Wednesday, December 05, 2007

A minor request to the blogging world Part 2

Sarge asked the question in the comments "Do you click-through" to blogs who only provide summaries in their feeds? My answer at the time was that I don't bother clicking through, mainly because it's a hassle, the subtext being that it is counter the spirit of a published feed to dictate to me how I consume it by forcing me to go to the site to view junkloads of ads along with the blog content.

Well, it appears I have to eat my words for The Dilbert Blog, by Scott Adams. Recently Adams changed his feed settings to only show a few words from the first sentence of each post, down from full posts as it had been for the two previous years he has been writing the blog. A couple of days prior to making the change he blogged that people only come to the actual site long enough to find the link to the RSS feed, his feeling being they are doing so to avoid the ads on the site. I am curious to see whether he provides an update later about site visits since making the change to the feed settings.

It would not be difficult technology-wise to stick ad content (text, images, whatever) into feed content and I won't be surprised if it starts happening, although I suspect the feed-o-sphere will be up in arms about it if it does.

2 comments:

Jason Hill said...

2 things. I've started seeing ads in feeds, Coding Horror is one that comes to mind. And who on earth clicks those ads anyway? Certainly not me.

Leo said...

That's interesting that you have seen ads in feeds; I guess I missed those.

Yeah, I don't click ads either, except sometimes by mistake. Maybe we are not typical consumers, but I know when I do want to buy something I will actively seek it out and not follow some random advertisement.