My friend Matt guest-blogs for Social Computing Magazine (SCM). Today they re-published his story on Social Computing Tools in Government. I’ve read the article before on Matt’s own blog, but wanted to see how it came out on SCM. Because I am suffering from a cold, I was lying in bed reading the day’s RSS feeds on my Nokia e61 smartphone.
SCM provides a partial RSS feed, never a good idea, but complicated by the assumption that the reader will want to sign in read the rest of the article. The pain of this is lessened if you are using a full-sized browser with cookies and password-handling to allow automatic login - but if you’re reading it on a portable device then this really gets in the way.
I’d like to extend the “laws” I laid down in Constraints for small format RSS readers to include the following:
- Please make every feed a full one.
- Don’t make people log in to access content unless you are going to make it easy and make it worth their while.
Both of these come down to the Golden Rule: put yourself in the reader’s shoes, and make it easy for them to read your writing.
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