A couple people have asked me why I’m such an ardent supporter of full-text RSS feeds. Tonight I thought of an analogy that might help make my point:

Imagine that you’re a lawyer working on an important case. To help you with your research, you’ve employed a couple of paralegals who are willing to work all night scouring the law library for relevant case law while you sleep. Upon walking into your office the next day, you find that the paralegals have completed their task in two very different ways. One has compiled a list of cases that includes the reference numbers and locations within the library where the cases can be found. He also included the first 100 words each ruling for context (not a brief or a summary, just the first 100 words verbatim from the ruling itself). The other paralegal has Xeroxed a four-foot high stack of paper. This stack contains the full text of every ruling on the first paralegal’s list. She hasn’t summarized or briefed any of it, but it’s all there in one place and neatly organized. Who’s helped you be more productive?

If it were me, I’d fire the first guy. Too much latency. Even though the second paralegal has actually delivered more information to me, I expect I’d be more productive because I’d be spending more time reading and less time walking across the library to fetch the books.

RSS should help me quickly access the information that's interesting and quickly discard the stuff that's not. Abbreviated feeds help me don't help me in either case. I hate getting enticed by a short summary of an article and then click out elsewhere to read the rest of the text -- the context switch is distracting. It breaks my concentration. It also incurs latency -- I have to wait for the page to load. If I'm disconnected, I'm left completely hanging and unable to read the rest of the article. If the full content had already been previously downloaded into my aggregator, I'd have none of these problems.

Unless the content of an abbreviated feed provides a useful summary of the item it links to, it’s not very good at helping me discard stuff I don't want to read. Abbreviated feeds are based on a flawed assumption: that the first n words of an entry will be sufficient for me to make an accurate decision as to whether or not I want to read the rest of the article. If everyone wrote perfect abstracts of all their entries then perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad way of doing things, but blogs just don’t seem to work that way. Most of the bloggers I read are like me – they’re essayists. Also like me, they don’t always get to the point right away. Even though RSS offers a “summary” or “description” tag, there are very few bloggers out there who are disciplined enough to actually use such a feature effectively. These are blogs, after all, not academic papers. Blogs just aren’t written such that the first 100 words of every post convey a concise summary of the rest of the content. Regardless of whether this is “good writing style,” it seems to be a characteristic of the medium. I doubt that this will be changing any time soon.

The beauty of full-text feeds is that they present a vast amount of information with effectively zero latency.  Because all the content is downloaded in the background, when I get around to reading it in my aggregator it comes up instantaneously. I didn’t spend five or ten seconds waiting for that article to load only to find out that I wasn’t interested in it – the aggregator wasted its time, not me. I have the full text of the article right there in front of me -- I’m reading all the parts of the article that I think are interesting, not just the first 100 characters (or a summary of all the parts the author thought was interesting, but didn’t quite do it for me) that an abbreviated feed wants to expose me to. It comes down to the fact that I can skim out interesting parts of articles faster than my browser can open them. Full-text feeds let me consume more interesting information in a smaller amount of time, and that’s what an aggregator is all about in the end.

Coming soon: ramblings on how the bandwidth problem that full-text feeds cause might be addressed, to the betterment of authors, readers, and content providers alike…