In addition to the traditional website, many news and blog publishers offer their articles in content-only formats called “feeds”, and more people are using feed readers to view this content. This means users are visiting the actual websites less and less. Has the rise of feeds had the effect of devaluing web design? Have we become so obsessed with instant access, no-nonsense content that we’d prefer to read our news in the blandest of surroundings, caring little for the actual presentation? Or have we just shifted our focus towards the content, rather than away from design? Would that be so tragic? Is web design really that important?

Design can be nice. Some is really pretty. But when it comes to reading blogs, if the design doesn’t offer additional functionality or make the content easier to read, I don’t care. I don’t claim to be any kind of web design expert, but as a regular user of the web, I’d like to think I know good and bad when I see it. Too many websites are cluttered with useless “junk design” such as advertising and superfluous meta-data that offers little extra functionality and obscures the content. But it’s the content that keeps readers coming back to sites, rather than the design. The advent of feeds has liberated readers from the frustrations of poor website design, leaving them free to focus on what really matters - the content.

Feeds are great precisely because they remove the website paraphernalia, leaving only the content. Website publishers control the presentation of their content and it’s the same for everyone. This isn’t ideal for readers; every user is different. Feeds give control to the reader by atomizing each article and meta-data, allowing the feed reader to present the content in a variety of customisable views. Feed readers also act as a “one stop shop” for users. Before we had feeds, you would visit each individual website and have to remember which articles you’d read. A feed reader consolidates content from multiple sites into a single application or website and tracks what a user reads. This is a far more convenient and efficient way to read content. The web’s feeding frenzy may be great for readers of websites, but it has some negative implications for publishers.

Publishers offering feeds who rely on web advertising revenue would have observed the increasing pupularity of feeds in the form of reduced ad impressions. An “impression” occurs each time an ad loads on a web page and is a metric used by most web advertisers to measure the amount of ads a site is serving up to its readers. To offset the reduced impressions caused by less website visits, publishers are now embedding ads in their feeds and getting the impressions that way. Some even go so far as to restrict the functionality of their feeds, forcing users to click through to the original site and cause ad impressions.

Take Slashdot’s feed, for example. They have been known to embed ads, but more effectively, they strip out all hyperlinks from posts, forcing readers to visit the website if they want to delve a little deeper into the story. Presumably this has been done because they need the ad impressions. All of this is fair enough; publishers are only reacting to the changing conditions of their marketplace. But as the popularity of feeds continues to rise, publishers will have to compensate with increased and more pervasive advertising. Website ads are an example of how web design can be used to the benefit of publishers; but how can sites utilise design to add value to the reader experience?

Feeds are one-way broadcast medium with the feed reader displaying static content in a non-interactive format. It is this inherent simplicity that limits feeds in their functionality. The web is a dynamic medium, and one example of this is the discussion features provided by websites. Most blogs and some news sites facilitate community discussion by allowing readers to submit comments on their articles. This feature adds value to the reader experience by letting them actively engage with the content. They experience the views of others and have their own views heard. It’s functionality like this that will see readers tearing themselves away from the purity of their feeds. Some sites publish a feed for their comments, but this is still non-interactive. You can’t post a comment without visiting the actual website… yet. It won’t be long before we have “RSDS” or Really Simple Discussion Syndication or something similar; an open standard for abstracting website discussions into the feed reader, possibly eliminating the need for a website altogether.

Is this ultimately where the web is headed? Could the future see a complete abandonment of the traditional website in favour of a totally abstract web populated by feeds and content-only formats to the point that the only real websites left are a few dozen feed readers and other content aggregators? It sounds like a utopian dream but would this really be so ideal?

Feeds aren’t perfect. Just like web design, they are often used poorly and not to their full potential. Certain sites truncate their feeds to the first few lines, or only give a limited abstract, requiring users to visit the website to read articles. One frustrating example of this is the ABC News feed, which somewhat inexplicably only offers an abstract of their articles. They’re a non-commercial broadcaster so I see no commercial reason for this decision. Other feeds such as VG Cats only contain titles or headlines, totally defeating the purpose of using feeds in the first place. Sure, it lets you see when a new comic has come out, but one of the main advantages of feeds is the elimination of the need for a website visit.

Is this necessarily the medium being abused, or are these condensed feeds actually providing more functionality than we think? Some readers want complete articles so they can read the whole text then and there without the need for those pesky extra clicks. But others actually prefer the more condensed abstract, which reflects why we invented the abstract in the first place. Its purpose is to provide a succinct summary of the full text so the reader can decide whether an article is worth reading. Headlines serve a similar purpose as an ultra-condensed version of the text.

The emergence of blogs has given rise to a new and widely used condensation method. I am referring of course to the mysterious double-edged sword that is “The Jump”. This device is a truncation point defined by the author that can be placed anywhere in the article. Content before the jump is presented on the main page of a blog, and readers must click through to the full post to read the rest of the article. It is usually positioned after the first few paragraphs and is similar in function to a traditional abstract. It presents a portion of the full text giving readers the option of continuing to the full article. But many feeds only include the content before the jump; so for those readers who like their full feeds, this is actually a limitation, rather than improved functionality.

It seems we’ve come full-circle and are faced with the same problem present in web design; that publishers have too much control over how their content is presented. Most blogs and news sites only offer one feed of their articles, and they decide whether to provide full text, abstracts or headlines only. The beauty of technology is that it’s actually possible to please everyone when it comes to feeds. Publishers simply need to offer a variety of feeds to cater for their diverse user base. What I’d like to see is readers given a choice between multiple feeds, such as full-text, pre-jump, abstract, and headline-only. Or alternatively, an extension of the syndication formats to include all of this information, thus allowing feed readers the flexibility to display feeds in any one of the formats.

All this talk about feeds is making me hungry… Where’s that Google Reader button?