I’m sure if I thought about it for a moment, I could come up with other blog and web quirks that drive me bonkers (please share your own web-peeves in the comments). But there’s one in particular that has me rankled this morning: RSS feeds that provide only partial content.
Those of us who use feed readers are well accustomed to major newspapers limiting their feeds to article titles and a sentence or two of summary. A typical NY Times feed item, instead of a full article, looks like this:
Sticking Together, Up to a Point
The Americans preparing for the Olympic sabre team have come to New York City, always a hotbed of fencing, to train for Beijing with Yury Gelman at the Manhattan Fencing Club.
It drives me nuts that I have to click through to read an article instead of reading without breaking stride on the Google Reader page. But I accept that advertising pressures–despite the fact that some feeds, even partial ones (*cough*washington post*cough*), have ads embedded in them–will prevent the major news institutions from sharing their content in a more open way.
When the Freakonomics blog moved from an independent site to the NY Times, they experienced a huge amount of legitimate outrage from readers for switching from a full to a partial feed. In a post to readers, co-author/blogger Stephen Dubner wrote (emphasis mine):
Way back when we first started talking to the Times, they said that they, like most content providers of their sort, favor partial feeds. Why? As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web [...] the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.
Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss. I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half. While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed. I’m pissed.
However, my passion for social media was reinvigorated last week when I was directed to a web page where a friend was raising money to support her marathon run in honor of her college roommate’s struggle with cancer. I put the link up in my Gmail status and sent an email to some of my fellow classmates to let them know about it. Though I certainly can’t and wouldn’t claim to have made a huge impact, I think a few of the donors that day decided to act because of that simple message and link from a friend. By the end of the day, my friend had raised several hundred dollars, and as of today she has raised over $1,000 from over 25 donors.
The conversation started by Steven Hodson about how bloggers can most usefully fulfill their roles and obligations to their audiences has grown to proportions rivaling some of our 
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