links for 2007-09-08

One thought on “links for 2007-09-08”

  1. Hi Jason,

    On the idea of full vs. summary RSS feeds: I agree with the idea of providing more information in the feed item description. In the past, we’ve tended to think of feeds as teasers to provide users with enough context to decide that following a link to the article was worthwhile. As an RSS user, however, I find that frustrating — even when using a desktop newsreader I prefer to read the article there, rather than on the web. My favorite feeds are those with full, or nearly full, information in the feed. I’ve even begun to think that comments, or the ‘best’ comments ought to be there as well. It’s fascinating to watch the evolution of RSS feeds from simple news headlines to rich information sources.

    For the feeds from Kavi Groups, we’ve increased the description length substantially and it seems that the increased text is welcome. This increase usually isn’t a problem for desktop RSS readers, and even for mobile it seems as though the usability of the increased text download is worth the pain (or potential cost) of getting text that is not compelling. And if bandwidth is an issue for mobile, I wonder what role text compression can play here, now or in the future. Seems like mobile devices are probably limited in what they can do — what, no gzip support on my phone? :-)

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