“In an impressive display of technical incompetence, Portfolio has not figured out how to show that some posts have one author and other posts have another offer”.

Anyway, I would rather see the full post in the context of the hosting website. I wish RSS readers would properly prefetch the full web page so that the view would be instantaneous (FeedDemon, at least, cannot do this). If my connection seems slow, I am grateful for full text in the feed. Otherwise it is a “don’t care” for me.

I used Bloglines for an RSS reader. For the most active blogs I prefer the truncated display so that I can quickly scan through without having to slog it through stuff I’m not interested in. But for the less frequently updated blogs, I believe it’s to their advantage to go ahead and display the full post. If there’s less than a couple dozen posts a week, then the material tends to be more niche and the subscriber isn’t forced to weed through a lot of stuff they aren’t interested in.

I read Felix’s article as well as the Techcruch site. Felix mentions that he would like to have empirical data, but links a Techcrunch article where RSS is dead because no one Steve knows still uses it. That is less than empirical, but Felix somehow accepts this I guess because Steve said it. Is Twitter more organized than RSS Readers. Not yet. Does it even have the capacity to offer up entire articles as we are saying today needs to be the case. Not as I have seen, so how could Twitter possibly replace RSS, which through capable readers like Google has clear and credible advantages.

I am concerned by what I see at Mashable which actually had an article a few weeks ago that Twitter might actually be able to replace Google, and Techcrunch to a lesser degree; that tend more towards pronouncements than journalism. Felix should have read through the comments to Steve’s post, Steve 1 and a whole lot against they way I see it.

Twitter and RSS are perhaps complementary but in no way compete. There are people that read everything and cereal boxes, myself included. Others read only because they have to. Yet others refuse to read, even when they’re signing things and there are still more that believe headlines tell the whole story, so why read the actual article or even watch a broadcast for that matter.

To be completely undisturbed when reading RSS aggregators are the way to go. To establish at a glance what merits one’s attention, again, not Twitter. Still knowing this advertisers are lazy. Go to YouTube and see how many digital video cameras, USB mics and better compression algorithms ads are present. I’d think if ever there were a place you could sell these things, it would be YouTube. Apparently I’m alone in this.

Twitter is great conceptually, but has almost no other features and so requires an army of ancillary website to augment it shortcomings. Still I like it and if I want to see if my friend is walking her dogs, what my aunt is cooking for dinner and what my favorite blogger is up to while browsing other headlines, I turn to Twitter. On the other hand, when I am working which is always, I only care about the news and other things that actually matter. Translation, I stick with RSS and stay off of Twitter.

If Twitter doesn’t address this matter of greater message size, then some one else will–one of these days.

I prefer if a site has a good summary rather than including the full post, because my other way of reading RSS is in a River of News aggregator which streams thousands of articles a day in front of my eyes. Sites that include full text are much less than optimal, they take a lot of time to skip over. And in this mode, I only want to consider a story for a second or two, because I have so much to get through. I skim the feeds the same way I used to skim a print paper.

Here’s the Twitter stream that Baseline is part of: http://twitter.com/friendsofdave

I really dislike ads in feeds, I see that as putting ads in ads. I strip the ads before my user sees them.

His reasoning, as far as I can remember was that more and more people were getting his content on their RSS Readers and so ad revenue was only a trickle.

And then he said that if people liked 9 of his 10 posts and didn’t like one, then they said that they were not going to buy his books or stuff. So, he ended up losing customers also.
The latter reason is somewhat intriguing because I see this happening all the time. If people find just one post that they disagree with, they somehow decide that they are not going to read anymore. I think even James had a post, which had extreme reactions and I read at least one comment in which the person said he or she is going to unsubscribe. From the looks of it, the person was a long time follower, so I wonder what is it that makes people decide that just because of this one thing we don’t like this guy. This is obviously much more harmful to people who are trying to make money off their blogs.

I don’t think there is a clear business model for blogs but I think people who are selling stuff and generally stay away from controversy do well. Others get famous and that’s a kick in itself, but I wonder if they really make any money.

As for Krugman and Sullivan, are we sure they are happy with their truncated feeds? That might be a decision by their respective publications.