Grauniad switches to full text RSS feeds
18 months ago, I reviewed the online editions of the leading UK newspapers and the various syndication options.
At that time, all the newspapers only offered partial text feeds which, in my opinion, is understandable but unsatisfactory.
So I was pleasantly surprised to read in ReadWriteWeb that The Guardian has broken ranks and now offers full text RSS feeds. It will be interesting to see whether this increases subscribers for The Guardian and whether the competition will be persuaded to follow suit.
UK broadsheets narrow view of syndication
Stuart Brown from the excellent Modern Life asks 'Why is RSS adoption so abysmal amongst UK newspapers online ?' with some interesting analysis including the staggering fact (to me at least) that Modern Life has more Bloglines subscribers than The Daily Torygraph.
The detailed analysis in this article interested me. I (delude myself that I) am technically literate. I subscribe to around 100 varied feeds and am very lazy. I live in the UK and am interested in News, Sport and Technology.
I always buy a newspaper whenever I commute on a train and every Saturday (to avoid DIY). And yet, curiously, I do not subscribe to any RSS feeds from any UK newspapers (well apart from The Sun's excellent 'Unders The Covers With Page 3 Babes' podcast).
So I just visited the Web sites of the main broadsheets (Times, Torygraph, Independent and Grauniad) to try to determine whether I am missing out.
The Times
The Times recently relaunched the TimesOnline site so it will be interesting to see what RSS support is on offer.
Not a good start - no familiar orange RSS icon in the Firefox address bar. No obvious subscription options is visible. Sure enough, the 'Newsfeeds' information is buried down at the bottom of the page as an afterthought.
The Times offers a narrow choice of News (UK and World), Business, Sport, Tech and the ever popular Law. There is no specific feed for 'Football' so I am obliged to take an interest in horse racing, darts and snooker. No thanks.
As Andy Piper noted, the title of the Sports feed is imaginatively titled 'TimesOnline:rss'. Like most UK media providers, The Times provides a partial feed. Sigh.
The Telegraph
A promising start. Automatic subscription option available from Firefox to 'Breaking News' and almost every area of the site. There are specific feeds for individual sports and the Football feed is sensibly called 'Telegraph Sport | Football'.
There is a useful help page describing the various subscription options which is useful for newcomers (including a NetVibes module). There is support for Blackberry and a mobile service for registered users (free subscription).
The Independent
Like The Times, The Independent does not offer automatic RSS and hides subscription information at the bottom of the page. Range of subscription options but I completely turn off when asked to select the section(s) and then get presented with a feed URL to paste into my RSS reader !
Reluctantly, paste the URL into Google Reader. Again, The Independent offers partial feeds with a headline teaser to lure you to the main site.
The Guardian
As Modern Life reported, The Guardian is the longest established and arguably most successful (in terms of the number of online subscribers) of the UK 'quality' press. Automatic feeds are available from each section and the normal range of devices (phone/PDA) are supported with news alerts (free) and a digital edition (softcopy version of the print edition available for paid subscription).
Mini-newspapers are also available for free download in PDF format. I presume this is for transfer to a phone/PDA to read on the train. Howver, I think I would rather shell out for the print edition rather than waste 12 minutes and miss the 07:58 but this is a different format from the competition.
Interestingly, like the New York Times, The Guardian also offers its own newsreader, Newspoint, which seems to defeat the point of RSS but may be helpful for newcomers (or confused readers fed up with trying to subscribe to The Independent).
feed overload
From a posting in the Google Reader newsgroup
I have (approx) 383,240 feeds...
resisting the lure of Google Reader
I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently.
- Speed - Google Reader has a set of keyboard shortcuts that make scanning a large number of feeds quick. Really quick. While Netvibes also offers keyboard shortcuts, out of habit, I tend to use mouse-clicks to navigate between tabs and articles.
- Flexibility - You can read related blogs that are grouped together (e.g. Oracle, Wordpress), read an individual blog or quickly skim over a river of news.
- Sharing - Occasionally, I want to save an article for future reference or potentially sharing with others. These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about. The most obvious place to mark these items is right here in the RSS reader as opposed to a static bookmark. The list should (obviously) be visible as an RSS feed. Google's shared and starred items make this easy (single keystroke).
- Flexible interface - I really like the full screen mode and the options for 'list view' where articles are condensed apart from the current article and 'expanded view' (all articles are expanded).
- Statistics - I can't decide whether the trends page about your personal reading habits may actually be useful or just a gimmick.
I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result.
Interestingly, Darren Rowse notes that subscribers from Google Reader/Desktop/IG already heavily outnumber the established and popular Bloglines reader.
Looking forward, one feature I would really like to see in Google Reader is feed discovery and recommendations based on readers with common interests and similar reading lists.
Google Reader adds stats on RSS habits
I have experimented with many different RSS readers in the past. However, in recent months, nothing has managed to dislodge NetVibes as my preferred feed reader.
However, I still occasionally use Google Reader and like the recent addition of detailed statistics about your RSS subscriptions and reading habits.
Matt Cutts posts an example of his own data and Robert Scoble also likes the new features.