There’s much discussion about the merits of publishing full or partial RSS feeds on your website.
There are some good arguments both for and against doing this if you’re a blogger, but for media organisations it’s a bit different.
Newspapers and organisations that rely on paid-for advertising to support their businesses are likely to see RSS feeds as a tool for driving traffic to their website, so publishing partial RSS feeds makes sense.
The BBC doesn’t rely on advertisers’ cash to pay the bills, yet they only publish partial RSS news feeds. I have several of them on my reading list, but I’m constantly frustrated by the short excerpts in the feeds.
Often these snippets contain so little information that I have to click through to understand what the story’s actually about. A bit of a pain if I’m connected to the web, but if I’m on the move without a connection that’s just impossible.
So why doesn’t the BBC publish full feeds or even offer both types?
Doing this would allow audiences to get news and information in a way that suits them, rather than relying on the out-dated concept of driving traffic to a single place.
It’s straightforward to measure RSS traffic, so the BBC could still measure its audiences effectively across the different touchpoints
So the answer is I really don’t know why the BBC doesn’t offer full RSS feeds, so come on let’s have full RSS feeds please auntie.
I’ve contacted the BBC Press Office to see if they give me any more information on this.
ps in the meantime there is a way to get full content feeds, thanks to Duncan Barnes (via Ian).