More and more, I am getting my daily information by RSS or Atom feed. At first it was just a few geeky site that offered these. But now, through reading feeds, I am getting my blog reads, world news, sport news, software update notification, new books added to Project Guthenberg, and even new referer to this site. “feed list”:http://ichris.ws/feedlist

I have got used to it so much that it actually dictates which site I read.

A few blogs, especially older blogger account, does not have atom feed turned on. I eventually stopped reading them because manually visiting the site feels like _so much_ work. Some platform, like Xanga, does not make it easy. This is because you access the feed at http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=UserName
Without mapping common file name like index.rdf or rss.xml to this address, it’s almost impossible to guess. And one can’t expect average user to put “RSS Autodiscovery”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02/important_change_to_the_link_tag code in their blog template to help guide readers.

Photoblogs suffer too. Some only have photo titles in the feed, which doesn’t really help. I even unsubsribed photoblogs that only have small thumbnails in the feed instead of full-size photos. (e.g. “iPlog”:http://jamb.ca/mt/ )

Of course, this doesn’t mean everybody should provide full feed. To some people or company, it might be important that readers read their information directly on the site. But in most case, I think offering full feed helps reach wider audience. (Especially lazy kind like me) Advertisement in feeds are becoming more common, so ad revenue should be less of a problem too.

To sum it up, I’m lazy. I want everything in one place, with very few ads, formatted so it’s easy _for me_ to read. “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/chrisada spoilted me.