Scoble ranks types of RSS feeds by what they include, but he misses a few points along the line. Headline-only feeds with ads are his worst. I would ask… worse than no feeds at all? As fast as things are changing, the lack of a feed or feeds is still an issue for many, many information resources of all sorts (not just news).
There are various resources where I do not want full-text, with or without ads. Scanning is almost as important as reading… and reading takes longer! No matter how many feeds you subscribe to, you don’t read every word of every feed. I suppose you could, but why would you want to? My point: I appreciate some full-text feeds, but where Scoble ranks partial text feeds without ads as “barely passable,” I find that type a competitor for the most valuable offering. Some variation on full-text is undoubtably attractive for the right content, but only for that content where (to stretch Scoble’s analogy) I’ve moved beyond dating into a long-term relationship. I don’t think an initial subscription to a feed is a deep commitment. Part of the attraction of feeds is that you control the connection, and anything that’s one way isn’t much of a relationship, even if ideas still spread wonderfully that way.
Getting back to the spectrum… I haven’t seen statistics on this, and haven’t scoured our own data to catalog feeds this way, but I would have to guess that the vast majority of current feeds are partial text without ads. I think the feed world is a heck of a lot better than “barely passable,” even if there is still a long, long way to go (Phil Collins alert ;-).
Returning to the “worst case” … in many cases, a linked headline is enough. Either I learned what I wanted to know, or I learned that I don’t care at a deeper level than the 6-12 words provided. Athletics beat Red Sox, 13-6 — a fun game this afternoon, by the way — is enough 98% of the time.
Side note: of course, my example falls through, because the San Francisco Chronicle used a more interesting headline than my fake example. Long before RSS came around, newspapers learned the value of writing great headlines. Some publications still have folks who specialize in this ever-more-important skill.
Ads will bring these choices into clearer focus, and the spectrum of feeds will evolve further. I can’t wait.