Robert Scoble’s linkblog is a wonderful idea. And, I do get quite a bit of traffic from it when he has chosen to link to me in the past, so I shouldn’t complain about it. But I’m going to anyway.
The reason I’m going to complain is that while I really love the concept of it, in practise I find it largely unusable. Why? Lack of full text posts. My guess is that Scoble himself wouldn’t subscribe to his own linkblog, as it currently stands. He has written many times about the necessity of full text posts, as he and many other people, such as myself, do the majority of their feed reading offline.
The thing that surprises me is that people actually complained about his original linkblog, where he used the full text of posts that he linked to. This is bizarre to me for a couple of reasons:
So, while I’d love to read Scoble’s linkblog, it’s totally useless to me when reading offline. And that’s a real shame.
Please note: I've moved my active blogging over to a new site, called Jason Clarke - Infinite Bass Line. I will leave this site up indefinitely, but if you're interested in my latest posts please consider visiting the new site.
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by J.P.C. » Blog Archive » Scoble’s Link Blog Going Full Text!
25 Nov 2004 at 19:43
[...] Scoble’s Link Blog Going Full Text!
by Leon Bambrick
24 Oct 2004 at 23:53
so the issue is with offline reading… is there anyway you can set an aggregator to pre-download all articles linked from a blog (maybe one or two layers deep) … this would be handy for preparing to go offline. i remember an IE feature that stored content several layers deep, so it could be read offline. Could be a good feature for an aggregator, so long as the user maintained control over it.)
by J.P. Stewart
25 Oct 2004 at 13:33
Hmm, just because I have an rss feed, does not mean I am giving permission for others to copy it. In fact, I have clearly noted my copyright in the feed itself and on my blog. When Robert WAS copying the full text entries in his blog, I warned him that he was copying copyrighted content, which is one reason why I think he stopped. I think that as you mention, its mostly a problem with offline reading and not with anything else. RSS was not built for offline reading necessarily, and was NEVER built to support full content. Some of us (me) only post full content because others bully them into doing this (even though its bad for servers, bad for bandwidth, and I think overall bad for blogging).
by Jason
25 Oct 2004 at 13:45
Wow, J.P. – I couldn’t disagree with you more. How many discoveries and inventions are being used in a completely different way than they were originally intended? The telephone was originally supposed to be a method of moving music around – not at all the communication infrastructure it became. Full-feed RSS for offline reading is in my mind even more important than the original intent of providing simple summaries and links. I think we are kidding ourselves that WiFi will be so ubiquitous in the short term that thinking about online vs. offline will become unnecessary, and therefore RSS’s ability to provide full content in an offline-friendly way is way cool – a killer application, or killer functionality, if you will.
I’m glad that you provide full-content RSS feeds. However, if I don’t happen to subscribe to your feed, and in the future link blogs don’t pick up your content because of your overzealous content restrictions, I won’t be exposed to your content. Without that exposure, I won’t have any reason to go seek it out, and potentially subscribe.
So you can decide if this is doing yourself a disservice. I firmly believe it is.
My point is simply this: I want to read your content, if it is worthy of my time. I’m willing to allow other people to make that choice for me – people who’s judgment I trust, like Scoble. But I’m not going to subscribe first and evaluate second – I just don’t have time for that.
And you mention that you were “bullied” into providing full-content feeds. If by “bullied” you mean that you are afraid people won’t read your content if you don’t give them all of it, then you’re not really being bullied at all. You’re making a choice to make your content more available, so that people will read it. If you don’t want people reposting it, go back to summaries, where it sounds like you belong.
by Jason
25 Oct 2004 at 15:46
Oh – J.P. – I just remembered you’re the XP in your car guy… (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=26133) very cool stuff!
by Chris
25 Oct 2004 at 16:04
I’m gonna have to agree with J.P.: I think full-text RSS feeds are bad for blogging. While I like reading full posts in my RSS reader too, it’s a trivial matter to have the aggregator go that extra step and open up the permalink. (In the case of FeedDemon, as you showed me, it’s just a stylesheet.) Your unique situation is that you read your content offline.
Yes, it’s exciting how much content is out there; there are some great writers with some equally great ideas. But taking that content out of the context of the blog, however, lets the reader bypass the social traits that make blogging so unique. You miss out on the design aspects of the website, you miss out on the blogroll, and you miss out on the comments. (And yes, even with Comments RSS, you’re still unable to participate in the conversation as long as you’re offline, Jason.)
I don’t think RSS, or blogging in general, is about consuming as much content as possible. (I don’t think it’s about consuming content, period.) It seems to me that the best of blogging promotes social connedctions, not mass-distribution publishing alternatives. Some people have found great distribution uses for RSS (like podcasting), but it’s the connecting of people that’s the real interesting part — taking people away from blogs, and reading other people’s content as if it were a newspaper, is a real step backwards.
by Jason
25 Oct 2004 at 17:06
Far be it for me to accuse you of being idealistic, Chris (har, har), but in this case I think we must respectfully agree to disagree. The newspaper analogy is a good thing, not bad. Instead of elevating blogging to a special status (people connector instead of publishing alternative), I prefer to think fo blogging as the best of both worlds.
I personally enjoy being able to consume a lot of content from a lot of very intelligent people (like yourself and J.P.), and for me that is only possible with an RSS reader that is extremely streamlined and strips away all that extra fluff that I don’t need. Because, at the end of the day, any given blog is about the content first, and the rest of that stuff (blogroll, design / layout, comments) second.
When reading my feeds offline, I have a method of bookmarking anything that is interesting so I can revisit it when I have a net connection. I think this makes my time online more efficient, and still brings me directly to the content that I believe is worthy of my time. And even if I was to be reading online all the time, I’d still prefer to read the stripped down feed. Why? Because I can choose my preferred font and text size. I can read twice as fast when these thing are optimized for my eyes.
When the web started, HTML was devised as a way to provide markup to content that allows the end user to still control how it looks. A paragraph mark might make a large, small, or no space between paragraphs. Marking text as strong might make it bold, or do something else depending on a users’s browser settings. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing!
The “designers” of the world want to tell me how I should consume content. I’ll admit, I spend a not insignificant amount of time thinking about how my blog looks. But really, all I care about is whether or not people can read it, and read it how, when and where they want to. Don’t you want to be empowered?
by J.P. Stewart
27 Oct 2004 at 15:02
Jason, you do have a point, I must respect that, but there are a few things that I would add to the discussion:
I dont think that we will have to worry about online versus offline in the long term. At some point, as long as you have your pc/pda/phone/(mp3 player?) you will be online. I DO agree that its a problem today (although more for some than others), and I do agree that looking where you can use existing items and use them differently is important, I dont agree that people should complain about rss the way it is today without making something else from it. For instance, why not create a different protocol (or at least a different revision which is more feature driven towards full text feeds…there are many things that could be added to the protocol that would aid when feeds have the full text…various formatting constructs for instance)? I dont disagree with that part of your argument, I just disagree with forcing RSS (which was not meant to be what its used for today) to do this.
In my particular case, I have written a rather sophisticated security mechanism that integrates with my blog which controls down to a word exactly what a visitor can read. In the world today, since RSS aggregators do not support cookies (or some other form of passive recognition….username and password don’t work because they can be passed off to someone else), I can not allow any protected content into RSS feeds, and it is just removed, but in the future, lets say that there was a way to integrate a good security identification mechanism into aggregators, then robert’s full text broadcast mechanism would be violating this security and this trust. Sure I realize that copy and paste on the webpage can do the same thing…there are almost always ways around things, the question is the intent and how easy it is to do. Ok, I am too off topic for my own good.
I suppose I could summarize each of those by saying: 1. Full text feeds may have a place on the internet, and thats fine, but why can’t they have their own protocol rather than messing up what rss already provides? And, 2. Systems which are designed to automatically syndicate others owned (and in some cases private ….ever seen wordpress and moveable type blogs with passwords?) content make it way too easy to violate that relationship.
There are a bunch of other numerical based arguments I have about storage and bandwidth, but I have already blogged about that and I am already far enough off topic, so I will stop.
Re: Car, Thanks! Its been a fun project.
J.P.
by Glen Trainor
02 Nov 2004 at 16:23
Jason,
I was reading wil wheaton dot net feed and realized that I had read his most recent entries and never visited his page, never gave his site and his advertisers my eyeballs to count.
There was never the potential for me to click thru an ad.
An opportunity was lost for me to go buy his book from Amazon.
The full feed robbed WWdN of $.
Glen
by Jason
02 Nov 2004 at 16:33
Glen – that may well be. On the other hand, you realized, and probably then did click through to his site. Would you have been reading his feed as religiously had you not been subscribed? Would you remember to go back every day to see if there was something new?
Okay, that’s not fair, since he could provide a partial text feed. But I subscribed to Wil’s feed when it was only a partial feed, and I have to admit that I rarely took the time to click through to his site to actually read his stories. Not because they’re not good, quite the contrary, but because I had other great content already in my feed reader, which didn’t necessitate me clicking through to a browser.
I would argue that there are other people, like me, that would not read Wil’s stuff with nearly as much regularity if it weren’t for his full-text RSS feed. Yes, that means people don’t see his site every day. But it means that more people have him and his writing in their consciousness, and when they do click through to his site, it will be with purpose.
[Bad analogy alert!!!] (my wife informs me that my analogies usually suck!)
What if we only got to hear excerpts from songs on the radio? That would be like a partial-text RSS feed. Useful, but in a limited fashion. Hearing the whole song is like a full-text feed – much more useful, but still lacking in context and quality (not CD quality, no CD liner notes, etc). I will listen to way more songs on the radio than I will actually seek out the CD for. But had I not heard it on the radio, would I ever seek it out?
by Glen
02 Nov 2004 at 16:50
Your wife was right
That song on the radio is paid for, and its followed by an ad or two.
Where we differ is on why sites allow feeds. Through the goodness of their hearts so that their message may be proliferated. Or as an attempt to pull eyes to their site.
I’m of the mind that the majority want the latter.
And in your case stated above a full feed gives me your offline eyeballs – which are absolutely useless to a commercial site.
by Jason
02 Nov 2004 at 16:56
But you miss my point, which is that before you deserve eyeballs, you need to deserve attention. If you make it easy for me to always pay attention to you (by providing a full-text feed), I will be more likely to arrive at your site.
I visit Wil’s site regularly, just not every time I read his content. He has a bunch of cool links and stuff, which make it still worth checking. My point is that Wil Wheaton wouldn’t be in my consciousness as a possible net destination if I didn’t read his stuff regularly. And when I didn’t read it in my RSS reader, I didn’t visit there either.
As a reader, or “consumer” of content, if you will, you need to treat me with respect by allowing me to consume your content in the format that I choose. If you don’t, I’ll choose someone else. Yes, I’m a small minority, but I believe a leading edge one. Scoble and Sean Bonner, two very popular and influential bloggers both have spoken out on this issue in this same way. As people become more sophisticated at consuming online content, many of the most important and influential personalities on the web will lean this way.
by Glen
02 Nov 2004 at 17:30
“If you make it easy for me to always pay attention to you (by providing a full-text feed), I will be more likely to arrive at your site.”
What you said works well with the term “partial feed” in those brackets. And I don’t you to always pay attention. I want your attention now.
The masses are a lot different than those few with 80+ feeds and an USB port implanted in their temple. Respect is a “brand” that will work for some some sites and perhaps your “sophisticated users” but not others. Hooks, lures, and headlines work for most and get the majority of eyeballs to the site at the first attempt. Its a lot more efficient, gets more traffic and builds a bigger base.
You are part of that base, but you are not enough.
I got your point but I believe that the partial feed is the attention or the teaser to get you to my site. The onus is on me to get you there. I, as a commercial site have to compose an attractive enough opener to get you to visit as often as possible. As a commercial site, I can’t afford to leave it up to you. Providing a full feed to be read off or on-line, I take a risk that you won’t come, ever. To cater to you the minorty in a process that is as fledging as it is, is too big of a risk to take. In fact accomodating your needs hurts my potential. I’ll risk losing you in order to get 10 more.
Syndicated news for other sites is a prime example. I co-run a site (maybe you’ve heard of it
) that offers others to post my headlines on their site as “news.” I have to make sure that those headlines are sexy enough to pull people through to my site. I’m not going to give my full articles to another site to post within their pages as a sign of respect to their readers that eventually they will come. I don’t want them to come out of respect 1 out of 20 times or 10x or 2x. I want them there every single time. Whether I deserve it or not.
Its a matter of economics, not respect. Unless of course Respect is a brand or image that I’m selling. Then, it’s a matter of economics.
by Jason
02 Nov 2004 at 17:52
Don’t underestimate the masses: http://www.cluetrain.com
The reality is that there is a TON of good content on the internet. And not only that, but there is a TON of quality content that is of interest to ME (or YOU, or whoever).
There are a few different factors that people consider when deciding what content to consume: quality, relevance and accessibility are the top three, in my opinion. The thing is, nowadays quality and relevance are a wash, since there’s so much other quality, relevant content available. So the next deciding factor is accessibility. How easy are you going to make it for me to reach your content? Does it cost money directly? You lose consumers if it does. Is it in my language? You lose consumers if it’s not. Does it come to me ready to consume? If not, YOU LOSE CONSUMERS.
People are getting more sophisticated, and more cynical. You state that you “don’t want me to always pay attention, you want my attention now” (emphasis added by me). Unfortunately, to a seasoned (cynical) consumer, I’m put off by that attitude. I don’t think you, or anyone, deserve my attention when you want it, but rather ought to earn yourself access to it.
You’re right, that right now most people don’t consume 125 RSS feeds regularly.
But they will.
I simply have too much good content available to me to bother jumping through your hoops, and eventually everyone will realize that.
Let me ask you this: When’s the last time you saw a popup window on a site that you frequently visit? I can’t remember the last time, because I simply WON’T TOLERATE POPUPS. I don’t care how good your site is, if you work hard to pop something up in my face that I didn’t want to see, I’m gone.
It’s about empowering the consumer, because they will realize they have a choice.
by Glen Trainor
03 Nov 2004 at 13:37
To quote Morrisey “How Soon is now?” Now is not when I want you to. Now is when you choose to read the headline. Thats when I want you to come.
Heres a quote from a blog I subscribe to “… bloggers should still pay attention to the very real lessons that are to be learned from the traditional news media, particularly the print media.
Readers are trained to scan headlines first, and this holds true more than you may realize when it comes to blogs. Many people subscribe to literally hundreds of blogs through RSS feeds. They can’t realistically read each and every post, so they scan. They scan the titles of the posts, or headlines, to be exact.”
It is this majority that a site is trying to capture. Hook them as they scan and pull them to the site. There is minimal benefit, and great risk to posting the whole article.
by Idetrorce
15 Dec 2007 at 07:53
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you Idetrorce