I use my RSS feeds as notification. I want to scan.
I want to somehow squeeze the juice out of a couple of hundred feeds, leave the pulp behind, and spend the real time on the six to nine posts a day which are worth three to five minutes each. Full-text can interrupt the scan. Even full-text has to earn the “launch to browser” action. Most stuff worth reading ends up in a browser window.
Different tools and contexts matter. If I ever did anything offline, maybe I’d be crazy for full-text, but I think of those rare moments when I’m away from a computer as deliberate, so why not enjoy the connection and the focused reading experience available in a browser?
I’m bringing this up because Scoble is again sharing his preference for full-text feeds. In Back to reading feeds…, he notes he’s cleaning out his blogroll. (And, now he’s done.) The first criteria for elimination?
Any feed that doesn’t run full text. Except for the New York Times.
I disagree, as noted, but then I don’t spend oodles of time on airplanes or other in a disconnected environment. For more of my opinion on this topic, read my earlier posts on this subject… easier to link than repeat myself.
- May 18, 2005: The spectrum for RSS content is broader than you imagine
- June 24, 2004: Full-text feeds: the answer?
Aside…If I were really an attention geek, maybe I’d throw off a feed with every RSS item which caused me to spawn a browser window. You get the juice, without doing the squeezing yourself. Reality is, you’d want to combine my “juice” with that of other folks you read and (presumably) trust, and see whether you end up with truly refined sugar, or simply more juice to drink. More juice takes more time… which is part of the problem attention is trying to solve. So refinement is the answer.