Dave Winer: “By some calculations, in three years, 27 percent of the NY Times hits will originate from their RSS feeds. The BBC is aiming for 10 percent by the end of the year. Neither company puts ads in their feeds because: The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate.”

While I agree with the above logic, it only holds true if readers are happy with the current state of affairs in which RSS feeds only contain summaries, and readers have to click through to a web site to read the full story.

Me, I’m actually getting fed up with having to do this. I’d much rather have the full story embedded in the feed, so I can read the story right there in the RSS reader without having to go to a separate browser window. Plus, that allows me to read feeds while I’m offline. Right now, I have two groups: Full feeds, which I can read offline; and summary feeds, which I have to flag if I’m offline for later reading, and that disrupts my workflow. I’d be perfectly happy to see advertising in the RSS if the full story came along with it.

I suppose I could find an RSS reader that prefetches pages or something, but I’ve never seen a reader that does that outside of Mozilla Thunderbird, and it seems like overkill to use Thunderbird for RSS since I use Evolution for email etc. Anyway, this seems like unnecessary work when all the technologies are there to just put everything in the RSS feed for me. (Personally, I’m looking for a nice reader that lives inside Firefox, since that seems to me to be the logical place for such a thing. Recommendations welcome.)