For many of us, our RSS reader – regardless of the particular flavor you prefer – serves as the hub of our daily information consumption, providing a steady stream of news on what’s happening in the world.
But when it comes to newspaper feeds, that ease of reading “everything in one place” has often been plagued by a great deal of clicking, given that traditional publications have opted to remand their posts to partial summaries rather than full-text. Now, The Guardian takes a step to change that by offering full-text through their RSS feed.
At first blush, it appears to be a simple and straightforward change – but in actuality, it’s quite noteworthy. In fact, the Google Reader team is reporting that The Guardian‘s decision to move to full feeds makes it the “first major newspaper in the world” to offer its RSS content as full-text.
According to ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick “The UK Guardian is the best example of a newspaper that understands the opportunities in becoming a broker of machine-readable data, instead of just human readable content.” With this move, however, they show that they still clearly understand the human element, as well. Truly, they’re taking the lead as a publication that offers the best of both worlds.
For The Guardian, this marks another progressive step forward in demonstrating how traditional media publications embrace the world of online media. But it’s not the last. With the influence of the recently acquired paidContent team and continued vision of employees like Matt McAllister – formerly of Yahoo! – we’re looking forward to The Guardian‘s continued thought leadership in this regard.
