feed. If I actually visited all the sites I’m subscribed to, I’d be browsing all day (I read approximately 190 items per day). It should be no surprise that when I come across a partial text feed, it makes me more than a little annoyed. Of course, I won’t subscribe to those feeds because there’s no point. If all a feed does is direct me to a site to view content, it defeats the purpose of me subscribing to the feed. Along with not subscribing, I will probably never go back to said site

I never understood why sites do this in the first place. If its a monetization thing, there are ways to monetize your feed. For example, Feedburner has had its feed advertising network for a while. If its a traffic thing, post content that’s interesting and relevant. Do this and people will come to your site from your feed to engage others in discussion about said content. Mind you this doesn’t work for sites that are chicken about opening comments.

In short, if a site isn’t interactive (my definition: I go there to perform a verb other than read) then their feed should be full text. Racialicious, I’m looking at you.

Update: Retracting my statement about Racialicious’ feed, having installed WordPress and seeing how stupidly it handles its feeds (seriously, content:encoded why?).