Free RSS

My biggest pet peeve on the internet is sites that lock down their RSS feeds. By this I mean, doing things like ’summary-only’ feeds or even worse, ‘headline only’. Of course, the majority of these sites do this to drive traffic to their main websites and blogs. Smart, right? Not exactly. The whole point of RSS is that it can be used in ways that traditional websites can’t. It syndicates your published data, making it available to people reading from many places: mobile devices, other websites, feed readers etc. People who strip content from their RSS feeds are forgetting the most important audience of them all: offline readers.

When Amazon released it’s Kindle, it revolutionized the way some people consume books. It’s essentially the iTunes for book publishers, targeting a whole segment of consumers who are sick buying big bulky, expensive paperbacks. The market potential is infinite: Magazines, Newspapers, Blogs…anything typed can be consumed this way. And if your potential audience is learning to consume media in new ways, it would be wise to get your media to them, in that new way. In this case, people who don’t publish full RSS feeds are missing out on people like me.

I don’t read RSS content online, I don’t particularly like Google Reader for this reason. My feed reader of choice is NetNewsWire, because of the fact that it works by downloading and archiving content to my hard drive. This means if the power goes out unexpectedly, or if I go on a spontaneous road trip, or end up on a plane having forgotten to load up my laptop with videos; I can fall back on the hundreds of feeds that I’ve pulled in to entertain me. Whereas with Google Reader, I have to know I’m going on a trip and download all my content in advance, NetNewsWire simply pulls it all in. Even better, I’ve set NetNewsWire to never delete anything at all! This means even if the unexpected happens, I’ve still got tons of content to read through.

This is where not publishing your full RSS feed really falls short. I often choose to save my content for the moments where I’m bored: planes, car trips, waiting rooms, lunch, the toilet. These are places where I often don’t even have internet access. In a way, my laptop has become an ever evolving magazine that I keep with me, ready to whip-out at the most opportune moments. This means I don’t read feeds that don’t work in these moments…I can’t, because I’m often not online without the option of an alternative.

I read sites like Huffington Post, All Things D, RedWriteWeb and GigaOM in my feed reader. Sometimes I click through to their websites. I occasionally even visit their sponsors. Why? Because they publish their full feeds, allowing me to consume their media whenever I want. Meanwhile sites like The New York Times, IT News Africa, anything from CNN; I actually read less. Getting headlines is great but if I can’t read it when I need to, if they don’t make that convenient for me, then why on earth would I visit their sites voluntarily when I have choice? I know that I’ll always have to be online to read content from particular websites and that I’ll always have to click-through to their sites to consume the media they offer. It’s negative reinforcement. If my power is out and I’m looking through a bunch of archived feeds on NetNewsWire to pass the time, and I get to a really interesting one that has a headline but no content, it’s disappointing. I wanted to read that, but I can’t. Instead, I read the sites who maybe have written about the same subject, that chose not to alienate me as a potential reader. At the very least It forces me to associate a continuing negative experience with certain brands, while other brands benefit.

I thought the notion of trying to control what consumers of online media do in their web browsers, died in 1999. Surely it shouldn’t have lived pass 2006. In 2009, it’s an especially useless effort. There are more ways to consume media now than ever in the history of humanity. That should be an asset to a publisher, not a nuisance. Even though I’m often an offline reader, it doesn’t mean that at some point I won’t become an online reader. I do like to support the brands that cater to me, and assuming there are more consumers like me, content providers should smarten up. But locking down their feeds, they could be driving potential readers straight to the their competitors.