Mathew Ingram explains (in the context of the NY Times) why partial feeds suck:

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.

I read feeds with ads, and it's not the end of the world. If you want your content seen, don't force unnatural acts on me :)

Technorati Tags: advertising

Rogers Cadenhead explains the nature of RSS reality to Robert Scoble, and demonstrates along the way why it matters.

Scoble gets taken in by Winer vis-a-vis the RSS Advisory Board:

But, what really is cooking here is that RSS has been given (and if you listen to Dave Winer, stolen) to big companies to control. How so? Well, the RSS Advisory board, which includes members from Cisco, Yahoo, Netscape, FeedBurner (er, Google), Microsoft, and Bloglines and this new unofficial board +is+ changing the RSS spec all the time (they are now up to version 2.0.9). Dave Winer, who founded that spec says that’s in direct contradiction with the original charter of the RSS Advisory Board that he founded when he moved RSS from UserLand over to Harvard University.

Maybe Winer is too close to the problem. The advisory board isn't making many changes; I've been following the process. What they have been doing is setting up a set of "best practices" for using RSS 2.0 - things like "the spec isn't clear about X, but here's what seems to be standard practice".

For instance: Can a feed have more than one enclosure? The original 2.0 spec is completely unclear on that. Some aggregators (BottomFeeder, for instance) are agnostic, and will allow multiple enclosures. Others will allow for only one. Most of what the advisory board is doing is finding agreement on what to expect in the unclear areas.

Why do big companies care? This thing called interop, which Scoble does care about. Watch him not connect the dots on this.

Gordon Weakliem thinks that Google was redirecting his subscription to Jon Udell:

I suppose it had to happen - Google Reader seems to have gone insane and replaced my subscription to Jon Udell with an apparently random selection from various Wordpress blogs. It seems like a rule of server based aggregators that they become flaky as they scale up, and there's usually issues with feed identity and redirects right in the mix in every case I've seen.

I don't think this was a Google problem. Why? Well, I saw the same thing yesterday in BottomFeeder - which is a client side aggregator I wrote myself, so I was pretty sure that the problem wasn't on my end. Now that I've seen someone else mention it, I'm thinking that the service being used by Udell (and the random site that kept getting swapped in) had problems.

Dare Obasanjo links out to Yaron Goland, who explains some of the things Dare had alluded to here - whereupon the Atom community, led by Tim Bray and Joe Gregario broke out their ceremonial Dave Winer suits and proceeded to act like jerks.

Note also the opprobrium tossed at Rogers Cadenhead for having the temerity to work on the feed spec that is used by the vast majority of feed enabled sites. The syndication space has turned into a parody of itself.

Technorati Tags: APP, atom

Scoble accidentally remarked on an old news item, because his reader saw old content on the Google Blog as new stuff:

this post originally appeared in 2005 (I didn’t remember it from back then). Turns out that RSS kicked out a new version of this post. Both Bloglines and Google Reader users saw it again (that’s where I saw it).

Over the last two days, I've seen a ton of old stuff show up as unread in BottomFeeder. I've seen this kind of thing before, and it usually means a change in the content management system (and thus, all new GUIDs).

Rogers Cadenhead notices an interesting bit of syndication news:

The largest email-based RSS service was sold to NBC Universal this week, an event that's curiously absent from the tech press. Randy Charles Morin's R-Mail was purchased by the entertainment network for an undisclosed amount.

The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily , though I suspect a zero's missing from the last figure. When I wrote about R-Mail last August , it had 20,000 users.

This kind of thing could be the breakout from niche to general that syndication advocates (myself included) have been expecting. An awful lot of corporate staff "live" in email - and this is an easy way to reach them.

I've updated the feed for the UIUC VW Wiki - each item should now show up with the associated content.