Let Me Use My Feed Reader The Way I Want To
I’ve been getting much better at reading the blogs that interest me (see the Blogroll on the lower-left here) using Bloglines. I find that I’m much happier reading the blogs in a consistent format and I’m able to read through many of them on a regular basis. What I don’t like are blogs that only put excerpts or just the first sentence into their feed — which is all that I see when reading their blog in a system like Bloglines. It means that I have to click on their blog link in order to read their posting, forcing me to visit their site. I can understand, maybe, sites where the feed is for the articles from the site, such as The Motley Fool, and not from a blog, so they want you to visit the site to get the "context" of the article. But for blogs, I don’t quite understand it.
Perhaps they want you to visit the site to be exposed to their ads, but Engadget’s blog doesn’t treat me this way — it puts the full blog entries (including pics) into the feed. Sure, they put some ads in between (or at the bottom of) posts, but they’re pretty inocuous (and if I was at all interested in buying a Ford, I might even click on one of them). So if they can do it, why can’t you? If your post is interesting enough to me, I’ll probably visit the site to see what else I’ve missed and/or read (or post to) the comments area.
