Comments on: The Good, Bad and Ugly of RSS

By: doctorvee » Shove your partial feeds up your RSS

doctorvee » Shove your partial feeds up your RSS — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:01:07 +0000

[...] are reading. What would be the point if you had no way of knowing if people were reading or not. Gordon McLean (whose recent post on RSS is an interesting read) falls into this [...]

By: Lyle

Lyle — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:18:26 +0000

With regard to the TV “On demand” thing, I do think that’s something that TiVo got right, and no-one else has yet been able to mimic.

With TiVo, you ‘rated’ programmes with a thumbs-up/thumbs-down , and based on those preferences, TiVo would record random other stuff that was aligned with those preferences.

It meant that while you recorded the things you wanted, you ended up with other things that you *might* want to see. At first it was truly bizarre, but as time went on it became uncannily accurate on some things. Although it still always insisted I might want to watch “Cold Case” and “Without A Trace” – both of which I hate, and repeatedly thumbs-downed.

So, not perfect, but still better than Sky+. The EPG and interface were miles better too. Not that that’s difficult.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:15:44 +0000

“wholeness of a proper blog page”

I guess that’s down to usage. I don’t use blogs as sources of links to other random blogs (via sidebar blogrolls or whatnot), and a lot of the time I don’t do anything else other than read the content, to the point that (I think it was Adrian Sevitz) once asked if anyone had seen the changes to his site. I said no, to which he retorted that they were in a list displayed right at the top of his sidebar… which I hadn’t ever scanned across to read.

The wholeness of webpage is a downfall of most blog designs (mine included) as there is typically a split between the content and the sidebar, it’s too easy to ignore everything else which.. well that makes it kinda like an RSS feed.. no?

By: diamond geezer

diamond geezer — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:49:24 +0000

RSS feeds strip away design and force readers to focus on content. Which is great if you have good content, and a bit of a killer if you don’t.

I still prefer the wholeness of a proper blog page to being fed an endless succession of decontextualised text.

By: z

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:06:47 +0000

I changed, a while ago, to a partial feed, just to see if it made any difference to the number of visitors. Since I rarely bother to check stats, I’ve no idea if it did. I intended to switch back sometime, but you’ve prompted me. Having just looked at my stats, my visitor numbers doubled yesterday – which is probably because it was my birthday, so RSS subscribers dropped in, rather than skimming past, when they saw the post title. I think that is rather charming and friendly.

I use a RSS feed so that I know when people update. I usually click through to the site because I prefer to read the post there.