Weather Blogs (and other urgent news) Should Always do Full-Post RSS

Weather, Newspaper, TV Stations, and other news-specific blogs should have “full posts” selected in their RSS feed settings. No exception. This way people can actually keep up-to-date via non-broadband devices.

If you are publishing such a blog:

It is ridiculous to use exerpt-posting for these types of weblogs. It undermines your reputation as a news provider and makes you look stupid. Weather blogs and “Breaking News” blogs are prime examples. In these cases, forcing people to hit your bloated, banner-covered home pages to read the rest of the information does nothing but make you look greedy IMO. It’s fine if you want to do this for broadband users, but RSS readers shouldn’t have to deal with it. If you must pacify your sponsors, why not intermingle sponsored messages within your feed, where it makes sense, rather than proven-not-to-work banners on your regular web pages?

Bad weather was around Lexington so I put in the WKYT weather blog RSS into my mobile google reader. I tried to keep up to date using RSS, but it was impossible.

The weather blog excerpts looked like this:

Hey gang… I decided to start a new post as the amount of comments in the last one were slowing it down a bit. Please keep up to date with my live blogging in the comments section. Be sure to post your weather and thoughts on this severe weather outbreak …

Trying to load the “video-enhanced” home page of the Blog Page (and its fat banners) using dial-up or blackberry was simply out of the question.

Not very helpful.

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