Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Headlines don't matter anymore!

With the adoption of RSS readers picking up steam, titles no longer matter. When you are a webmaster running a newspaper website, your job is to capture as many eyeballs as possible, so you need catchy headlines, and lots of them. With RSS, the people that want to read your stuff have subscribed to your feed, there is no longer a need to draw these people in, now your job is to provide the service(content) that the reader originally subscribed for. That means you need to display the whole article in your feed! We use RSS readers to minimize the number of websites we visit, if I wanted to recieve your headlines I'd sign up for your email newsletter. If you have to insert advertising into the feed to make some money, so be it, just don't try and lure me to your website when I subscribed to your feed so that I wouldn't have to visit your site as often!