Martin Gordon's Blog

Ethan wants to start a movement:

Everyone should unsusbscribe to feeds which don’t honor the spirit of RSS.
Everyone should thereby unsubscirbe from feeds which do not provide full-text.

I tend to agree with him. When I started this blog, I had partial feeds and Google ads because I cared about numbers. Then I gave up partial feeds because I only cared about numbers with dollar signs. Then I gave up Google ads because I cared only about me.

Anyway, I decided to go through my feeds and pick out how many of them are actually partial feeds. Here's my list:

• Ars Technica (more than one feed) (no good excuse, but probably my favorite site on the 'Net; been following it for 6+ years)
• Daily Pennsylvanian (school newspaper; a partial feed sure beats picking up a paper copy)
• Ctrl+Alt+Del (only care about knowing when the new comic is up, which doesn't show up in the feed, FWIW)
• Penny Arcade (same as above)
• Brighthand (should probably unsubscribe)
• Daring Fireball (I believe there's a paid version of full-text feeds, which I should get around to purchasing)
• DP Review (I don't care about their news items, since all I watch out for are the camera reviews, which tend to be ~10 pages long anyway)
• Phill Ryu (hasn't updated since November)
• LOST — The Tail Section (I don't know of any other decent Lost blogs)
• Cheap Ass Gamer (not a partial feed; has no text at all)
• Trey Copeland (should probably unsubscribe)
• ThinkSecret (best Apple rumor site)
• Startup Review (another unsub candidate)

In order to not encourage the partial feeding, I'm not gonna link to these guys. If they sound interesting enough to you from the name, then Google them. My partial feeds total to 16 (counting 4 for Ars Technica) out of my 140 feeds, a little more than 10%. I'll probably unsubscribe to 4 or 5 of them, bringing my percentage to below 10%, only one of which (Daring Fireball) I would consider a true blog. It's a start.

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