Monthly Archives: July 2009

BBC Free: Help us persuade the BBC to open their RSS feeds up

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The internet blows my mind. Ryan Carson opened my eyes to the power of it a few months ago. We can sit down and create a blog or web application and have it instantly accessible to the world. That’s unique, and it’s exciting.

We’re asking the BBC to join us in this creativity. Today, we’re launching BBC Free – it’s a campaign to convince the BBC to offer full article RSS feeds.

Current short bbc feeds

Currently, their feeds are just a single line or two and this hurts your RSS experience, and it also hinders creativity in online news. RSS feeds are machine readable and a ton of great startups base their news products off that content. By making the feed “full article”, we can be far more creative with how we improve your online news experience.

We’re not asking the BBC to create an amazing news API like The Guardian. The BBC doesn’t run adverts, any users of RSS will appreciate this change, and people who don’t use RSS won’t know anything has changed.

We’re imploring you, internets, to help us with our campaign. Full details are at our site http://bbcfree.net – the twitter hash tag is #bbcfree and you can follow the campaign at @bbcfree.

— Peter Clark, CEO of Broadersheet.

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Newspapers: turn off your RSS feeds

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Update, 2 days later: Paul lets me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going fairly well until I wrote this post … You can read my climbdown here…

The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.

(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)

The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.

And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.

melanie-phillips-rssDaily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK … Continue reading →