I have come across a frustrating number of feeds of late that put no work into their headers or feed displays. I don’t understand why folks would not take every opportunity to scream who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish. That’s marketing 101, right?

I’m going to pick on BusinessWeek’s new blog, blogspotting, to make my point. The only thing they put in their header is their rather generic site name. When they came out this week, I stuck them in my Under Evaluation category in Bloglines, and promptly forgot who they were and why I bothered to put them there in the first place. Their feed has nothing to help me remember. It could use:

  • Author name
  • Company affiliation or logo
  • Introductory text about their blog’s purpose

Their feed could have been saved if the post entries were better formatted. However, each blogspotting post only contains the first couple of sentences, and the category name they use on their site. Annoying! If you’re going to abstract your feed, include the following in each post:

  • Author name
  • A decent abstract (see the NY Times for an example of how to do this)
  • Good post titles!

Heads up! People are moving from surfers to feed jockeys. I guarantee sites will lose readership because of bad feed formats. BusinessWeek was lucky that I didn’t delete them out of hand, but if they don’t change soon, I will.