techdirt gets it

I love reading Techdirt. It’s good, editorial summaries of the news that’s going on in technology news.

I just saw this in my RSS feed, their take on why full feeds in RSS is a *good thing*. It is. Because people who disable them, I want to beat them sensless, although I usually just get tired of clicking through to the website after a while, and stop subscribing.

Here’s a great quote, or half the article depending on how you look at it:

… in our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

So, read the full article and fix your dang feeds before I beat the hamstercrap out of you.

1 comment on “techdirt gets it

  1. dirtyepic

    techdirt++ although I always seem to get behind in reading it.

    and as someone who spends a lot of time reading them offline i agree, preview feeds suck.

    Reply

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