Last week, the Guardian stepped up its online battle against the Telegraph for online readers by upgrading its RSS feeds to provide the full content of each article in a wealth of topic themed feeds.
To find a feed on the Guardian site, “simply add /rss to the end of the URL you see in the location bar in the browser”. If you do this for a “topic” page you seem to get a full text feed for the articles in that topic. If you add /rss onto the end of the URL of an actual article, you appear to get the comments via RSS (a similar sort of feed URL semantics to WordPress).
It didn’t take long for the twittersphere to catch on:
or for some far more informed commentators than I to have exactly the same thought about the immediate consequences:
Stanza? Stanza – the ebook reader that does for ebooks what iTunes does for music tracks…
Regular readers may remember I posted about Stanza quite recently – OpenLearn ebooks, for free, courtesy of OpenLearn RSS and Feedbooks… – describing how the Stanza iPhone app could, with a little help from the Feedbooks RSS2ebook converter, be used to view offline ebook versions of OpenLearn course materials.
And now I can do the same with Guardian technology stories:
- for example, pop over to http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog;
- add /rss: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/rss;
- feed feedbooks and create my own technology news newspaper:
Hmm – let’s add some BBC news in there too, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default.stm (via http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/technology/rss.xml).
And there I have it – an eNewspaper I can synch to from the Stanza app on my iPod Touch (or using an ebook reader on other platforms), and read when I like as an offline ebook…
PS There is one thing that appears to be missing from the Guardian RSS offerings though – single page RSS… that is, a single item RSS feed for each Guardian news story that only contains that news story (or that story plus the comments for it…).
What we need is a mechanism to do the crossword via twitter
I did give this a go as part of my ‘month of living paperlessly’ experiment (http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2008/10/a-month-of-living-paperlessly.html), but was immediately impressed by how much I missed the layout of the paper.
Perhaps I’d get over it given time, but it brought it home to me that the way a paper (or site) is put together, and content selected to be featured etc. is a key part of the newspaper USP – just giving me the stories is not the same.