KissaBoo

ESPN + RSS = WIP (Work In Progress)

I thought this was already posted on this site and unfortunately I forget the source where I saw this, but ESPN has been offering RSS feeds for a while now. At some point I'll link to some sources for the RSS uninitiated that read this site, but in summary it's important and will only become more so. However, though I am no master of RSS etiquette, what I saw today from these feeds was an example of what not to do.

I would email the beings in charge of ESPN's web presense, but oddly enough when you do a search on ESPN these RSS feeds do not appear. This leads me to wonder who is in charge of their feeds and what the policy is. Btw, here are the RSS feeds I've been following - I wish there was a college basketball one:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news - All News
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nfl/news
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/mlb/news

One of the issues of RSS feeds is what information should they contain. Should they contain the whole story or just a summary to entice you to click on the article? Here at kissaboo we provide both links that do both (as several sites do), but due to laziness only Atom has everything while RSS has only the summary - this will be modified in the future. The problem with the latter is that people are lazy and instead of posting a specialized summary of the story their scripts just output the first n words of an article. Actually, this is technically what kissaboo does, but we encourage our authors to write in a manner where this isn't an issue. Using the second method, however, can cause the following two scenarios from this morning to occur.

1st Example: Title: Unhappy 'Skins campers: Ramsey

INDIANAPOLIS -- At St. Elmo Steak House, this city's most famous traditional downtown eatery, the challenge isn't so much devouring the artery-clogging, 24-ounce T-bone as it is surviving the notoriously incendiary shrimp cocktail that has become the restaurant's trademark appetizer.

Just one bite into any of the six tiny crustaceans and sweat glands erupt. By the time a diner reaches the final shrimp -- which has been marinating for hours at the bottom of the ramekin, pickling...

2nd Example: Title: Bracket Buster Schedule

...

By just taking the first X words, these RSS entries became rather useless. The first serves as an advertisement for some steak house without ever mentioning the QB controversy in DC. In the second, the entire article was a table containing a schedule of basketball games which their script could not handle.

While in most cases the easy way out works well, how much more effort would it be for the authors of these articles or at least the people who post them to the site to create an excerpt for feeds or other purposes (such as cell phone displays)? While one day computers could become better equipped to handle these scenarios by throwing in some AI, the current solution is good ol' human elbow grease.

Posted by shs4 at February 21, 2004 03:10 PM | TrackBack