Help me - share you

Steve Clayton wrote a small piece on Google Reader and how it's still tops for him. I could not agree more. Google Reader has changed the way I view the web over the last year or two. I spend more time in Google Reader than anything else I would imagine.

Here is the thing though - I wish more people would allow for full posts/articles in RSS readers. I use Google Reader to read everything. It's very rare that I go directly to any content producing website from the browser's address bar. I just open up gReader and let the news and sites I read come to me.

My biggest complaint is that not everyone gives you the full article in the feed reader, but makes me click out to the website to see the whole thing. I understand the main reason is probably because they need you to go to their site so they can get the ad impressions, and hope you click on one as well. But you can shove ads into the feed if you want.

I'm sure the payoff on those feed ads is not the same as the ones they get from the eyes on the actual site. But here is the thing - I don't share your article or post with others if it's not in my feed reader. I also don't save your post to refer to later. The way I go about reading my feeds means I never pass on anything you write or save anything you produce, if I don't have the full feed.

Here is an example how I read my feed when you only give me partial news. Let's use CNET as an example because they produce a lot of news. When I go to their feed, I start quickly browsing the headlines (I view it all in list view). Ones I find interesting I click and read the partial feed (normally a sentence or two). If I want to read the whole thing, I ctrl+click the headline to open it in a new tab (while keeping me on gReader). I will go through the entire CNET feed of new stories and do this. Once I make it to the end and have opened all the stories I want to read in a new tab, I click the "mark all as read" button to get them all cleared out of the feed reader. I then normally do this to a few more partial feed sites, then start going through each tab and reading the stories/articles I opened in new tabs.

The problem is, now if I like an article, I don't have the same "sharing" controls I had when I was in my reader. Or at least I don't have the ones I like. From gReader, I can go to the bottom of the article and click on "share" "share with comment" or "email". I can also add a star or tag it in my reader, so I can go back and read it later. Google Reader is my main form of bookmarking.

The thing is, I am now out reader and will not share your article/post. Not out of spite or anything, but you just made me go read it in a place I don't have all my sharing and saving tools. I could go back to gReader, but then I have to go to your feed, tell it to show all "read" stories then start searching through the list of stories to find the headline, open it and share it. I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to act like everyone should change their publishing and ad strategy around me. I'm just saying I wish more people would allow me to digest the news the way I want. Instead of thinking you need to shove me through your pipe and make me read it the way you want me to read it.

In the end, I think you would get more from me by allowing me to share stuff the way I want to share it, than just having me go to your site and then forget it. And sharing is a big deal to me. That's how I get all my new sites. People I read, either on blogs or Friendfeed, share an article which I then read. If I like the author, I subscribe to them, and start reading them in Google Reader.

And I know there are all sorts of bookmarklets or bookmarking and sharing services I could use. And I do use some from time to time. But it's not how I want to use it. And it requires too many steps, or for me to be at "my" computer. I want it all in google reader. I don't want to be at a browser I set up, or have to cut and paste an address and type in another site. Unless you can grant my Google Chrome wish, I need to do all my sharing in the cloud. Not with browser based bookmarklets and the like.

I hope this year more content producers realize that allowing me to digest your content the way I want, makes it much more likely that I will pass your content on to others.