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To syndicate or not to syndicate

Fred Oliveira on October 31, 2005

Syndicated content Do people read more syndicated content than they visit pages nowadays? I find myself trapped in the news-reader world a couple of hours a day (when I have the time), but for a person with my background - who loves layouts, web-page creativity and information design - I feel like I’m missing out on my favorite part of the web.

What would you do if you favorite pages started removing RSS feeds to get you back visiting? Would you, or have you been consumed by information to a point when it doesn’t make sense to use the browser but as an end-point to content reading?


Comments on this post

Weblogs Work » Content or design, what is important?

[...] Guys like Fred at WeBreakStuff are starting to realize that most of us are not using web content in its original or intended form.  Instead we are using news readers like NetNewsWire to pull content from web sites and deliver it in text form to our readers.  Do you offer RSS/Atom feeds?  How do you feel about the loss of control feeds represent? [...]

Craig Bovis

I too find myself engrossed for a couple of hours a day in Newsgator however I seem to use it more as an index to what is available for me to read.

When I see an article that catches my eye I pop it open in a background tab and read a whole bunch of them in their intended format.

Zac

I follow the same pattern as Craig.

And if my favorite web sites started removing their RSS feeds, I’d most likely stop visiting; I just don’t have the time or inclination to manually check web sites for updates. In this regard, a “teaser” or “summary-only” RSS feed seems like a good compromise to me.

Nicole Simon

I would stop reading them. Because I will not visit websites by hand.

But then again, I do read as it seems differently (and did even when I had a local feedreader): go through the headlines of a folder - which usually holds a nice amount of feeds on a special topic - and click everything to open in the background.

When I am through with that folder, I go reading those websites in their layout, on the page. The feed is an indicator of fresh content.

If an entry is a oneline, I am more likely just to read it there, but like for example here I am curious about the comments.

When i am through with reading those open tabs, I go back and read a new folder. :)

Pete Cashmore

If I want to read a whole post, I normally click through to the site - if I can see the layout, it reminds me of who the blogger is, what they have posted about before etc. Feedreaders can be pretty inhuman sometimes. And of course it’s good to read the comments.

Nonetheless, I still hate partial feeds - I need to be able to scan the whole post to see if it’s relevant. And partial feeds take the control out of the hands of the reader, especially those irritating “teaser” feeds which give you nothing but a headline and a line of text. How are you meant to figure out if a post is worth reading if you have nothing to go on?

I certainly wouldn’t continue to visit my favorite pages if they removed their feeds - it’s too much effort to seek out information.

Tristan Dunn

I’ve never used RSS feeds personally, but I appear to be the minority here. One reason being I’ve never liked the looks of any readers, either web-based or for Windows. (This may change once I purchase a Mac.) The other being I enjoy seeing the website, rather than just the content.

Sam

If a site has no RSS feed at all I’m unlikely to look at it more than every few months. However, a feed of summaries linking to the full content is an excellent comprimise.

The issue isn’t so much reading the content as being alerted to new content. The title/abstract is perfectly adequate for this.

PJ Hyett

If a site I liked stopped providing an RSS feed, it wouldn’t be a site I liked anymore. It’s as simple as that really.

andr3

I agree with PJ Hyett. One of the features i look for in a site with regularly updated content (ie, blogs, news sites,etc) is syndication. Not because i like to read stuff inside the aggregator, but because i don’t want to walk around the web bumping into content i’ve already read.

If a site owner wants to bring back the users, stop giving the full article in the RSS feed, and give a link instead. (in addition to the link field in rss specification). It’s rude, imo, but it “solves” that problem. If people want to read the article, they’ll click the link. Removing the feed will send people away, not bring them back.

Some aggregators (like Thunderbird) show the page specified in the link field if there’s no decription of of the item. Not sure if this is a generalized approach or not.

Just to add my €0.02, when i want to read my feeds, i open a browser with a tab and in it i open my aggregator (searchfox). After that, i open the description of each item and if i find it interesting, i middle-click on it, thus i usually read the articles in their natural habitat. ;)

Marcos Toledo

I, for one, just realized I’m in the same position as you are: I hardly go over to websites anymore, and only consume the information. Also, I don’t really like teaser feeds as I think they get in the way of the whole story. I wish websites had Teaser and Full Story feeds and would leave you to decide which you like most.

I also have just noticed the layout on your website. Just realized I’ve been reading your posts without actually knowing your site :-) You are a great designer, I must say. Though, somewhat I think the feedreader gives me cleaner information. I’m starting to think that in the future we’ll have to leave to the websites things that a FeedReader won’t do well, like navigation, multimedia content, etc. (I know multimedia can be subscribed to as well, but we can’t skirm through multimedia like we do with text, therefore having teasers makes sense)

keith bohanna

I was thinking about this in the car this morning. About how I have moved from endless email newsletter subscriptions to RSS subscriptions having bypassed browser bookmarks (no matter what browser I used) because I never did use them regularly and intelligently.

I almost never visit sites without RSS feeds - so I guess that answers one part of the question. And I regularly visit my RSS fed sites - because I like to see their intended look and feel. And I need to for commenting :-)

keith

Artemi Krymski

I don’t see what the deal is with syndication. I think its a fancy term for a directory listing in XML. Just like online shops provide their products as XML feeds for various affiliates to advertise, RSS & Atom feeds advertise content. As a directory listing, RSS should only contain a preview / thumbnail / summary of content, thus allowing it to act as an advertisement similar to adSense and sponsored search results.

Yes, I know, you want access to the full content in your RSS reader, not just the summary. But that isn’t the purpose of RSS. As a listing, it simply points to objects. If you want your RSS reader to show you these objects directly (instead of viewing them in your browser) they have to be written that way: the content must provide an alternative rendering of itself (HTML, XML, plain text, video, etc) that your RSS reader would understand (note: your RSS reader may understand HTML already, so what you really want is to display only the text, removing any ads that the content provider may need to generate revenue and publish that content in the first place). But of course, content rendering is in the hands of the publisher.

Read more

Michael Vigor

Who has the time to go through all of their favourite websites to check for new content?. Personally, I use Bloglines for my RSS feeds, because its web based and I can access it from wherever I am working. I check it pretty regularly throughout the day for new posts, but I’ve never got more than a few minutes to see what’s new, read an article, and then carry on working.

I could never do this if I was checking the websites one at a time, and it’s invaluable that everything I could want to see is presented on one screen without searching around for new content.

N.B. For any website that does decide to remove its RSS feed – here is a new tool, via Lifehacker, that will create an rss feed for any web page just by analysing the content. It looks like there’ll be no stopping the newsreaders now!

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/rss/rss-feeds-from-feedless-pages-134175.php

Richard Ziade

In an eerily weird coincidence - I just blogged about this on my site.

I’ve gotta say, I feel completely deprived when I find out WAY after everyone else that a site has been redesigned.

Bernardo Raposo

You’re just looking at one side of the coin.
Yes, syndication is a big problem to those who worry about their blog/site look. But in other hand, those who can’t give a pleasant design to their websites have a major boost of readers who use aggregators.

Nowadays you check the content first and only have the look&feel after. As I said before, is bad for designers and great for writers as all the blogs/sites have the same look in a aggregator.

andr3

Bernardo,

you still have to convince the user to subscribe your feed. Even if you have spanking-awesome content, a good layout will help making that good impression that will lead the user to add your feed to their aggregators. ;)

joao

I still visit websites. Personally i dont like to use feed aggregators but I dont know exactly why, i tend to come back to check the website instead. It feels like I loose a important part of the reading experience when i use a aggregator - the visual identity gets lost.
I tend to select more and more precisely the content i’m looking for and let other people filter the content for me using social tools and checking personal selected resources/links, it helps me find interesting things the most efficient way.

Josh Seiden

My question to readers is this: is content that can be parsed by RSS the only thing of value on a site? Isn’t context important?

People keep saying that syndication gives control to the consumer of the content, but that’s only a partial truth. The consumer who works with code may be happy, because this consumer will create a new context for presentation. But the end user? Syndication gives that consumer control to see content however they like–as long as they like using crappy RSS readers, and as long as they like content without the original context.

You can’t expect to suck “content” out of context and expect that you’re not changing it somehow.

Elliot Anderson

I like feed readers but they are not for me.

For me the blog reading experience is about going to the persons site and reading the content there. That way you can check out the design and layout of the blog while also seeing things like link lists that don’t usually come up in the rss feed. Going to the site also helps to support a lot of blog because of the adverts.

Zoli Erdos

It’s the information, not the layout… full feed or nothing.  I hate to say it, but in the age of infoglut very few people are “irreplaceable”. If bloggers dropped their feed, I’d probably find other sources on the same subjects that provide full feed. 

Steve Ryan

In my opinion, web site design is there to support the content. In most sites the layout is just decoration and I don’t need it. I prefer a quick check of the news feed.

That said, I often click through to the site if what I see looks interesting but isn’t complete. That could be because it’s a teaser, I want to see comments, or it just seems to need the context of the site.

I just looked at my Bloglines page. I have 45 feeds, and there are 8 I would visit regularly “by hand”. The rest would be visited rarely, if at all.

Kris

Nice!

Something to say?