Saturday 14 May 2011

The BBC regresses almost three years

A little under three years ago, I wrote a blog post asking why some blogs on the BBC website had the full content of the post in their RSS feed while others only have a short excerpt.

It was spotted by Jem Stone who posted this comment:

All the blogs on the BBC should now be (we switched over this PM) full article feeds. Anything else we can do for you let us know!

and there was much rejoicing.

Today a whole bunch of blogs from key news correspondents changed which platform they were published on. This includes Mark Easton, Nick Robinson, Robert Peston and Rory Cellan-Jones. They do still have an RSS feed, even if it is harder to find as the tag that would tell a browser where it is is missing so you have to find it in the clutter of the header manually, but the feeds are back to only having summaries.

So for example this 1000 word post is represented in the RSS feed by just 18

A geographic divide in social care has been revealed by a BBC survey, but why does it exist?

There has already been speculation that this move has been to make life easier for those concerned, but it surely can’t have been a conscious decision to make life harder for the end users of the site?

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