Recent Blog Entries
Summarizing content (excerpts)
Written by Tyme White on October 22, 2008
On Twitter today I noticed a comment I thought would be good to address in a blog entry. WebFwrd says:
Seriously, 9rules should enable at least summary in their Feeds instead of just title.
I’m going to explain why we don’t do that.
On 9rules we use the writer’s RSS feed to pull the information. Usually summaries pull the first 50 or so words in an entry to display to the reader as a “preview” or lead-in for what the article is about.
Using WebFwrd’s blog as an example, this is the feed for the blog that is listed on the Twitter profile. The first entry (as of this writing) is an image, so no summary or excerpt would show. The second entry is a normal entry. Let’s pull the first 50 words of the article:
Well, I have not been able to release any update for Diana at all this few weeks. All due to increasing projects and workloads that I do not have any available time set for Diana’s updates yet But it is not going to die this way, probably I will set aside…
This is what happens most of the time when the first X number of characters are shown as a summary. The summary doesn’t show enough information to give the reader a clear understanding of the article. This can go two ways. Using the example above the reader could see the article is about lack of updates and move on, completely missing the plans the writer stated in the entry (the meat of the article). Or the reader could see the title of the entry (Updates for Diana) and if interested in that topic, click over and see the upcoming plans detailed in the article. Let’s look at another example, my last 9rules article:
I might not be processing the new members for the next couple of days. Ike did a job on my city and I’m at a library sending this. They are estimating a couple days until power is restored. No clue when it will be restored.
I am keeping track of those
Forget the formatting issues with this and notice the same thing happens. The important information (do not send a second email) is in the second paragraph. In both cases the user could read the summary and think he/she has enough information to make an informed decision to click through but in truth, the “important stuff” is lost. Most bloggers do not write their articles so the important information is in the first 50-something words. Those that post images for an entry wouldn’t display anything at all – their profile page would look empty in comparison to the other members.
An example of a site that has excellent summaries is Ars Technica. Look at their feed. They write excerpts for their entries so people click over to read the article. That is the ideal situation for summaries.
WebFwrd asked a good question and the reason I decided to blog about it: you might want to consider adding excerpts to your entries. Some content management systems use the excerpts for search results as well. If you use partial RSS feeds over full feeds using an excerpt would most likely help your click-through ratio because the reader would see exactly what the article is about, not what happens to be the first 50 words.
That is why 9rules does not have summaries…we would not want to place further requirements on our members. We used to have summaries but the only time they are of value for the reader, across the board, is if all members adopted the Ars Technica style of creating them. You might want to consider trying them out on your blog, especially if you use partial feeds or full feeds.
Thanks WebFwrd for bringing the topic up! 
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Which is too bad, because I do use custom excerpts for each and every one of my posts. I can understand that other people might find it a chore and not everyone can do it (I know WordPress has the ability to, I’m not sure whether other platforms can), but I find that it’s useful to give people a teaser of what the post is about.
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:10 am
Thanks for picking up my twit and actually answered the question, yet as a lazy user, I still want the feeds to have some summary especially when I am on iPhone where opening up the link just to read the post is troublesome.
And I believe it is a ploy by 9rules to actually get readers to visit the site instead of just browsing through RSS readers.
October 23rd, 2008 at 5:06 am
[...] my surprise, somebody from 9rules (Tyme White) actually picked up my twit and blogged about it with a reply to why 9rules does not enable summary for the feeds. The points that Tyme [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
The same argument can be used against Google, which pulls excerpts of sites. But I digress. I believe excerpts to be a good way of getting people to click on links. It may not be an accurate representation of what the post’s about, but it does provide 1)a idea of the author’s tone 2)a sampling of what’s to come.
That, coupled with the blog title, gives a good enough incentive for the reader to click. Then he scans through to find information that’s useful to him.
PS: I thought the real reason you don’t put excerpts in 9rules was because of a software issue? Scrivs got back to me sometime back, and he said it’ll be hard coz they lost … something the last time 9rules crashed.
PPS: I’d like to point out that more than a few people have already suggested excerpts. I remember a couple of users commenting on the new redesign: they said it wasn’t useful, because there were no excerpts. And I did, too. Now, a couple of months down the road, another user suggests the exact same thing.
Tyme, perhaps it’ll be a good idea to give 9rule’s users what they want. We’re too used to seeing excerpts for content aggregators, and it’s exclusion in 9rules is a little jarring.
*unless, of course, if it’s a software issue. In which case I apologize and back off, slowly.
October 25th, 2008 at 4:51 am
I agree..without excerpt and small image it’s hard to guess from just article title, what are the article about.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Sorry for the delay. I was out of town.
@Edrei – smart move doing the excerpts.
@Eli – The real reason? Like my reason is fake? The REAL reason, is what I said:
“That is why 9rules does not have summaries…we would not want to place further requirements on our members. We used to have summaries but the only time they are of value for the reader, across the board, is if all members adopted the Ars Technica style of creating them.”
You are assuming the first 50 characters are text. That’s not the case. We don’t control the content. It could be an embed from the dozens of movie services. It could be an image. It could be code. It could be f-bombs that would stop the entire page from being viewed in some work environments (we discussed that one publicly in notes more than once). It could be the text is so off-topic after seeing 3 of them the user clicked off the page instead of scrolling all the down. And let’s not forget the people who put their entries in a word processor first and copy/paste it into their CMS, resulting in all the characters being wing-dings on our site. Maybe those are the software issues Scrivs spoke to you of. If you look in the member forum I work with members getting the entries to display timely when only the title is showing because of random feed weirdness.
We had a public discussion in notes about the excerpts like we always do when we change designs. Scrivs and Mike jump through hoops trying to please everyone but it is impossible. If we put back the excerpts it would tick off the people who like titles only.
When we turned excerpts off we had very good reasons for doing so. If our pages/feeds are jacked, people won’t view them.
@Dainis: A good title should be enough to tell what an article is about. For example, I picked a random 9rules member. Very clear by the titles what the articles are about: http://9rules.com/member/216
A person can easily scan the titles and perhaps click on a topic that interests them.
November 15th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
[...] aspect was also argued by Tyme White at 9rules as a reason why they do not feature summaries on their pages. Chugs and I had also discussed this [...]