Feed me, but please don’t tease me
March 12th, 2007 9:40:44 am pst by Sterling Camden
Chad Perrin (aka apotheon) is working hard to manage his new-found RSS addiction. I know what it’s like when your feed reader gradually collects new feeds until you’re surfeited with the incoming content. Then it’s time to winnow out the ones that don’t make good use of your time.
The first bullet in Chad’s list of reasons to unsub ranks high on mine as well: partial feeds. You’ve got to have some very good content to keep me subscribed to nothing more than a teaser. Normally, I don’t have time for more than a quick scan to decide if your post is something I want to read or not. If you only give me a couple of sentences about it, they’re going to have to quickly capture my interest to get me to click through. Whereas if you give me the full story, I’ll scan the whole thing. You’re much more likely to get me to read it. Plus, as Chad says, I’m also more likely to click through, either to comment on it or to bookmark it for later linking.
I’ve been within a hair’s breadth of unsubscribing every partial feed in my reader at one time or another, just because they’re such a waste of time.
Shout out to those I still have, in hopes of getting you to change your evil ways:
- Blog of the Gods
- Peter D’Adamo
- Chris Boese
- Damn Interesting
- fepus|net
- Good Morning Silicon Valley
- Greg Laden
- inkblot earth
- Stu Savory
- Wonderland or Not
That’s 10 partial feeds out of 116 to which I’m currently subscribed. Please, people. Wasting your readers’ time is not the way to gain their attention.
UPDATE: inkblot earth and Wonderland or Not have both enabled full feeds! Thanks, folks!
UPDATE: Greg Laden has enabled full feeds! Three down, seven more to go.
Posted in Get Outta Here | 12 Comments » RSS 2.0
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Thanks for adding your voice to my comments on partial feeds (even though, relative to you, I’m late to the party on the subject of discussing the evils of partial feeds).
In this case, I think I’m actually somewhat thankful for the partial feeds on the weblogs from which I unsubscribed yesterday. I think I would have unsubscribed from those weblogs for other reasons anyway, given time, but the partial feeds helped me hasten my decision. Thus far, nobody in my feed aggregator whose content is so good that I will want to keep them in the long haul has given me partial feeds. I guess I’m just lucky that way.
That is fortunate. Or perhaps the decision to provide partial feeds often coincides with an attitude about ownership of content that runs counter to your tastes (and mine).
I’m sure that factors into it somewhat, but I actually notice that several of the other bullet points I listed in the SOB entry to which you linked seem to apply to weblogs that provide only partial feeds. For instance, the first, fourth, and fifth points (and I’ve decided to change the bullet points to a numbered list for ease of reference) all applied to the Asymmetrical Information weblog, penned under the pseudonym Jane Galt. Based on titled and nom de plume, you can probably guess why it initially appealed to me enough to add to my aggregator — and based on points 1, 4, and 5, you can probably guess why that one didn’t stay in the list very long.
last_comment.gsub(/titled/, ‘title’)
Not the real deal, eh?
Not so much, no. I was disappointed.
I’ve rid myself of evil. Thanks for tip Chip
Excellent, Hrafn!
Don’t hate me I’m only hum4n! I’m getting married in 2 weeks and the wife-to-be just doesn’t understand spending time the ‘blogging’ thing. I’ll get things fixed… after the honeymoon
thanks for the tip!
Hey, congratulations, David!
No hate here — this post was intended as a friendly nudge to get you to do The Right Thing. Looking forward to some more great content from you in the future, after you recover.
[...] has added me to her blogroll. Woo hoo! Thanks, Alice! Nice new theme, BTW. And thanks for enabling full text feeds! Tags:Chip’s Quips: alcohol, apotheon, beatles, blogging, blogroll, catonsvillenine, [...]
[...] it looks like Greg Laden has taken my advice and started providing full-text feeds! Way to go, Greg! You’ve got a great blog, and now [...]