RSS Feeds -- Your Take

1. Natalie said:

I use Bloglines (online via the browser) to keep me updated with whats new on the websites I visit that have feeds. It does the job, but in around 80% of cases I will visit the actual website to get the entire article, images or read people’s comments.

I think sites that offer a choice of full or summary RSS are doing the right thing, giving your end-user a choice of coming to your site, or using a reader is really ideal.

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:14 AM | #

3. Benedikt said:

I use the Sage plugin for Firefox. I always keep it open as a sidebar on the left (my display is 1400px wide, so there are no space problems with most sites). At the moment I don’t use summaries/full text at all. If there is something new on Asterisk (or any other site) I’ll just check it out. But I have to admit that if I there were more than 20-25 pages in my news reader, I would find summaries useful. That way I wouldn’t have to visit every website to see if the new content is worth reading.

I hardly use feeds for sperate categories or topic groups, although I sometimes find feeds for comments quite useful as well as some special feeds (ig. iTunes New Releases).

Ads in feeds? Well, I usually don’t like ads, but if there are done in a decent way (like the ones between articles and comments on Asterisk ;-) )…

My favourite (and only) news reader is Sage. I never used stand alone readers, because for me news feeds are somehting that makes checking websites for new content easier and is therefore a feature I need in my browser/while browsing.

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:35 AM | #

5. Bogdan Manolache said:

For more than a week now I use NewsGator, a news reader for Outlook. It is great and I have added all the blogs I read. But I still use the websites … I get noticed for new posts and only the excerpts are displyed. If I am interrested in that post I have a link next to that post’s title to open the real page in outlook. This way I know when new posts appear and also enjoy the design of the website (being a designer myself I really enjoy that part). Is there any RSS reader better than NewsGator?

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:42 AM | #

7. Abhay S. Kushwaha said:

My first aggregator was Bloglines.com but I moved to FeedDemon soon afterwards. The past month, since moving to Linux, I’m on liferea.

I appreciate full-text posts in RSS feeds. Whenever something interesting comes along, I visit the site for more information, comments, etc. Not otherwise. Not enough time to visit the sites and read all the posts… I think full-text feed is the right spirit for general content feeds.

I don’t like truncated/summary feeds. People generally are not good at writing meta content for their posts. Plus, their blog’s trucation limit might be too low – I come across many posts where the summary doesn’t even touch the topic properly. I appreciate these only for news-related blogs.

I have seen ads in RSS feeds. My personal take on advertising is this: Whenever I come across something interesting and valuable, I visit the site anyway for more. When I’m there, I make it a point to click on an ad – there’s always something interesting. :) I don’t like ads in feeds though - I find them distracting.

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:57 AM | #

9. Alex said:

I use Bloglines on a daily basis and found it to be very comfortable. I have stopped wandering through poorly organized bookmarks and sometimes even desperately trying to remember some site I really liked. You should definitely give Bloglines a try.

As for ads in RSS, eWeek has an advert in almost any of its feeds, for example. Definitely against this.

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:58 AM | #

11. daniel harvey said:

I used Amphetadesk before switching over to Bloglines. I think newsreaders have to be web-based to be truly effective. My feed list currently has 80 subscriptions (the majprity of which are accessible to the public both through bloglines and via my blogroll) and honestly, if I didn’t read them through a reader I’d never get through half of them regardless of how great the content or the site is. There’s just not enough time in the day.

That said, the posts that catch my eye have a gravity. For example, just earlier today I came here to Asterisk to read/blog the posts about web mistakes and SEO. Obviously I came here as well to respond to this post.

RSS readers do decrease the time browsing a site but I’m not entirely convinced they dramatically reduce the time spent actually reading/participating in a site. Does that make sense?

Posted on August 31, 2004 01:01 AM | #

13. KMB said:

I am using Bloglines as well, because it (like other news readers I suppose) makes scanning feeds for preferred content so much faster. You can switch between the feeds of your choice within seconds and it loads faster (being mostly text and the feeds already grabbed from the site), too (which is probably the cause for it loading faster).

My own usage of the feeds is scanning the first lines of the entry and if I like what read I open the link to the entry in a new tab and completely read it there.

Oh and please don’t do ads in your feed. It would totally ruin the ‘flava’ of rss-feeds in my mind.

Posted on August 31, 2004 01:10 AM | #

15. Meitar Moscovitz said:

I use my RSS aggregator almost as much as I use my Web browser. Since I have a Windows laptop, I use SharpReader, while on my iMac I use NetNewsWire Lite. I am looking forward to ThinReader as a cross-platform, open-source news reader.

I like to think of my news reader as an alternative web browser of sorts that gives me content-only web pages, much like the way the Web was back in the early nineties. I enjoy the fact that I can instantly “browse” literally hundreds of sites by clicking one refresh button on my news reader and have access to any new content of interest: that, I believe, was the whole point of RSS!

The first thing I did when I discovered the technology was unsubscribe myself from every single newsletter subscription that had an RSS feed as an alternative. It’s more effecient, more interesting and keeps my email correspondence clean. I used to use filters and “rules” in my email client to get those newsletters funneled into their own folders. Now, my RSS aggregator has rightfully taken over that role, and it does the job a whole lot better.

I am rather annoyed that there are so many different formats for RSS. NetNewsWire Lite doesn’t support Atom, for example. But, I digress.

As far as how I like to read posts: I appreciate full-text feeds because I don’t want to keep switching between my browser and my news reader. It’s not really that big a deal, though. Many of my 200+ subscriptions publish only summaries, but then so did the newsletters I got so I don’t feel like I’m losing anything.

Blogs are a different story, however. I very much dislike blogs without full post feeds because of the content-rich nature of blogs. While I can appreciate the argument that I may be missing the “design” of a blog when I read its text-only newsfeed, I like to think that the content of that text is the most important element of the blog.

Furthermore, in my mind it is analogous to the difference between reading a novel and watching a movie made from the novel: the book (the text-only newsfeed) is always more enthralling specifically because I am not distracted by the design or the full-blown web page. Blogs are frequently chock-full of links. Blogrolls, badges and buttons, comments, navigation to the rest of the site, permalinks, links within the post and more. The newsfeeds I get, thankfully, strip out almost all of that and leave just the meat of the matter: the content. Besides, links in the content is what I’m really after, since navigation in a news reader isn’t to other parts of the same site, but to other feeds.

As for ads, as you can probably guess, I would hate them to appear in news feeds, and I don’t really think that needs too much explaining. Besides, this has become rather long for a comment anyway. :)

Love your blog, by the way. Both the content and the design.

Posted on August 31, 2004 01:18 AM | #

17. André said:

I do use feedreaders to read news on websites, but I also visit them. It happens quite often, that I read it first in my newsreader and revisit the news on the page later. Especially if it is a long article.
Sometimes you really have to visit the page, i.e. some rss feeds of photoblogs only offer the comment on the photo but not the photo itself.

I’m fine with a short teaser text. I don’t need the full text in my newsreader.

Feeds for separate categories can be helpfull. Depends on the category.

Feeds for separate comments I’ve never used, but I think it can be usefull sometimes.

I’m sceptical about Ads in news feeds. I wolud expect that they can be clearly identified via the subject. If this is the case, who would read them?
BTW: I recall having seen it.

I haven’t used too many newsreaders. Currently I’m using Feedreader. But I’m not too happy with it.
Checked Newgator and intraVnews. Both can be used within Outlook. But I think I like having a separate programm for news feeds, not mixing up with my mail client.

Best regards
André

Posted on August 31, 2004 02:10 AM | #

19. Anol said:

I use FeedDemon to read 150+ blogs per day. Without RSS there is no way I could possibly relish all these sites. When a particular post attract my attention, I visit the actual post, go through the comments and Trackbacks. I also use w.bloggar as offline blogging tool, which works nicely with FeedDemon, making my blogging life very easy.

About advertising in RSS feed, as a blogger I know that apart from Movable Type, Asterisk as well as many other blogs are powered by lots of time stolen from other important things of life. If you are getting something out of it, even as a token, I do not think anyone should have a problem with that.

Also thanks for giving such a variety of choices of RSS feed, really appreciate that.

Posted on August 31, 2004 02:17 AM | #

21. Dave Meehan said:

Feed snippet size depends on the reader, not the producer. We are all different, have varying amounts of time to get the news we want, and varying reasons for doing so.

As a minimum, a site should provide one feed, preferably containing full article text. RSS is about syndication, and that should mean full article syndication. In the publishing world, syndication might mean an abridged version of an article, but this is not usually truncated, but specifically rewritten for a shorter narative.

People consume RSS for different reasons. Some people use it as a ‘change’ log for a website, and a title is enough. Other people like some of the content on a site, and use summaries to decide whether to delve deeper, and some people read everything a site produces, and there a full article is probably right, although in some cases those people might well just follow the link to the webpage version because there is supplemental info (or just the page layout) that makes long content more accessible.

What I do find funny is that most websites produce seperate feed resources when they publish alternative views. What’s wrong with a parameter? mysite.com/feed.rss?content=synopsis for example, instead of mysite.com/synopsis.rss. Most Rss feeds are dynamically produced, so this aids site maintenance.

Of course there may be other reasons for sites producing less or more in their feeds. If the site relies on advertising for revenue, and that advertising is not carried in the feed, you would be as well to only include titles or abstracts in the feed so you ensure for relevant content you gain some advertising revenue (and that should be worth more because you’ve filtered the consumer to suit the content).

Generally though, I’ll woe the day when sites start putting adverts in RSS. I just don’t think its relevant, and the above method is a practical alternative.

Finally, some sites use RSS as a bandwidth reduction scheme. That was my angle when I started. I could delivery 10 times the RSS in the same bandwidth as the webpage, which was a very useful benefit. Also, as my page doesn’t change frequently, once someone is subscribed to the feed its easier to get return visits as you have a useful notification mechanism thats probably more powerful than email mailing lists.

Posted on August 31, 2004 02:34 AM | #

23. Gabriel Mihalache said:

My ideal feed would be one where the author publishes just the excerpt on the feed and then I’d go to the page if I’m interested. The disadvantage is that most people can’t or won’t take the time to write the excerpt themselves, so we end up with the first 40 words of the full entry, which might end up not even touching the subject. This being said, if you don’t do excerpts, I’d rather you publish the entire feed. YMMV

Posted on August 31, 2004 03:16 AM | #

25. Hermann said:

It took quite a while to get myself into the feed world. I hated the idea of not visiting the page of the creator, not because that way he’d loose hits, but because feeds are so inpersonal.

But as my list of daily reads grew bigger I was forced to try them out. I must say as a site owner, that most people (like myself) just use the feedreaders as notifiers and mostly read the articles at the page itself. I tend to read the first lines of the post, and if interests me I’ll continue reading at the authors page.

A variety of choices of feeds is always a good idea, because not everyone uses feedreaders that support all the different kinds.

It’s also good because some people, like me, only read the first parts of the posts at the feedreader. So there is no use in sending the whole article.

The more the better.

Posted on August 31, 2004 03:24 AM | #

27. Dave Marks said:

I use SharpReader (www.sharpreader.net) as my feed reader. Its a great little app thats free :)

I have a whole bunch of sites that i like to be notified of when they update.

I much prefer to read an article on the relevent website, but i like to have the full article in the feed - that way if its short, i’ll probably read it right there, if i’m not sure whether its relevent, i can scan a few headings etc to get a feel for whether its gonna interest me, or if indeed i’ve read about it somewhere else.

Oh and what really bugs me is the way some updates are done. Ideally i think you should have an UPDATED: link at the top of the page/feed. So i know you’ve added something as oppossed to fixing a typo - Not occusing yourself, but for example meyerweb - if eric puts an update on the post, i have to go to the site to see if its been updated, or just tinkered with. Its all about getting as much info as possible in the shortest amount of time :)

I appreciate the way that photomatt for instance seperates his asides and similarly Dave Shea’s dailies… if i’m not interested in these i can chose not to subscribe to them and prevent getting bogged down, missing the articles i want to read!

I don’t think ad’s in the feed would bother me, assuming they don’t get in the way and are clearly seperated - a hr or something.

Posted on August 31, 2004 03:59 AM | #

29. Totoro said:

I prefer full text feeds, so I can read entire articles without opening the full site. This way I stay focused on the article, it’s fast and efficient.
I also like when “serious” and “personal” artciles are separated. As a webdesigner when I subscribe to a feed I expect to read about web things, not about cats and dogs :)

Posted on August 31, 2004 04:26 AM | #

31. John Serris said:

I have all my regular reads added to bloglines, but I only use it for a quick glance at whats new. I usually click on the web link when I see something interesting. I prefer looking at the actual web site.

Posted on August 31, 2004 04:45 AM | #

33. Aleksandar said:

FeedDemon here (I don’t nearly use it as much it is capable of).

When I encounter some new web site, I mostly first read it through the browser, from time to time. Then, if I see a worthwhile content that could benefit me on daily basis, then I add it to FD. I check daily, and mostly read all I add.

I prefer good sumaries (something I rarely do properly for my own blog) and prefer to read posts in a browsers.
However, I reallu like it when people put links in summaries, so I can click on whatever they talk about. I usually click on both the post link and in-post links.

Posted on August 31, 2004 05:00 AM | #

35. Ste Grainer said:

I use Bloglines to read feeds, but I usually read actual posts on the website they’re from. A few things I like about Bloglines over a simple service like blo.gs:

- I can mark feeds unread if I don’t have time to read them or want to remind myself to read them later.
- I can “sync” what I’ve read between home to work. Since Bloglines is web-based, it remembers the state of things I’ve read on any computer. (Syncing is what keeps me from using a software-based feed reader - I got tired of having to mark items in NetNewsWire that I’d already read. Luckily, the next version reportedly supports this feature.)

How I “do” it:

I leave a tab open in Firefox all the time to Bloglines (at home and at work). It refreshes automatically every hour. Whenever I get a spare moment between projects, I’ll check any new posts. A lot of the feeds I have are news-related so I can quickly skim the news without committing myself to a single news site. If an article is particularly interesting or longer than I feel I have time to read, I’ll mark it unread (this is where I have an issue with Bloglines; you can only mark a feed unread, not an individual item) and catch up to it when I get home.

I have my feeds divided up into several categories to make things easier: Technology, Design, Personal, General, Photos, Mac, Quick, and Comics. (Quick, for me, is the “remaindered links” and short links that so many weblogs have these days.)

Posted on August 31, 2004 05:22 AM | #

37. Eli Sarver said:

I use feedonfeeds, and I grab your ‘every entry’ feed. I don’t really care if a ‘tech’ site talks about real life, and isn’t that what weblogging is all about?

Feedonfeeds is nice because I can access it anywhere, while still protecting it via apache directives. Also, no software to tote around, so it’s truly portable. And when I find something new to add, I don’t have to remember it for later.

I mostly read the articles in RSS, and if they promise more content, I click through to the site.

Posted on August 31, 2004 05:23 AM | #

39. Dave Mead said:

I’m fairly new to using RSS feeds and have found Bloglines to be really good. It offers a notifier that sits at the bottom of Mozilla and I just click on that to see who’s updated and if I want to read the whole piece I’ll visit the site.

It also has a nice add feed feature with a right-click.

I’m not sure if I’ll progress to something like Feed Demon but I know that ads in feeds would turn me off. Using Bloglines definitely saves me time now I don’t have to visit each site in case it’s been updated.

Dave

Posted on August 31, 2004 05:38 AM | #

41. geeky said:

I use FeedDemon for my feeds, and have 3 “Channels” or groups of feeds - my Web Development group (which you are in), my Tech News group, and my Other News group. Personally, I find it easier to keep up with the web development community if I read via RSS.

I’m currently using your summaries feed, and I like it. It’s enough to give me an idea of what you’re talking about and if I should read it. I would say about 75% of the time I click through to your site. As far as ads in RSS feeds go, I don’t think I would mind as long as they were clearly separated from the content and something tasteful like the google ads.

That being said, I do still read all my personal blog reads without RSS. I like seeing the designs and the other bits of personality you don’t get with an RSS feed.

Posted on August 31, 2004 05:54 AM | #

43. Waylman said:

I use the RSS Reader pluging for Firefox. I tried a Newsreader but never liked reading the content outside of the site so I went back. I like having the list of updated feeds in the sidebar. This way I never need to switch between windows to go back and forth between feeds and the actual sites.

As such I never use either summarys or full articles in the feeds. I just note which sites have been updated, get a list of new entries and bring them up knowing nothing more than the title.

Considering my approach, I don’t imagine I would ever see any ads added to your feeds unless they were added as another entry/article. This would cause my reader to indicate you have knew content and unless the title of the entry clearly indicated it was just an ad (which would be annoying enough in itself) I would come to your site expecting some new content to only find some ads that I normaly ignore anyway. That would be extremely annoying and could cause me to remove your site from my list no matter how good the real content is.

Now if you imbedded the ads into the body of the content/summary I would never see them and could care less. Other’s however, might feel differently.

As far as different feeds for different content - I like one feed that lists all new articles for a site regardless of subject. If a particlar article doesn’t interest me, I just ignore it, but I still want to know it’s there, that I have the option to read it. Which reminds me: Didn’t you use to have “SOW:” appended to the title of your Song of the Weeks entries in the feed (maybe on the site too)? I miss that in the feed. That way I always knew what to expect. How about adding a few more like “WEB:” or “Personal:” or something like that? It’s just an idea, maybe even a bad one.

Posted on August 31, 2004 06:36 AM | #

45. kyle said:

I’ve tried a bunch of rss readers, but none really did what I wanted. I finally settled on the php based feed on feeds which I’ve customized to my own liking.

I use it for the majority of the sites I visit. I prefer full text (because if it gets to be a burden I can just edit the source and implement a “See More” button. I find it especially useful for link feeds. I have all the feeds on one page, and just open up anything for further reading in a new tab.

Posted on August 31, 2004 06:59 AM | #

47. Joel LaTondress said:

• FeedReader
• One feed with summaries
• Text only ads would be acceptable

I prefer to read my feeds in the layout the author intended, so I generally scan the feed and if interested, open the site in FeedReader’s content pane.

Posted on August 31, 2004 07:13 AM | #

49. Ram Yoga said:

I generally use a feed-reader as a notification service, and read sites via a browser. I like having the choice of subscribing to full posts but I generally go for the summaries as that suits me better.

I go through the summaries in my feed-reader and read the most interesting posts first. – This all depends on what I have time for. Sometimes I don’t have the time to read a long post, and I’ll mark it as unread, and come back to it later.

I don’t like having feeds for different categories, although I see this might be useful. I guess the reason for this is that I don’t want more feeds in the reader than neccesary. I already have 40 subscriptions… And I keep finding interesting sites to read. :) I therefore prefer to keep all content from one site in one feed.

Ads via RSS? I’d prefer not to get ads in feeds, but I also understand the need for authors to have a way of earning some money. Text-only ads that are as discrete as possible would be my suggestion. But not having any would be better. ;-)

My feed-reader of choice is NetNewsWire. RSS has definitely changed the way I surf. In general I read many more sites than I used to, and I seem to be finding more interesting content. The problem now is being able to actually read all the interesting stuff I find!

Posted on August 31, 2004 07:46 AM | #

51. Nick Finck said:

I use FeedDemon at home after hours, but Blo.gs during the day. In both cases I don’t actually read the material via the RSS feed. Instead I prefer to skim it (i.e. I wish these were summaries instead of full articles) and then if it is of interest I will click on the link and read the material on the site with the added design (i.e. improved readability, better fonts, better typography, etc.).

No, I would not stop reading the site if you didn’t offer full text. But note, there is a difference between partial text and summaries. I prefer summaries.

Personally I don’t come to your site for the music and movie info. I come to it for the web design and web industry related info. So ya, it would be nice to have a fead without all that other stuff… but that’s just my personal preference.

Ads via RSS, don’t go there. Yes, it would bother me. I mean, I love the idea of independent web designers making a living off this and I support you as much as I can, but RSS was never intended to deliver ads or anything outside of standard information (i.e. text and links). Asside from if it can be done or should it be done, I think there is also some issues of if you do it, what benefit does the feed actually have. You have to think of the goals of your RSS feed from the standpoint as if you invented RSS and were running on your site to serve a specific need. To me, that need is to distribute information, not design, not graphics, and certainly not ads.

I use FeedDemon and Blo.gs and I love them. I have accounts everywhere else but those other sites seems to be poorly organized, not well maintained (hello! data cleansing anyone???), so I don’t use them for that reason.

I almost view them as a email newsletter. A text stream of news and information, delivered on demand when something new is published. So, I guess I should note that I “hate” it when I see people editing old entries and all the sudden their blogging software marks that RSS entry as new.. what’s up with that?

Posted on August 31, 2004 07:56 AM | #

53. Kevin H. Stecyk said:

• FeedDemon
• Much prefer full text over summaries
• For blogs, I prefer seeing everything as opposed to categories
• prefer to see no ads, but would not stop reading with only text ads

With RSS feeds I can quickly read blogs. Those blogs that have not posted any new material don’t slow me down. Those blogs that have posted new material can quickly and easily be read. With Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon, I am able to quickly read important news stories and follow those blogs that interest me.

I believe that RSS feeds will grow in popularity. The NY Times, Wall Street Journal Online, and Washington Post are just some examples of major news organizations that are providing their readers with RSS feeds. As more people understand how to use RSS feeds and appreciate its time savings, RSS feeds will likely grow dramatically.

Posted on August 31, 2004 08:06 AM | #

55. Sarah said:

I use Bloglines as well for my RSS reader. I like being able to use the browser to read the feeds and not have to go between two applications.

My process is slightly different from what has been said. I view the new posts in Bloglines first and read the title and the summary or skim the post. I tend to like good summaries the best. If I want to read more, I right click and open the post in a new tab. Then I go on to the next new item and do the same. Often I’ll end up having a bunch on tabs open in my browser and throughout the day I’ll go through them and read the sites as I have time. It serves as both a reminder to read that site and I also like being on the actual website. Also, this way I have cleared up the reader so that I know when there is new content throughout the day when I am notified by the Bloglines notifier.

I supposed if I had a ton of sites in my reader like some people, I could end up having 50 tabs open if I did it this way. But for now it works.

Posted on August 31, 2004 08:08 AM | #

57. Keith said:

Whoa, y’all blow me away at times. I posted this, went to bed and expected a few responses when I got up. Not this many though! Wow.

Thanks so much for the feedback and participating in this. It’ll take me a bit to get through it all, but this kind of stuff really helps me make Asterisk as good as it can be. Keep it coming and, again, thanks–you’re the best!

Posted on August 31, 2004 08:38 AM | #

59. Roger Johansson said:

I use NetNewsWire Lite to keep track of when the sites I read have been updated, then just press right arrow to open each interesting post/article in a new tab in Safari. After I’ve gone through all new headlines, I switch to Safari and read them, dragging any items of interest to a folder on my desktop.

I haven’t tried any of the web based feed reader thingies yet. Maybe I’ll do that some day.

Whether the feeds contain full posts or summaries doesn’t matter to me, just as long as I can decide whether the post is interesting or not. I read everything in my browser anyway. Feeds that contain nothing but a headline for each post are no good though.

Posted on August 31, 2004 09:13 AM | #

61. Justin said:

I go Bloglines all the way, I know there’s probably better feed readers out there (via plug-ins or desktop apps) but then you’re constrained to the computer you happened to read the feed on.

I like to be able to browse new updates on my Windows PC at home, then go to work and browse updates there too… without having to sort through entries I already read at home. I also jump over to my Linux machine and enjoy seeing already read entries marked as read without having to do anything. Web-based feed readers all the way baby.

As for *how* I read my feeds, I always, always go to the source for my reading. I don’t like feeds that offer full-text of the entry because then I have to scroll down the page to see if there is more than one entry.

Posted on August 31, 2004 09:34 AM | #

63. erica said:

i also use bloglines, and in a way very similar to several people here. i like it because i use three to four different computers throughout the day, and bloglines is web-based. i have my subscriptions organized by categories. usually i read news items right in the bloglines interface, but i visit the blogs in another tab to read the full posts.

people often post things like pictures, sidebar links, or your “song of the week” that you can only see by going to the actual site. and after missing a couple redesigns because i read the posts in bloglines, i’ve committed to actually going to the site for the ambience and to appreciate the design and other offerings.

Posted on August 31, 2004 10:39 AM | #

65. Roy said:

I use Bloglines as my news aggregator. I’m not sure how many people who say they like summaries better read more than 100+ blogs on a given day, but I *need* full text. I love the individual designs, but at the end of the day, I read for content … and the more content I can read in one place, the better. I stopped reading blogs that only offer summaries (unless they are really offering something that no one else offers) simply because of time constraints.

Back before RSS and ‘blogs’ became so mainstream, I would have to visit each site individually through a bookmarked list … and that took many many hours. Only now do I realize how great it is that I can quickly skim all 100+ blogs in about 20 minutes.

I don’t mind advertisements via RSS; it’s up to the content creator to figure out how to offset the costs of offering such a feed … so I have no qualms about it. It’s not as if it’s affecting my ability to read the content in any way …

As a side note, I was in Korea this summer, and after the Korean beheading, Korea decided to go the China-esque route and block the blogosphere (blogspot, livejournal, and typepad were all blocked). Although it was quite possible to use unipeak to visit each site, those sites that offered RSS feeds didn’t suffer … I could simply read the full-text feeds via Bloglines.

Any method of decentralizing the data … is a big plus. I think a lot of people miss this when they live in the States…

Posted on August 31, 2004 11:11 AM | #

67. tom braman said:

Bloglines, because I check RSS feeds from multiple computers. I skim swiftly, and read probably 1-2 percent of the hundreds of headlines I see each day. Makes for fast research. It’s easy to skip over headline-style ads, so I don’t mind them. Prefer excerpts to full text, as excerpts make skimming easier.

Posted on August 31, 2004 11:17 AM | #

69. Ruben said:

I use Feed on Feeds to retrieve various RSS feeds and load them into my own web site. I prefer summaries, so the full texts I also summarize myself. I want to read all posts in their own layout.

(I don’t use news feeds - I prefer Google News Alerts and e-mail newsletters, don’t know why actually)

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:04 PM | #

71. Brian Behrend said:

I switched from Sage (Firefox extension) to Bloglines about a month ago and couldn’t be more satisfied. It fits my browsing habits perfectly, as a server-based solution allows me to get the same feeds and is accurate about read/unread at the 3 or 4 computers I use daily.

For most sites (including yours) if a post is over a sentence or two long I visit the site to read it. Plus one of the main reasons I have something like 50 web design feeds is because I enjoy the aesthetics. I guess if a site looked like crap but had quality content (arstechnica.com comes to mind) I would read the post from within Bloglines.

Posted on August 31, 2004 12:53 PM | #

73. Peter (01010) said:

From reading those 71 comments it seems that:

1 Bloglines is by far the most popular reader.
2 Everyone appreciates a well-written summary or first sentence.
3 Firefox-plugin or Opera or Bloglines users like summaries.
4 Non-ffplugin/opera/blogline users are more likely to like full feeds.
5 Almost everyone clicks through to the web site.
6 Only a few just read the feeds.
7 There is opposition to ads but most people are resigned or ambivalent to them.

Posted on August 31, 2004 03:11 PM | #

75. Jason said:

I think a very important point (I only read about 75% of the comments) that has been missed so far is usability with respect to bandwidth. I’m a college student who has T3 line access 9 months a year, and snail speed dial-up the other 3. During my time at college I usually visit the sites themselves. However, despite how streamlined html and css have dramatically reduced download times, there still remains a drastic time difference between visiting all these sites and simply reading articles in my newsreader (NewsGator). In the time it takes for me to visit maybe two blogs (or even view 2 or 3 articles on the same blog) I can have all of my 75 subscriptions downloaded to my RSS reader. Because of my slow connection during the summer, an article must be VERY enticing before I visit the site. I am probably missing out on a lot of interesting things, but the time/value-added trade-off just doesn’t cut it. For this reason, I am extremely grateful for your producing 2 feeds. I only wish all other sites had a “full-post” feed. Of course, this is a moot point while I am at school. (God I miss my LAN…)

Posted on August 31, 2004 05:47 PM | #

77. Lashlar said:

I use FeedDemon. Generally, my feed reading pattern is like this:

I pull in all the feeds (sorted by category: law, China, web design, politics, news, transhumanism, literature, et cetera).

While sipping my morning coffee, I run through the post summaries, mentally marking off items I know I’m not likely to read unless I have a surplus of spare time.

If the site offers a full-post feed, I’m usually subscribed to it and I read the post in FeedDemon. That way I don’t have to waste time (and bandwidth) going to the site. Unless I want to comment, that is.

If the site offers only summaries, I categorize them into “must read now”, “can be glanced at later”, and “don’t mind if I don’t read it”, then fire up Firefox to read the “must read now” category. Sometime during the week, if law school isn’t killing me, I look through the “can be glanced at later” list and see whether there are any summaries that look interesting enough to read.

So in general, I tend to read every article by a site that publishes a full-post feed, but be more selective (because of time constraints) in reading posts from sites with only summaries.

Posted on August 31, 2004 06:28 PM | #

79. The Mad Dater said:

Hey dkr,

Glad to see the site is still doing really well (I used to work for needa, so I’ve spoken to you a few times - albiet (sp) under my real name - lol). I was actually over on the RSS weblog and saw the link to this and thought I’d give you an answer:

1. I use My Yahoo and think it’s great I can read my mail and feeds at the same time (though I think outlook will eventuall do this as well - so I hear)

2. I like summaries.

3. Ads are no prob, as long as I know they are ads. (Ya gotta make money)

4. I use bloglines as well - I used to use it before my yahoo.

5. I think feeds are great. The news, job listings, blog updates I want comes to me - so I don’t haver to continually check a site for those updates.

Keep up the good work. I’ll add ya to My Yahoo.

Posted on September 1, 2004 08:39 AM | #

81. Phil Knox said:

Something I haven’t seen mentioned - and I’m not sure how well it compares to other aggregators - but I actually use my livejournal “friends” page to get RSS feeds, and it works quite well. The fact that it’s integrated into my livejournal means that I can get updates from my social circle and from my news sources from the same spot. I’m sure it wouldn’t be as useful if I got more than 15 feeds or so, but for my purposes it’s great so far.

I prefer the full RSS feeds when possible, but not if it comes with advertising. I’m perfectly fine with getting the summmary and clicking through if it interests me, as opposed to getting adverts on my friends page.

Posted on September 3, 2004 07:58 AM | #