The Last Word (for Now) on Our RSS Feed: An Excruciatingly Long and Boring Post That Will Please Exactly No One
The post that follows isn't likely to make anyone happy. — It is our third recent post about Freakonomics.com's RSS feed. Here is No. 1 and here is No. 2.
Context & Ripple Effects
Freakonomics.com is on its third post about its own RSS feed in under two weeks, following criticism that running a partial feed was a bad idea. The self-deprecating headline concedes the topic's unpopularity, but the underlying fight — full text versus truncated feeds — is one publishers have been circling since at least 2006, when Doc Searls framed syndication as the long-run logic of the open web in Welcome to the Long Run.
The friction isn't new: panelists at the 2005 Blog Business Summit flagged industry-wide inconsistency in how feeds are presented and subscribed to, and an ongoing copyright debate has shadowed syndicated content since early 2006. A high-profile blog like Freakonomics publicly wrestling with its feed policy makes that plumbing visible to a mainstream audience.
First-order effects
- Readers of Freakonomics.com face a degraded reading experience while the partial feed stands — headlines without full entries, forcing a click-through for every item.
- The blog itself pays an attention tax: three consecutive posts on feed mechanics displace the economics commentary that built its audience, as the authors themselves acknowledge.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers now have a visible test case: if Freakonomics reverts to a full feed after the criticism, it hands ammunition to advocates of full-text syndication; if it holds the line, ad-supported partial-feed models gain cover.
- The episode pressures feed readers and aggregators, whose display of truncated items determines whether the publisher's click-through strategy actually captures visits.
Third-order effects
- If the full-versus-partial pattern holds across publishers, feed policy hardens into an access-layer power question — who controls distribution, the writer or the reader — rather than a formatting detail, echoing the 2006 argument that syndication only works when companies give up lock-in.
- Persistent usability inconsistency, documented since the 2005 summit panel, risks capping mainstream RSS adoption regardless of individual publishers' choices.
The trend: Publisher RSS policy remains an unresolved battleground between full-text openness and traffic protection, with each high-profile reversal shifting the norms for everyone else.