RSS Article Addendum 2: Drawbacks of RSS
I had an offblog conversation about the drawbacks of receiving an RSS feed versus visiting a site with someone who read my RSS article. I did not address them in my article because of space limitations and what aspects of RSS I wanted to cover in the article.
There are a number of things on a blog or Web site that do not necessarily become part of its feed. Blog taglines, for example, are usually not syndicated. Navigation links or other features in sidebars are usually not syndicated, from what I understand. The configuration of the feed is often the choice of the person running the blog server, so some bloggers don’t control what their feed contains. And of course, if it’s not in the feed, the aggregator won’t catch it. (Aggregators are similar to e-mail applications. They just catch and read the feeds–they don’t monitor the sites themselves. The sites send the “e-mail”–the feed–and are responsible for its configuration and contents.)
For some people, not getting everything on the page that changes is a disadvantage of using RSS feeds. For others, the content that gets into the main body of the page is what’s most important. Some people, like Jay McCarthy, whom I quote in the article, use RSS as a way to monitor when sites update, then they may go to the site to read the new content instead of always reading the RSS feed. In January, Jessamyn wrote about some of the drawbacks and advantages to reading feeds in an aggregator versus visiting sites. I read a few sites almost exclusively in my aggregator because they do not render well (or at all) in the browsers I use, but my aggregator presents them in a format I can easily receive and read.
Another drawback to RSS is that corrections and additions to blog posts aren’t always syndicated. Some sites’ amendments come out in a feed, but many sites don’t syndicate their changes. I think NewsliBlog sends changes through the feed from Feedster. (I don’t subscribe to the Atom feed, so I can’t comment on that.)
One advantage that met the delete key because of space is the time saving factor. I subscribe to about 30 feeds. I estimate that it might take me about two to five mintues to go to each site individually in a browser and find the new content. By getting the updates in my aggregator, I probably save at least an hour a day. But like Jay, I probably wouldn’t visit all the sites I subscribe to daily. The ease of receiving feeds in an aggregator means that I’m actually reading sites I wouldn’t necessarily have the time to read or visit otherwise.
I’m sure there are other drawbacks I’m forgetting or haven’t considered.
