As someone who reads way too many blogs to be comfortable either naming the amount of them, or letting someone look at my computer screen while I’m in the feeds tab of Windows Live Mail, the quality of the feed is paramount to whether I read and comment or not. Let’s go through some examples!

The Plain Old Boring Default Blog Software Feed

About 80% of people have it set up this way. To quote… someone: “Don’t mess with that is already perfect”. And rightly so. This sort of feed means I can read the full story (or at least the full original story when it was downloaded) from my reader, both on and offline.

The only real disadvantage is the lack of formatting, or if I’m offline, pictures – but then again every feed has that and it can’t be helped.

The Excerpt Style Feed

This particular style come in two flavours – the automatic excerpt based on size, and the author-created excerpt. The auto-generated one is very annoying, especially if the first x characters don’t get the point across. But ones with author-created excerpts can be intuitive and very helpful. The Formula 1 feed tends to use the author-created excerpt option and works quite well. Although very few places rely on the softwatre automatically making a feed item by making an excerpt, those that do fail epically.

The Ambiguous One-Line Feed

These feeds are generally the most annoying type of feeds, since it’s very hard to understand the concept of the item from the single line they provide you, usually meaning that you HAVE to click through to get a gist of the story.

Some one liners are worse than others. Ones that aren’t necessarily too bad include the A1GP feed, and the BBC News feed. But one that is just plain nasty is the Bungie.net Blog feed. Usually 3 words are all they post in the feed, making it impossible to tell what it’s going to be about just from looking at the title! (Since usually the Bungie Blog is full of shit)

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So, in short (or long) – summarizing your feed is not good for your feed readers. It’s no excuse if you’re a big game company, a news site, or otherwise – you obviously have no idea how best to bring the news to those people who care.