This is exciting news … The Guardian newspaper has added full-text RSS feeds.  I just wrote some thoughts about it enthusiastically over on Mashable, but I’m even more excited about the long-term implications it has for RSS and ReadBurner.  

Accomplishing our goal of showing “what’s shared on the Web” isn’t going to be easy.  At the moment, it’s more like “what’s shared amongst early adopters that like tech news,” although our new Categorization algorithm brings some greater variety into the mix.   While our plans include pulling in data from more sources, at the root of why our site (and other aggregators) is so tech biased is because old media sucks when it comes to RSS.  

Partial feeds aren’t very fun to subscribe to, and are even more pointless to share. Thus, rather than our top sources including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or The Guardian, it’s popular tech blogs that offer full-text RSS feeds.  It’s not that ReadBurner users don’t read these types of publications - it’s that they don’t read them within RSS readers.  

While The Guardian is just one newspaper, we’re hoping that its the first domino to fall and that more and more mainstream news sources will adopt full-text feeds.  It’ll make their feeds way more worthwhile for users, give ReadBurner a more balanced view of the news, and ultimately, drive more traffic to the newspapers, that still - despite a bleak economic outlook - do some of the best reporting in the world.  ^5 to The Guardian!

_adam