The Guardian Gives Readers the Whole Story via RSS
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.
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As the former IT Director of a newspaper struggling in the digital age I can't see a downside of this. Embracing technology that helps your readers can only ever be a good thing.
The RSS feeds I subscribe to are limited by my choice to full length articles. On the go I want to read not wait for load times and badly crafted java ads.
Kudos to the Guardian for making a brilliant decision.
Partial feeds are the reason that I mostly refuse to subscribe to rss feeds of newspapers and news outlets. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend.
Awesome. I use RSS all the time. I hope more news writers take advantage of it.
Excellent resources, well done.
JIff
www.anonymity.pro.tc
Thanks, Rick. Very insightful.
It would be great, though, if all publishers offered full content feeds. I think that's the real answer to Forrester's recent research, "What's Holding RSS Back?":
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47150,00.html
Best way to keep up to date without actually visiting the site... rss!!!
thanks.