I’m not happy about Wonkblog’s new, partial RSS feed. Ezra Klein knows better but his overlords at the Washington Post obviously do not. My email to them is below. If you care about the blogosphere or Wonkblog, I encourage you to email too.
It’s a bad idea to shift Wonkblog or any blog to a partial RSS feed. You can ask Ezra himself for the argument. Or, you’ll find it all right here: https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/full-feed-please/
If you care about traffic and influence, you won’t ignore this.
That’s the end of the email. What you shouldn’t tell the Washington Post (though surely they know) is that you can defeat the partial RSS feed any number of ways, including using the Chrome extension Super Full Feeds for Google Reader.
Before you tell me this is a smart marketing move to increase page hits, please click through to my post and from there to Felix Salmon and the others.
UPDATE: WaPo writes back,
We made this change so that Ezra’s feed would be like all of the rest of the feeds on our site and our RSS feeds could be consistent and streamlined as possible. We’re definitely monitoring all the feedback we’re getting on this, so I appreciate you sending this, along with the link below.
Consistency is not a good reason to shoot yourself in the foot. Are there hidden economies of scale in this streamlining? Could they be realized by making all WaPo feeds full?
