RSS Feeds: Full / Summary Feeds? - A Solution for Both Camps

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Thursday, October 20, 2005

I wouldn’t re-hash popular arguments for / against providing full RSS feeds here. I would just like to point out a simple capability with most RSS readers, I have tested with, that can be leveraged to keep both camps happy. Interestingly the solution comes from the other extreme alternative.

Solution
I realized popular RSS readers like FeedReader / Newzcrawler etc. displays the entire page if absolutely no content is provided in the feed. So essentially if you just provide the headlines only with no summary or content then the actual linked page is displayed instead. This is the crux of the solution.

The feed item would look like:

<item>
<title>Dinosaur Swam for Its Dinner</title>
<link>https://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,106698809,1439,f/</link>
</item>

Challenge
RSS view port is cramped and is not an equivalent of internet browser. However it is possible to create an alternative view suitable for RSS viewers which can be passed in RSS feeds instead of the actual page.

How would Google Blog Search like it? I don’t know. It needs to be explored. However if enough people adopt this then they will be forced to modify their strategy.

Who uses it?
Scientific American

However I am not sure if are doing it intentionally because additionally they force the users to jump through an advert page like salon (though less painful than salon) and have advert listings inserted as feed items.

Happiness Defined
It keeps both camps happy because:
1. Full Content groups gets to see full content in their feed readers.
2. Summary Content groups get to insert their advertisements in the display very much like a webpage. In fact at the simplest the normal webpage would simply do fine, albeit may require some scrolling. They are also happy because the bandwidth consumption is drastically reduced.

Discussion
November 30, 2005: 2:35 pm

[...] LifeHacker and other Gawker Media sites chose to avoid the RSS full feed versus summary feed controversy by deciding to provide both. They provide ad-free summarized feed and full-content feed with ads. [...]

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