Feb

11

Linkblogs need full feeds

February 11, 2008 |

Steven Hodson’s piece today on the continuous importance of mainstream media source for blogging and his dislike for those mainstream news organizations that only publish partial feeds made me think of how partial feeds fit in with the current trends towards using linkblogs as a measure of an article’s popularity.

The answer to me is simple: they don’t.

I fully share Steven’s dislike for partial feeds. I can see why some publishers would choose to do this, but they are simply losing me as a reader. If I see that you only publish a partial feed, I will simply not subscribe to you.

Now maybe a lot of publishers don’t care. They are only interested in getting eyeballs to their sites to make their advertisers happy. That’s fine with me, but it is also a very myopic view.

Well - because I mostly live in my RSS readers, I barely see their actual sites anyway.

What does this have to do with linkblogs?

Because I tend to take my readers seriously, I (and many others, too) will not share your partial items in my linkblog, which, in the end, means they will not show up on RSSmeme, ReadBurner and similar sites. As these services gather in popularity, publishers of partial feeds will find themselves outside of this realm and lose a good number of readers - probably more than if they just published full feeds (or feeds with embedded ads).

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3 Comments so far

  1. Steven Hodson on February 11, 2008 7:32 pm

    The thing is that the news site feeds don’t even qualify as partial feeds in my opinion. It is also the big complaint I have with our Elite Tech News feed via reddit — I would be happy if they even allowed for publishers posting the links to have a small text area for a brief outline about what the post is about.

  2. Benjamin Golub on February 11, 2008 8:00 pm

    Here here! CNN is the worst…sometimes they have partial feeds and sometime they have absolutely nothing.

  3. Frederic on February 11, 2008 8:27 pm

    Steven, Benjamin,

    You guys are right - a lot of the feeds are, at best “headline feeds.” Those, in my hierarchy, fall even lower than partial feeds, too.

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