What’s the point of blogging when there’s no RSS?
David Rosam on Apr 24 2003 at 7:53 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
For me RSS is absolutely core to blogging.
My news reader is one of my most used pieces of software, so when I hear about a new blog and I drop in to sample it, my heart sinks when I see it’s a Blogger blog.
There’s a very high probability I won’t find an RSS feed, which means I’m very likely not to read that blog in the long term - and I’m sure that counts for many people.
If I’m feeling really keen, I might look at Syndic8, but to be honest, I peobably won’t get round to it.
So Esther Dyson and Geoff Cohen won’t be getting read by me 
Joho the Blog: Two New Blogs of Note
Your posting was the first hit when I was looking for “RSS what’s the point?”.
The plain text information snippets and headlines make sense to me: I can quickly scan them for items of interest.
But the next step doesn’t make sense to me: In order to get more information and read the whole article, I usually have to get the webpage (or fire it up in my browser, depending on software). I do get the article, but it comes complete with navigation, blogrolls, layout, advertising - basically the whole traditional webpage shebang!
This is a waste, and I wonder what’s the point? In my opinion it would be more sensible to offer the complete article in this new and efficient format, and then provide -as an option- a link to the webpage.
But I guess as an RSS newbie I must be missing something.
Matthias
Hi Matthias
I think it’s a personal thing - some people hate some RSS feeds that supply the full text, as they prefer to scan the headlines and the first few words!
You can’t please all of the people all of the time, I guess!
Timothy Appnel suggests we should offer a choice of feeds: http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2002/11/19/rssfeedquality.html?page=2
Of course some people will take this to an extreme and offer special feeds for every aspect of their online activity…