Too Much RSS Feed Bling
October 31st, 2006
I know we all love RSS feeds. Even more so, with a recent rash of plug-ins, advertising options, and feedburner services… many users are embracing RSS feed bling. However, as in cars or cell phones, too much bling is just tacky.
Nothing against Cybernotes. I just did a google blogsearch for “related entries:” and they were one of the first examples that I found. (I am actually going to subscribe to their feed for a while because they look like they have interesting content.) With that brown-nosing aside, I do think this is an example of RSS bling overload.
Ads, related posts, and feedburner feedflare — any of these are completely justified on a RSS feed. I certainly have no problems with ads (especially text ads) in a full content RSS feed. I am not sure that the related posts or feedflares are ever utilized by users, but I see the attractiveness to the idea. We are experimenting with feedflares on many of our sites right now.
To combine all three of these seems like overkill to me. In fact, I think it is an injustice to the advertiser. This is giving the reader a lot of options to click other than the “sponsored by” link.
Many times I am seeing that the related post information is actually generating more content than the actual blog post itself. I am assuming that most people are using the related entries plugin by WASABI. My hat comes off for a great idea for a plug-in, and I think that on many sites that it works well after the main content within the blog itself. However, it certainly seems to be a lot of bling overkill for a RSS feed IMHO. The RSS copyright plug-in is another example of a plugin that, if not used carefully, can overwhelm a RSS feed with excessive content.
RSS feeds are a beautiful thing. Trashing them up with too many services, however, goes against the very simplistic nature that has made RSS feeds so attractive.
Addendum:
I believe this morning I have seen the absolutely worse case of rss bling ever:
