September24

You Want Me to Jump?

As the phenomenon of RSS becomes more popular and widely used in the internet society, we're beginning to see more and more evolution as to how articles are displayed. Marketers haven't fully figured out how to monetize the medium, yet. Some try inserting ads into the RSS feed themselves, while others only display a portion of the article (a teaser, if you will) in hopes that a curious reader will click-through to read the entire article. I find the later to be very annoying and not utilizing the purpose of RSS – and don't get me started on those f'ers that break articles apart into five, or more, pages. That's just not worth it.

Yesterday, while reading one of my favorite political features on CNN (Fact Check), I noticed that in the middle of the damn article you find the text (click thumbnail to see full-size):

Get the facts after the jump!

This might lead some readers to say, "Uhhh, what? I'm jumping? But I think I see the article below, should I keep reading, or do I need to find a link somewhere?"

What's going on here? Easy, CNN is using the same html file to serve their RSS teaser and article. It's fairly common practice, but they should do a little CSS tweaking to help make themselves not look so dumb. A little line of CSS to hide that statement when viewing on the web site would work perfectly. Or maybe they enjoy being dumb.

+ original post date: September 24, 2008 08:48 AM
+ categories: WTF, Web Stuff