Partial Freakonomics feed = bad idea
I’m a huge fan of the Freakonomics guys, and a subscriber to their RSS feed, but I didn’t realize until I saw a MediaPost item on Techmeme that they had been “acquired” by the New York Times. I also didn’t realize until I read through the item that they have switched to partial RSS feeds, which I absolutely loathe.
That loathing appears to be shared by dozens of commenters and formerly faithful readers who left their thoughts on Stephen Dubner’s post about the move to the Times. Many have said they will be unsubscribing from the blog, which will hopefully make the NYT smarten up.
I realize that — as Tish Grier points out on the MediaPost item — the Times is looking to make their content pay, especially if they decide to lose the Times Select pay wall (as has been rumoured), and getting readers to click through to the website is probably one way of doing that. But I still think it sucks.
Some of the reasons are enumerated in this comment on the Freakonomics post. The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place. Bad idea, guys.
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(On Aug 10th, 2007 at 4:09 pm)
I share your loathing of partial feeds. In fact, I wrote a web service to convert them to full feeds (labs.echoditto.com/fulltextrss — works fine on the Freakonomics feed). I can understand the predicament that Dubner is in, but advertisers will eventually have to face the fact that giving content away in one location and restricting it in another isn’t feasible — technology makes it too easy to circumvent such restrictions. It’d be nice if Dubner took advantage of his relatively luxurious position to point this out to the ad men.
(On Aug 10th, 2007 at 9:24 am)
I may be an exception on this, but I click through more often on full feeds because they have more of an opportunity to catch my interest. If there are pictures or video, the story catches my eye.
If I become engaged with the story, I’ll clickthrough to see the comments and discussion about it.