A blog and nothing but since 2003. Some tech, lots of music, and if rambling was money, drinks are on me.
Where the wild reads grow
There’s a decision that comes along with being a site administrator: do you give people the partial post in the RSS feed and make them come to your site to read the full article/post, or do you give them the full post in the RSS feed, letting them read it entirely in the reader?
Contrary to what a lot of people think, the choice to include a partial post is not just to boost traffic numbers. It’s much more about design and knowing that readers would get more out of the post if it was read in the design it was meant to and with the full functionality of the site. Plus, the traffic thing helps gauge whether or not the audience is interested.
Still, I know that a lot of people prefer to do all of their reading without having to leave a reader, which is why I changed my feeds to show the full post. Also, I decided I preferred to operate in relative ignorance of your interest in what I’m writing about.
But I’m curious: what’s your preference? Does it bother you to have to click over to the site, or do you find that you click over anyway? To try and get an accurate count, I put together another one of them Google forms, which I always expect to be cooler than they are. But thoughts are welcome in the comments as well.
Partly to use more of the Google Docs functionality and partly to kind of make my point about how you miss things in RSS feeds, here’s a pie chart of the results:
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July 8th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Maybe instead you could just post all my other RSS feeds here on your site. Then you’d still get my traffic, and I’d still get to read all my feeds in one place, while experiencing the better design and functionality. Sounds like a win-win to me.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Believe me: if I had the coding skills, that’s exactly what I’d do.
Thing is, I’m not out to “get traffic”. Again, whatever itch I have to make people come to my site to read the full post is only to get an idea of what you find interesting enough to click over to.
I’ve actually started clicking over more often, just because I can be sure that, on the site itself, it’s going to be formatted properly and have all the features of the site that the author/site own intends. It’s convenient to read a feed without having to click over, but you lose quite a lot.
It’s an interesting topic to me, as much professionally as personally. People getting their information via RSS is still a relatively new way to communicating: content providers give content only and the the public decides how they want it displayed. You could easily compare websites to newspapers and blogs to columns, but RSS/XML feeds really have no other media comparison.
Fascinating stuff. Not the last time I’ll write about it.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I’d like to set this up again. Know of any good RSS readers for Windows Mobile? I haven’t checked, but I think I can get this on that Kindle thing for a small fee (yes, I’d be willing to pay for it).
On the other hand, maybe we can cut out the middle man and I could just call and you could read it to me for a dollar or two.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:51 am
I tried various readers awhile ago for Windows Mobile (can’t remember their names) and wasn’t impressed - they were just to memory hoggish and clunky. Now I just have the homepage of my mobile browser go to google reader - which is nice because I don’t have to set it up or anything (not to mention being synched with what I already have), and their mobile web format is easy to read and keep track of (but you have to like having all your feeds in one list - not bad for quick checking updates though)