Feed me

Slight glitch in the RSS Site feed thingy. Sorted now.

Ohh and whilst I’m on the topic – what IS the big deal with not allowing full site feeds?

Now, I’ll preface this by stating that it’s not a big deal, and I’m not that bothered myself but I just “don’t get it”. Ohh and it’s undoubtedly a mental block on my part.

Anyway, Peter and zed (and I’m sure many others) have been railing against Blogger because it is publishing the full RSS feed to their posts when they’ve set it to summarise them.

Now I “get” the fact that, because Blogger isn’t doing what they are telling it to, they are justifiable miffed. I’m the same when something doesn’t work.

But I still don’t understand the reasoning behind not allowing full feeds? Anyway, this isn’t a call for Peter or zed to comment on their reasoning, far from it, it’s more a wondering about why we do what we do when we blog (my that’s an awful lot of ‘w’s).

For the large majority of bloggers, what we write is written to be read by others. Without an audience a blog is like one of those five year diaries with the lock securely closed. You look at it and ponder the wonders it may, or may not, hold inside. That same sense of intrigue isn’t really available in blogland, if you want a better sense of what someone is saying on their blog, well you just start skimming the archives. It’s all public, it’s all out there (because sometimes that’s all we want to do, just put it out there without rhyme nor reason).

Is it the public nature of blogging that entices us? Do some of us harbour dreams of being writers and this is out tentative first steps, requests for peer approval? I know why I STARTED blogging, but why do I continue?

I think, in my case, it’s a way to gain an understanding of the world outside of mine. Even if the opinion only arrives from a few miles down the road, it’s still different, and may conflict with my view of things – the 4×4 post is a perfect example. I guess it does us all good to have our own views challenged.