(Yes, every post I write about RSS must contain the hilarious “‘RSS’ sounds a little bit like ‘arse’” pun.)

I have a request for those people who publish RSS feeds. Make them full feeds!

I know there is a supposedly a debate about whether partial or full feeds work best. Well, that is not really the right way to put it. Everybody knows that full feeds work better than partial feeds. I mean, it is like saying that a sandwich is better than the crumbs. It’s just obvious.

But some website owners are, for some reason, sniffy about full feeds. Some people publish partial feeds for relatively superficial reasons, for instance because they can’t bear for any readers to be reading it in an environment other than their lovingly handcrafted web page design. Others have more serious suspicions: that full feeds rob them of page views and rob them of advertising revenue.

Earlier this year, the rather good Freakonomics blog moved to The New York Times website. At the same time, the full feeds were snatched away from the blog’s many readers. Apparently, it is NYTimes policy.

Immediately there was an angry reaction from readers. It (mostly) wasn’t from readers concerned about NYTimes itself or even due to the fact that the URLs had changed, that there was an entirely new navigation system to accustomise to, or anything like that. They were almost all from people who were angry that the full feed had overnight turned into a partial feed. Many readers even said they were unsubscribing.

The comments to the initial post were just the start of it. Several subsequent threads descended into similar “outraged of Bloglinesville” mobs, and it has become a recurring topic on the blog ever since. This is one plus side — at least the authors are open about the problems and the reasons why they can no longer offer a full feed.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to get angry, I would guess that I have read a lot less of the Freakonomics blog since the move. This is entirely down to the fact that it no longer offers a full feed.

I am aware that a lot of people simply cannot believe that (or understand why) full feeds generate as many clickthroughs as (or sometimes even more clickthroughs than) partial feeds do. It doesn’t seem to make sense, right? If people can read the entire content without leaving their RSS reader, why on earth would they visit the website?

But it doesn’t work like that. FeedBurner say so — and they would know. To me, it is just common sense. I have been reading RSS feeds for a few years now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of the reasons why partial feeds just do not work.

Think about why people use RSS feeds as opposed to visiting the different web sites all the time. It’s obvious: people who use RSS feeds do so because it makes it easier and quicker to read everything they want to read.

So immediately we have run into the problem with partial feeds — they do the precise opposite of what the reader wants. They make it more difficult and slower to read what you want to read. If you have begun reading and want to read the rest of the content, it involves clicking through and waiting for the (probably bloated) web page to load. It is a needless, unwanted, time wasting, inefficient hassle.

That explains why readers generally don’t like partial feeds. But what about the clickthrough rate? First of all, it is worth pointing out that page views are falling out of favour as a meaningful web metric thanks to the increasing use of Ajax and other kinds of magic. In a funny way, more page views usually means it’s a worse website. (Ask users of MySpace and Facebook about the navigation of those sites, and see which site has the happiest users.)

But let us say that page views (and certainly visits) are a good thing. So why should you use full feeds? Once again, for me it is down to convenience. I use RSS feeds because it allows me to squeeze more reading into a shorter space of time. Imagine sitting there in front Google Reader. You have a list of items waiting to be read. So you get on with it and start scrolling through, scanning for anything interesting.

By now, you may have realised why partial feeds do not automatically generate clickthroughs. It is because there is less of the content for me to scan-read and evaluate. Typically, a partial feed will contain the headline and the first couple of dozen words. This simply is not enough to give me as a reader an idea of how good the rest of the article is. Neither is it long enough for the author to sell the article.

There is one site that falls victim to this more than any other if you ask me. Tim Worstall, one of the most widely-respected British bloggers. His RSS feeds simply do not do his blog justice.

I will sit there with Google Reader and scroll through the many posts he has written that day, and all too often I find myself not being enticed by a single one of them. That is not because they are not interesting. It’s because his partial feeds simply do not give me any confidence that clicking through to read the rest of the post will be worth my time.

If Tim Worstall writes ten posts in a day (which is my conservative estimate of what he averages), he is asking me to read ten summaries, click ten times, wait for ten web pages to slowly load, then read ten full posts. What a waste of time!

This is especially annoying if the partial feed stops in the middle of a sentence, which is almost every time. When the partial feed stops at the end of a sentence, then there is the confusion over whether I had read the full post (just a really short one), or if it was just a fluke that the feed finished in a neat position.

If Tim Worstall provided full feeds in the first place, I could have just read them all there instead of going through all of that hassle. Who knows, I might even have clicked through and left a comment. I might have bookmarked one of his posts in Delicious, letting other people know how good the post is. I might even have blogged about it. I might even have clicked on an advert!

As it is, I just scroll through the summaries and ignore them all. I have, in the past, unsubscribed from his blog because of the frustration over this. I recently subscribed again, but can’t say I read a good deal more of his blog as a result.

Some other blogs provide “summaries” instead of partial feeds. This is where, instead of the first few words of the post, the author has instead specially written a summary designed for the feed. The problem with this is that sometimes it is made up of a random paragraph taken from the middle of the article. Even worse, it might give away the conclusion before I have even read what it was the conclusion for!

If I am enticed by such a summary, I will click through and find myself reading the post and thinking, “This isn’t what I thought I was reading.” Then I will come across that paragraph in the middle. Ah, and that introduction in the summary? I have found out that it was actually a conclusion. It is like forcing somebody to read the last page of the novel before reading the rest of it!

There is another more fundamental reason why people should offer full feeds. It is just plain rude not to. RSS subscribers are your most dedicated readers. They are people who have decided that your content is good enough to have it effectively delivered straight to them on a regular basis.

Yet, how are these dedicated readers paid back? By getting a mangled fraction of the content that they asked for. It is like subscribing to your favourite magazine only to find the publisher sending out cuttings rather than the whole magazine. What a way to treat your regular readers!

I can hear the howls already: “What about all of the beautiful adverts that I have lovingly placed on my blog / newspaper / whatever? If I offer full feeds, nobody will look at the adverts and I won’t make any money!” Again, there are several responses.

I have already explained why full feeds do not lead to a reduction in clickthroughs. So people will see your adverts just as much as they always did.

There is an even more obvious answer: what is stopping you putting adverts on your feed? Plenty of big websites already do this. It is perfectly possible. People who are refusing to offer full feeds because “they don’t contain my adverts” are simply shoving their heads in the sand.

Even if there was a legitimate concern about adverts, it has to be remembered that your regular readers (the sort who would subscribe to your RSS feed) are the very people who are the least likely to click on the adverts anyway.

Let us not forget also that a lot of adverts are not even designed for human eyes as much as they are designed for SEO. These kinds of adverts would not even mind not being seen (just as long as Googlebot sees it).

Maybe you are concerned about stats. Let’s face it, as bloggers we all are. We want to know how many people are reading. What would be the point if you had no way of knowing if people were reading or not. Gordon McLean (whose recent post on RSS is an interesting read) falls into this group.

Admittedly, this is one downside to RSS as it becomes impossible to find out precisely how many people are reading. Mind you, web stats are not generally the most reliable things anyway. Run four different stats counters and you are bound to get four different — sometimes wildly varying — figures. RSS further muddies the waters.

As it happens, I recently moved over to having this blog’s feeds provided by Feedburner (combined with the absolutely vital FeedSmith WordPress plugin), partly because it would give me some fairly accurate (but not precise) statistics. I was pleasantly surprised to find that around 140–150 people are subscribed to this blog. (Hello to you good people. I hope you are enjoying the full feed!)

Beforehand I had vague ideas of who was reading this blog’s webpages and why. But I had no idea of how many people were actually subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed. But now I do have some fairly interesting and meaningful stats about my RSS feed. So even the stats issue with RSS feeds is resolved to an extent.

All of this is not to say that partial feeds do not have their place. For instance, they are perfect for news websites. This is because of the way they work. We are used to just scanning through a front page containing only a headline and a (very) brief summary of each story. From here we choose which stories we want to read. This is how news websites work, and partial feeds can reflect this.

Blogs, however, do not work in this way. Very few blogs offer just a summary of each post on the front page. The blog format does not usually lend itself well to this approach. Rather, the vast majority of blogs’ front pages contain either the full content of the most recent posts, or at least a huge chunk of them.

As far as I can see, there is no reason why the vast majority of web sites should be forcing their most dedicated users to put up with shoddy, sub-standard partial feeds. For me, the fears that website owners have surrounding full feeds are mostly unfounded.

All of the national BBC Radio stations appear to be getting new logos. I had noticed that the logo for my station of choice, Radio Five Live, had completely changed at the same time as the theme music got watered down yet again (anyone else remember when it sounded punchy and authoritative?).

About time in a sense, because I can remember that Five Live had their old logo from even before I started listening to it regularly, which is a looong time. In fact, most of the BBC Radio logos are pretty damn old, as this website shows. Seven or eight years old in fact, which is good going for a logo these days (particularly one for a TV or radio station). So it was probably time for a bit of a refresh, although — as usual with these sort of things — the responses appear to have been lukewarm.

Indeed, some of the attempts at new logos are rather uninspiring. Radio 1’s has barely changed from what it had before. Meanwhile, Radio 2’s logo has been changed from the neat neon sign to the utterly dull plain 2 symbol.

But there are some signs of clever creativity. The incorporation of a bass clef into the numeral 3 for Radio 3’s logo is inspired, although it does make that numeral look slightly odd. Similarly, Radio 4’s logo cleverly has a speech mark in it, while 1Xtra incorporates a ‘play’ symbol.

BBC 7’s old logo was one of the best going, so the new version was always going to be a disappointment. It has turned out to be a greatly watered down version, although with a nod towards the old logo.

Similarly, 6 Music’s new logo is a bit like a watered down version of the old logo. I was never a fan of the old 6 Music logo. I never understood why that ‘6′ was so slanted and, well, big and fat. To represent Phill Jupitus?

BBC Asian Network’s logo is by far the jazziest. It makes me wonder why all of the other stations opted to go for more reserved, plain logos when the Asian Network can have such a colourful and vibrant one.

What I find most interesting about the new logos, though, is a point about branding in general. Firstly, the logos’ focus on numerals has effectively entailed a name change for one of the stations. The difference between ‘Radio Five Live’ and ‘Radio 5 Live’ might be subtle. But it was obviously important enough for someone to go around the website and, like a cuddly Stalin, change all instances of ‘Five Live’ to ‘5 Live’.

As such, overnight one of my tags has become irrelevant. Still, whoever it was that went around changing the website missed a couple of bits, including 5 Live’s own studios as my in-depth investigation of the website reveals! Notice also, that bbc.co.uk/5live still redirects to bbc.co.uk/fivelive. These pesky rebranding exercises are more trouble than they realise.

(Update: I have just realised that the changes on the Radio 5 Live website have even gone to the extent of writing ‘live’ with a lowercase ‘l’. What a load of arse! It is a bit like when Channel 5 changed its name to ‘five’. It just looks stupid! And it looks double stupid when some of the programmes are now called things like ‘5 live Report’ and ‘5 live Breakfast’.)

Another point is that all of the new logos contain the words ‘BBC Radio’, even when some of the station’s names do not. In other words, BBC 6 Music is not now called BBC Radio 6 Music, and BBC 7 is not now BBC Radio 7. But perhaps this is just a halfway house before going all the way to calling these radio stations.

Presumably the reason 6 Music and BBC 7 omitted the ‘Radio’ tag from their names was to emphasise the fact that you did not need to (indeed, you could not) use an old fashioned tranny to listen to them. This always irritated me, because surely there was more potential for confusion with the television channels.

I mean, the BBC used to always advertise Freeview and how you could get “eight BBC channels”. Yet the BBC have an outlet called BBC 7. Surely that is just asking for confusion. It would surely make more sense to call the radio station Radio 7 and leave the BBC X monikers to the television stations.

As the years have gone on, we have come to learn that radio is not a dirty word on the internet (or, indeed, on your DAB set). Radio is radio is radio, whether you are listening to it on the internet, as a podcast, one of those fancy-schmancy phones or, er, the radio. I mean, the internet is teeming with internet radio stations. Even I have two (courtesy of Last.fm)!

And another thing. Why haven’t the new logos incorporated the really swish ‘radio’ logo that appears on the actual BBC Radio website?

I think I have just given myself a headache over logos. Time to go back into hibernation.

So as I mentioned in this week’s Scottish Blogging Roundup, a new website has been causing a bit of a stir among certain circles — just not the right ones.

YouScotland was launched amid a blaze of publicity. Well, a blaze by the Scottish internet political community’s standards. Apparently the people behind the website appeared on The Politics Show and some other media outlets (although I didn’t see any of it).

The website is all mouth and no trousers. The tone they use makes it sound as though we are on the verge of some kind of cyber-revolution or something. “Join us and change the world!” seems to be the gist of it.

The only problem is that it is impossible to find out exactly how they want to change the world. There is a vague mention about “reclaiming the Home Rule agenda from a Scottish establishment that has so patently failed,” but that is hardly a new idea.

There is a founding statement that you can download — as a Word Document or a PDF. I really don’t know why they couldn’t just put it all on a normal web page to make it more accessible. There is nothing on the Word / PDF document that actually required it to be a Word / PDF file. They are just making visitors jump through hoops for no reason.

Even once you’ve waited the age for the file to download and Acrobat Reader to fire up, you’re still left pretty much none the wiser. The aims are banal:

Debate – more of it
Democracy – more of it
Transparency – more of it
Education – more of it
Enterprise – more of it
Conservation – more of it
Accountability – more of it
Bureaucracy – less of it
Politicians – less of them
Perks – less of them
Injustice – less of it
Waste – less of it
War – less of it
Prejudice – none of it

Freedom – more of it

You would have to spend a long time looking for anybody who disagreed with a single word of it. These are just vague buzzwords. They tell us nothing about what the group stands for.

Going through the entire twelve page document, all we really have is a broad — but not very strongly expressed — support for independence. It is hardly as though Scotland needs another independence movement — there are already plenty of them. So it’s difficult to tell exactly what the big deal is supposed to be about YouScotland.

I’m not even convinced that the people behind YouScotland even know what their aims are. I think they just want to be the next big thing, but have no idea how to go about it, other than setting up some bombastic website.

…in part, we are modelling ourselves on the web based citizens’ movement, www.moveon.org…

But visit the actual MoveOn.org and you see a site with real purpose. They thought of the issue before they set up the website, and they have clear goals that they want to achieve. You might even get up and do something. YouScotland just makes you scratch your head.

The whole website is unenjoyable to visit. Take a look, for instance, at the blog. Why do they feel the need to keep on changing the font? As you can probably tell from the design of this blog, I don’t mind a bit of colour. But with so many changes going on with the font on this page it really is difficult to read.

And I’m not a grammar fascist. I don’t mind the odd typo here and there — we all do it. But greengrocers’ apostrophes are all over the place.

It’s number 1 objective - to get Gordon into No 10

It’s number 2 objective - to keep Tony out of jail

It’s number 3 objective…

Soon afterwards the author makes howling geographical errors with “Dumbartonshire” [sic] and “Dunbarton” [sic]. To think that these are the people who think they can kick-start another enlightenment!

This post at Applied Planetary Engineering suggests that the “steering group” only appeared on The Politics Show due to their media connections. So much for YouScotland — this is a clique’s Scotland.

And they don’t have the first idea about how the internet works. They say they want a bottom-up movement. “We see our role as facilitators”. But if they want that they should tell people to set up their own blogs so that they can speak for themselves.

YouScotland looks like a vanity project more than anything else. “Make your voice heard — JOIN NOW” says a graphic in the top left of every page. But if people want to be heard they need to actually say something. Not join a shaky website whose biggest contribution to online political debate has been to beg for donations.

If a bottom-up movement will be created, it will create itself. That’s, uh, kind of how bottom-up movements work. It wouldn’t be bottom-up otherwise. YouScotland is trying to tell people what their movement should be and then asking people to join, and oh by the way give us a donation. (NB. It is FREE to set up a blog!)

They are dressing themselves up in lots of internet buzzwords that sound out of place.

The technology behind YouTube now allows us to “broadcast ourselves”, e-Bay, sell for ourselves, Google, find out for ourselves, Sky+ watch for ourselves, and i-tunes sing for ourselves.

i-tunes [sic] allows us to sing for ourselves? It is a music player for crying out loud; just an evolution of the CD player. They are wrapping themselves up with all this new-fangled interwebs business, but at the moment it looks like they don’t have the first clue about it.

It is like watching your dad dance. These people think they’re down with the masses by namedropping websites like Bebo and YouTube. But they are actually embarrassing themselves by highlighting just how little they know about how genuine internet communities form. A mass internet movement won’t rise just because some clique told it to!

I’m not sure if I’m being too harsh. Maybe the website does indeed have laudable aims. It is early days after all, and it might end up being highly influential come May (although I doubt it).

But I’m not the only one expressing doubts about the whole project. Richard Thomson sums it up really well:

But am I alone in thinking that the idea there’s somehow a mass ‘collective will’ out there, ignored by politicians, but which can be brought to bear by a website, is really keech of the highest order?

Small Nation: Citizens’ media or geek plaything?

Perhaps someone from the group that has founded this can give me a bit more information on exactly who they are and where they are coming from, politically?…

I just had a look at some of their survey items and I am a little uncomfortable about the tone of some of these such as antagonism to “road pricing” and “traffic wardens” - this sounds like narrow minded, grumpy old conservatives! What about global warming - don’t you give a damn?

Applied Planetary Engineering:

The site was supposed to be accessible for those with the minimum of computer experience. Not so, it was very unintuitive, links did not work, the site was unfinished for a launch and very difficult to navigate…

The idea was laudable, but if you are going to try to create a revolution in cyberspace, the first priority should be your site and software is at least basically up to the job. This Google blogger set up was better, as in easier to use for a visitor, than their revolutionary cyberspace offering.

Commenter Jim Flynn on YouScotland:

All the best to YouScotland - a great idea, but please check your spelling - it’s Pollokshields!!!

Commenter Ken Mailer on YouScotland:

I have just registered and am finding my way around your website. Although taken by the idea, I have no idea who you are or where you operate from.

Interestingly, nobody responded to Mr Mailer’s point.

The person who seems to be most excited by it all is Jessica Smart — the thirteen-year-old daughter of Alan Smart from the “steering group”.

I really hope I am proved wrong about this, because the Scottish internet community is punching below its weight at the moment. I covered this at length when I decided to have a go at re-initiating the Scottish Blogging Roundup.

It seems as though things are improving. But the fact that YouScotland, a rather inept attempt, is the project that’s made the biggest waves in the media makes me want to bury my head in my hands. Is this really the best that Scottish internet users can do? If so, we are in trouble.

I thought I’d write a little guide to privacy on Facebook because clearly it is sorely needed.

Facebook is a social network. Essentially, it’s designed to connect friends together. Facebook is quite an exclusive place. The only way you can sign up is if you are in a supported network (usually a university — for instance, my network is Edinburgh (University)), and you must sign up using your university email address.

By default your profile is hidden from people outside your network. Nobody who isn’t also in Edinburgh can see my profile, unless they’re a friend from another network. But you can choose for your profile to be yet more private. See the ‘My Privacy’ button? Anybody can set their profile up so that only approved friends can see it.

Recently there was a lot of controversy when Facebook launched new features: news feed and mini feed. These features essentially provided a list of actions that people have done on Facebook such as groups you’ve joined, new interests and so on.

None of this changed the privacy settings. Your actions were still only visible to your network, or just your friends if you wished. All of the information provided in the news feed and the mini feed were already available anyway: the new features merely aggregated it all into one convenient space.

But the new features were massively unpopular, with many users howling that their privacy was being invaded and that the new features were too “stalker-esque”. But the privacy settings hadn’t changed — all of the information could be hidden from everybody but your friends if you wished. What kind of person adds stalkers to their friends list?

Part of the problem seems to be the fact that the new feeds listed postings to The Wall (a kind of message board attached to each person’s profile, and one of Facebook’s most popular features). For instance, one person left a comment on my last post about Facebook:

I might have just broken up with my girlfriend. I might also have just posted a kinda flirty message on someone else’s message board [Wall] soon after. If you know both these things, you might reasonably infer that I fancy this other person, or even that I broke up with my gf to pursue this other person.

Neither of these actions would have been private in the first place on Facebook. If you change your relationship status, that change is visible to everybody who has access to your profile. If you post on somebody’s Wall, that message is visible to everybody who has access to that Wall. Okay, so maybe with the new features these facts were more obvious with the feeds ‘pushing’ the new data to you. But essentially your information was as private with the feeds as it was without.

One of the most intriguing things about the Facebook furore is the revelation that many, many people appear to use The Wall as a kind of quasi-private messaging centre. This is pretty reckless behaviour on the user’s part. There are a few pretty big clues that The Wall is not the place to be writing messages designed to be private.

Firstly, the name. It’s called The Wall for crying out loud! How private does that sound?! Not very. The analogy it draws is very clear: treat this space like a wall in the street. On this wall you can write whatever you would be prepared to write on a physical, real-life wall.

Another pretty massive clue is the fact that there is a separate private messaging feature! Private messages are not advertised in the new feeds. That’s because they are, unlike The Wall, private. So — get this — if you want to write something private on somebody’s Wall, why not think twice and private message them instead? What a novel thought!

Why not go a step further and use email? I like to use Walls and the like, but when I have something important or private to say to somebody, I always use email. We all have email addresses, so why would anybody consider writing something private on a whimsical social networking feature called ‘The Wall’?!

Did you notice those words I used in that last sentence? Social. Network. A website designed to connect friends. Because Facebook is a social network, its main function is to keep friends in touch. Obviously I will take an interest if one of my friends changes something in their profile or writes something on a Wall. Do you know why? Because they’re my friends. I’m supposed to take an interest in them!

And yes, I do go around reading other people’s Walls. That might sound “stalkerish” to you, so shoot me. I have sometimes been surprised at what I have read on Walls. But I had always assumed that everybody who wrote on a Wall was prepared for that message to be available to be read in a semi-public environment, because that is what the Wall is designed to be.

There is a golden rule that everybody that writes anything on the web will inevitably learn sooner or later. The rule is: write on the web, and people will read it. Don’t expect people not to find something you’ve written, even if you think it’s in a relatively private corner. Google is more powerful than you think.

Anybody who thought that the Wall was a private place was kidding themselves on. And if you don’t want certain “friends” reading your profile, why on earth did you add them as friends? Presumably to keep that friends counter high. Well, serves you right for being such a shameless narcissist.

And now, in yet another “doh, those users of Facebook really are dim” moment, it was actually possible to remove everything from your feeds anyway!

See that ‘X’? That’s not a multiplication sign. It’s only a bloody delete button! Next to every single entry in your feed!

Yesterday, Facebook had to add a whole lot of features that dilute the usefulness of the feeds just to get those maniacs that were setting up e-riots to shut up. A set of new privacy options means that you can now decide what does and doesn’t make it to your feed — or you can just disable the feed completely.

So what has happened? All of my friends have disabled the feed! At least I assume that’s what’s happened, because the feed updates have come to a crunching halt from some point last night. And I know that my friends have updated their profiles. You know how I know? Because it says so in the ‘My Friends’ section. You see? I can still “stalk” my “friends” easily. And that feature has been there ever since I started using Facebook. It’s just one click more difficult, that’s all.

I actually find it quite offensive that somebody would list me as a “friend”, yet feel the need to attempt to hide their activity from me.

So there you have it. A potentially useful new Facebook feature has become almost useless. It could have greased the wheels of the social network, but the site’s users seemed to balk at the realisation that they were using a social network and not some kind of private zone.

This whole furore is not Facebook’s fault. It’s the fault of those dunces who joined groups because they weren’t responsible enough to think through the security implications of:

1. Adding stalkers as “friends”
2. Writing private messages on The Wall

If you were stupid enough to do either of those things, it was you — not Facebook — that endangered your privacy.

Image nabbed from the ‘Quit bitching about the Facebook feed! Its easy to fix!’ Facebook group

I’m not taking part in the Naked Day thingy, although it is quite interesting. If you’re really eager to see what this place looks like without any clothes on, Firefox users can just go into View > Page Style > No Style. As far as I’m aware that does the same thing.

At least if you view the blog that way it doesn’t look like I change the design every other day…