RSS Behavior for Link Blogs
John Gruber has been experimenting lately with the format and strategy for his RSS feeds. One of the changes that was more subtle was the way he hands out the item on his RSS feeds for posts that fall under his "linked list." The default behavior for as long as I have been a subscriber has been for the item to actually point to the site/article of whatever he's specifically linking to in the post. This sends people away from the site and directly to the content that the reader is most likely interested in.
People who have programmed their sites to do the opposite behavior are often scorned that it's a cheap trick to get larger page view stats. Some individuals, regardless of the countless evidence against the idea, still fear RSS as a traffic killer. They reason that if people are reading the content of their site in an aggregator, their not reading it in their browser, which in turn has a negative effect on their page views, which in turn has a negative effect on their ad revenue. Teh bloggers got ta get paid!
I think history has shown however that RSS has the opposite effect on traffic, that in fact, providing RSS feeds to your readers actually increases traffic and reader loyalty. This is a thesis that I tend to agree with. Beyond that, there are also multiple ways to capitalize on RSS traffic and use that avenue to create revenue.
As far as any site goes with a "linked list" sort of content, it has always been a tough decision as to whether or not link back to your site's archived entry first before sending the reader on to the intended location. This is what Gruber tested during his short stint of RSS experimentation and mentioned that many people had been requesting this feature. When he finally implemented it, people of course complained and asked for it to be turned back. The speculation remains however as to why would people want this in the first place?
Here's where I might be able to shed some light on that. It starts with an app called NewsFire by David Watanabe. NewsFire is one of the most popular RSS aggregators for OS X. In fact, I don't have the statistics, but I wouldn't hesitate to say that it's the #2 aggregation app in popularity, only behind the long-living NetNewsWire.
NewsFire is a beautiful app and Dave Watanabe is generally known for his attention to detail and UI in his applications. Here's where NewsFire makes one peculiar flaw however. NewsFire has two options for reading feeds. You can either read the actual content in NewsFire itself, or you can use NewsFire as a somewhat "link base" and click on each story you'd like to read, it will open the item in your default browser in the background and the proceed from there. Combine this with tabbed browsing and it makes for a nice efficient workflow of plowing through your RSS subscriptions.
One cool feature of flexibility that Dave added to the app was the ability to have NewsFire set to open stories in NewsFire, but holding down the option key will temporarily disable that behavior and open the link in your browser instead. What I find fascinating is that that particular option doesn't work in reverse, i.e., you can't have NewsFire set to open stories in your browser and hold the option key down to temporarily open the story in NewsFire.
So what does this have to do with Daring Fireball and the linked list? Well this particular strange feature (or lack thereof) of NewsFire has bugged me for a long time, but feeds like Daring Fireball really bring to light why it can be frustrating. My default behavior is to open all stories in my browser of choice. NewsFire however only displays a very small summary of a story, which normally isn't a problem since the link sends you to the full version of the story. But in the case of DF's Linked List, there's double content that I'm equally interested in. I want to of course view the linked item that Gruber is linking to, but I'm also interested in his comments and what he has to say about that link. There's no current way to do this effectively with NewsFire unless the blog author makes the feed link back to his archive first.
My purposed solution would be to have the item point back the arhive but also include a link within the content of the post to the linked site. This would allow users like me to visit his site first and read his comments, and at the same time allow for people that read the feed in their aggregator to dirrectly click onto the linked site. Obviously this would be my preference, but from the feedback that Gruber received, it sounds as if there are even more people out there that find this behavior annoying. I guess the ultimate solution would be for the software engineers to provide defaults for their apps that also provide simple ways of temporarily circumventing them for specific cases.