Syndication and me.

I’ve been following all the hoo-haw about RSS and Atom and such for a long time now. I have used NetNewsWire at home and Bloglines (here’s my list there: mikel’s blogs). I love that more and more services are offering syndicated content in whatever format. But I also know this: I hate reading weblogs through their feeds.

For me, the words on a website aren’t really distinct from the overall effort that has been put into the site – the design, the additional content, the links, the stupid little buttons – I love all of that stuff. Extracting the words from that is, to me, to denude the weblog owner’s work far too much, it is to remove more context than I like. I have found that I much prefer a service like Blo.gs or something that lets me know when my favourite sites have been updated so I can go and read them myself, and in the format that the writer intended.

I don’t mind if you, dear reader, prefers to read this in either RSS or Atom formats (I provide both). But me? I prefer to get the full effort a person has made, not the minimalist version that RSS provides.