‘You did what?’
Author: Simon Sellars • Feb 4th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, advertising, crime, gated communities, media landscape
I caved in and implemented two site-specific scenarios that I possibly thought I wouldn’t do in any especially near version of the future.
One is to provide full RSS feeds for this site rather than partials, which is what was on offer previously. I did this because I read on various forums about so many people getting indignant about partial feeds, saying if a site supplies partials they’ll ‘unsubscribe from the feed straight away, no fooling around, mister!’ Or that ‘life’s too short to click on a partial feed and go to an external site; the RSS reader is my space, how dare you take me out if it’… Or, ’sites that supply partials are like big bastard record companies plastering music with DRM; how dare you place restrictions on my content, I want it delivered the way I choose’, etc etc…
Such venom. It really takes me aback, the way people feel about this topic.
Personally, I don’t have a problem clicking on a partial feed to read a post in its original context, and I’m imagining I’m as ‘time poor’ as many, but if it gets me more readers then full feeds it is. Although, after carefully redesigning the site so that no post is privileged over the other, so that there’s no top-down hierarchy, full feeds of course scupper that ideal — it’s top-down all the way with your good old RSS readers.
The other thing I did, perhaps the most controversial, was to set up a MySpace page for the Ballardian Home Movie competition. The cheek of it, eh? After I had the nerve to unceremoniously slag off that whole insidious gated community.
Heh, heh.
Go on, then — flame away.
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I might be getting old (old enough to remember when ‘PEEK before you POKE’ was the height of computer-related humour, anyway) so I’m not even 100% sure what an RSS feed are, let alone the consequences of this move. But might I suggest that people who do get venomously wound up about such a topic probably aren’t really worth chasing after?
TimC, it’s a method for keeping updated with websites and blogs without having to go directly to the website every day. Instead you have a little desktop application (I use RSS Bandit, it’s free) or an account on a website (Bloglines do one I think) which will inform you of whenever a blog or website you are interested in has posted a new story.
The change the Simon has made is so that the RSS feed contains the full text of each new story he posts, rather than just the first few hundred characters.
Being a bit of a geek, I can’t really imagine using the web without RSS now. I had RSS bandit loaded with some several hundred RSS feeds, including the various websites linked to Ballardian. Each morning when I get to work I’m alerted to which sites have updated content.
I must admit I am a bit of a die-hard “full feeds or else” subscriber, and Ballardian is only one of about three feeds I was willing to put up with partial feeds for, simply because it’s the only blog in its niche and because the content is so good (and often warrants reading in the Web layout).
I think this is a positive move, since even people like me will come to the site to read an article if it appears particularly long or has images / media content that we think might be formatted better on the page than in the reader. With the way Ballardian is structured now, too, I sometimes (perhaps once every week or two) visit the main page anyway, just to see what’s going on. If you have an interesting blog, full text feeds are no threat, since interested readers will always pop back to the site every now and then.
JD, i’m converted too, i use the rss reader all the time, although i still like checking in on the posts in their original context.
peter, the reason i used partials to begin with is, firstly, that i like nice design and i got the site the way i wanted it to look…i wanted that to be on display, rather than vanilla text in a reader. in some ways rss has killed off good design on the web and that’s a bit sad.
the other reason is f*$%@# scraper blogs stealing content from full feeds. but that’s just a hazard of this environment, there are ways to deal with it, and if the majority of readers want full feeds i’m prepared to put up with this particular annoyance.
Scraper blogs? Ah, I see. Somehow that reminds me China Mieville’s short story “An End to Hunger”.