Sunday 21 October 2007

I want full RSS (but is that good for everybody?)

Interesting to come across a controversial issue by experience rather than than reading about it. Wanting to keep up with increasing amounts of information from forums and blogs etc. I have been utilising RSS feed in Netvibes and Google Reader to more and more effect. I have heard it said that you can process around 10 times as much information this way. Not sure how that is worked out but for sure I can get through a lot more than visiting individual websites.

I hadn't really thought about this issue before because most (if not all) of the feeds I was most interested in were full feeds, I can read the full content in my online RSS readers. This reduces distraction and allows me to absorb more in less time.

It was only when I came to pull in a number of feeds from an online magazine into a Netvibes tab that I came unstuck. The feeds were partial so I had to follow each link to read the full content. The experience was not nowhere near as pleasant or convenient.

I had a look around the Internet and found a number of posts and viewpoints. Aside from any bandwidth issues, what might be good for me may not be so good for advertisers, may not be so good for tracing site usage (although feedburner can help here).

I still need to think about this some more. As a consumer I prefer full feeds by far but should I feel the same when thinking on the behalf of my Employer? (it seems I am finding this duality is common nowadays).