Old media just doesn’t get it – in the attempt to clutch on to what is essentially a sunset industry, they’ll try every trick on earth to lure reader to their sites.

The partial content RSS feed is just one example of this – a feed that purports to be of interest but can only be fully read by linking through to the home site. The inimitable Rob Cottingham posted this ‘toon over on RWW.

 2008-11-09-feeds

It’s pretty rare to find an old media site that doesn’t post partial RSS feeds serious kudos needs to go to a media site that gives fully authenticated feeds – I know of one such case here in New Zealand and I’ll be telling you some more about that in the next few weeks. Overseas the Guardian is leading the charge to do the decent thing.

Of course my other pet hate is dodgy advertising on RSS feeds – a blog network that I have an immense amount of respect for sent me a post a few weeks ago (the post itself was moderately interesting) offering me my pick of Russian brides – I mean if you have to port advertising, at least target it well – a Russian bride offer on a Web 2.0 blog post is pretty marginal.

Rant over – suffice it to say you will never see advertising or partial feeds on my own blog, or over at CloudAve, the site that’s revolutionising the blogging world (well wants to anyway!)

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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