Some of my favorite blogs and news sites have one huge, grating shortcoming that keeps me from becoming an all-out fanboy: partial feeds. There’s a title, a supposedly tantalizing teaser, and a link to read the whole thing. The sites’ creators probably hope that will mean readers visit the site, click on ads and generate revenue.
But I’ve been burned too often by mystery-meat teasers that fall far short of their promise, or that are ambiguously worded and turn out to be about something completely different. So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.
If a newspaper like The Guardian – one where the content is their business-model bread and butter – can figure out a way to make full-text feeds work, then it can’t be that tough for the rest of us. Come on, folks – open up the tubes.
