I know that NewsGator isn’t the first to offer this capability in your RSS feeds, but I find it darn cool that one of the new display options in my favorite RSS reader, the web-based NewsGator Online, now has a “summary” view:

The article that’s in my feed from Gizmodo is longer than what’s displayed because Giz uses what we blog people call “full RSS feeds”. But I no longer am at the mercy of their RSS configuration!
Of course, with every positive change comes a negative aspect, perhaps somewhat of an unexpected consequence…

To see the problem, let me expand that particular RSS entry so you can see everything that’s in their feed.
First, though, what do you think might be a problem if an RSS reader algorithmically only presents a small subset of an article?
Are you guessing that some of the information in the feed is going to be masked, information that might just be an important — or revenue generating — part of the feed? You’re right.
If you haven’t checked out NewsGator Online recent, do note that there are many different ways you can now tweak your feed presentation:

Back to my point, though!
Check out what appears when I click on the “+” to view the full feed entry:

The banner ad just magically shows up.
I’m sure this is not what Gizmodo wants to have happen and what it’s promising its advertisers when referring to the reach of its advertising. Worse, as far as I can tell, the minimized / full view switch looks like it’s all done with CSS layers and JavaScript, so to the Gizmodo server, it has legitimately served up a banner ad. Problem is, it’s to a hidden layer in the RSS reader itself.
Not good at all. Advertisers definitely do not want to pay to have their adverts “hidden” while they’re being told that it was a legitimate display.
I have advertisements in my AskDaveTaylor feed too, and while as a reader I like this new feature in NewsGator Online, as a publisher I am now wondering what percentage of people who subscribe to my feed actually see those adverts on their screen.
Nonetheless, kudos to NewsGator for introducing this new option and giving readers the ability to determine if they want to get every word of a feed, even if it’s a full article entry, or whether, like me, they prefer summaries where a click of the “+” icon reveals more information on the article and its title always leads you to the original blog entry anyway.
If you have a published RSS feed, do you think it’s a good idea for individual subscribers to be able to get a reduced view of your data in their reader? If you’re an RSS subscriber, do you prefer full feeds, partial feeds, or do you think solutions like this new NewsGator view are optimal?