Meg Hourihan spent a month in Paris and learned that broadband isn’t everywhere and dial-up isn’t always cheap. My dial-up bills when I lived in Germany were $250-$350 per month. When DT briefly offered a flat-rate single-channel ISDN Internet plan for about $100/month it seemed like a bargain!
Today, thankfully, we have the technology to make slow-and-expensive connections easier to cope with:
The third wonder of my dial-up world is NetNewsWire Lite, an RSS reader for the Mac. In the US it provided a nice alternative to poking around a bunch of sites to see if any had updated, but it didn’t feel like a critical link to keep me in touch with friends and news. Now I can’t afford to poke around, to download a blog only to discover the author hasn’t updated since last Thursday. Whatever I can get through NewNewsWire is what I’ll take. In the case of weblogs, those writers that syndicate their entire post, rather than an excerpt, have become my new best friends.
I hate adding new Movable Type weblogs to my aggregator because nearly everybody uses the default RSS template, which is excerpts-only, and hardly anyone creates their own excerpts. If weblog content were like newspaper articles, auto-generated excerpts might be meaningful, but few weblog authors follow journalistic practices (myself included, but I don’t confuse what I do with journalism).
Worse than the unknowing MT webloggers are the small group of Radio folks that actually made a concious decision to produce feeds with auto-generated excerpts. Do they not want anyone to actually read their content?
Without a meaningful excerpt, why would anyone follow the link?
Mark Pilgrim understood that, he used to create high-quality excerpts for his entries but has since switched to a full-content feed. CNET gets it, their RSS feeds contain a lead-in sentence, but most other news organizations persist in producing headlines-only feeds. InfoWorld could put a lot more advertisements in front of my face if their Columnists feed contained any meaninful content at all — their headlines are less descriptive than Slashdot’s.
Hopefully Meg’s column will be widely read and inspire the weblog community to produce higher-quality RSS feeds.
