Neil McIntosh ponders the trouble with RSS. Or rather, the trouble with full text RSS feeds.
I think all of this blog’s feeds are full feeds. I did switch to partial feeds once, but I got complaints! So I’ve kept the full feeds ever since then. And that’s not a problem.
I kind of feel that Neil McIntosh’s points are valid — especially the one about comments. Ever since I started reading RSS feeds as opposed to the actual blogs themselves I’ve not commented so often. As for pageviews, well they are nice of course, but they’re not really that important in the grand scheme of things.
I can also see why, for some (ie. good) blogs, people nicking your work would be a problem. As for me, though… err, well, if somebody really wants to nick my “work”, then good luck with that.
Partial RSS feeds annoy me, but not a lot. After all, the real deal is just a click away. But I’ll be keeping my RSS feeds full. That is, unless people start complaining about it (which I doubt)!
Update: Thinking about this while going through all the blogs in Bloglines, I’ve remembered other occasional problems with RSS. Sometimes links are broken, and sometimes images don’t show up, which renders anything along the lines of “look to the left” pointless.
Stuart Dickson
10 June 2005 06:25
#1
Funny that you should mention that “look to the left” thing, because that thought had immediately occurred to me when reading McIntosh’s article. I have done that “look to the left” thing quite a lot recently.
I’ve never given feeds much thought, as rarely use them. Was using SharpReader. But have been pondering them more since you suggested a Scottish political blogs aggregator website.