I am going to release an optional “short-description” feature tonight that I hope everyone will use for posts longer than a sentence or two. (instead of the full post text appearing in the feed, only the short-description will appear)
While I understand Scott’s motivation (he needs traffic on his site to support revenue generation), I am in complete agreement with Brad, Brian, and others – don’t do this and take away the utility of aggregators for everyone. The news aggregator is what makes it possible for me to read so many people’s writing; without it, I’d only be able to read a few.
A possible compromise, I suppose, would be to expose both types of feeds – full descriptions, and excerpts, and let the feed consumer decide which feed he wants. Not sure it would help you, but people who have limited bandwidth might like it…
I totally agree with Greg on this one. When NG pulls a link only (slashdot comes to mind) it drives me nuts.
I use NewsGator because I DON’T want to have to go to a website just to read some news.
Bad, Bad, Bad idea Scott.
RSS and short descriptions…[more]
As a blogger, I love being able to provide a separate abstract to each post that is distinct from the content.
Unfortunately, so many blogs just slam the entire content into the description element that I just discard it in my front-end – it’s worthless and I might as well read it from the actual site.
DB
Don, personally I don’t think it’s worthless to have the entire content in the RSS description. I tend to read a lot more of someone’s posts if they provide full content. And while you’re right, you could just go to the site itself, the use of an aggregator has really changed the way I work, and the way I keep up with the people/sites I read.
The more I think about it, the more I think that blogs should provide two feeds by default – a “complete” feed, and an “excerpt” feed. Let the reader decide.
Please don’t tell me that some blog readers are still stuck in the dotcom boom la-la land where bandwidth and server cycles are assumed to be free?
Blog authors offer blog readers a service, one which hopefully has value and therefore likely has a cost to produce and deliver, and one to which no reader is entitled free and clear.
Whether to get you to their site to see ads which pay for hosting and/or just to discover other content there, its perfectly reasonable and justifiable to see blog authors making these kind of changes.
As much as it might inconvenience me a bit to read the content, I am not naive and fully understand the many reasons why they may choose to do so.
Jeremy, believe me – I understand that bandwidth and cycles are not free; our hosting charges for rassoc.com, newsgator.com, and some client sites are not cheap. I’m not trying to get anything for free out of anyone.
However, I also believe having rich content exposed via RSS isn’t necessarily a traffic detractor. I would hypothesize that if I were to drop descriptions from my RSS feeds, my overall traffic (excluding RSS hits) to this site would drop. Unfortunately I don’t want to try it to see if I’m right. :-) In other cases, like for Don, his traffic probably wouldn’t be affected, since many folks would jump through LOTS of hoops to read his content.
Dare actually seems to have a pretty useful compromise; he has “real” content in his descriptions, and additional content if you click-through.
I don’t think there’s any one right answer…and I certainly respect the rights of the content providers to provide as much or as little as they like in their RSS. And based on the value I get from their content, I can vote with my clicks.