I’m not sure how many folks will be using Outlook 2007 to read RSS feeds (not me, most likely) but for those who do there will be something important to consider: you may not receive updates for already published posts.

I wasn’t aware it was considered a blogging “best practice” to re-post new content in place of updates to single posts, but at least Michael Affronti believes this is so. I think a better practice is to correct misinformation (ASAP with attribution where possible) and add updates for already published posts rather than to have a dozen new posts correcting what was said earlier and forcing readers to click around to get the whole story. If there is enough new information to make a new post, or something that needs in depth clarification then a new post is warranted, but updates are a vital tool for publishers that shouldn’t be handicapped by RSS Reader features.

And what about live blogging? These are typically single posts with timestamp updates. This says nothing about posts which ask reader input so they can be updated along the way (dynamic posts).

Those with Outlook 2007 will see none of these type updates.

Nathan at Inside Microsoft doesn’t think much of this functionality either:

With all due respect, I don’t want to hear about “best practice”. Many, many bloggers issue updates to their posts, as they should, and rely on the RSS readers pushing through the updated items. Being able to update vital news stories brings accountability and transparency. I hate it when Boing Boing leaves up a completely false article, instead following this supposed “best practice” of reposting, since it leaves false articles all over the internet.

This is a good example of RSS aggregator developers attempting to fix a legitimate issue by doing readers an unintentional disservice. They are trying to keep duplicate posts from appearing in the aggregator which is a good thing, dupes most definitely suck, but their solution forgets about the many types of posts with updates.

A real solution
A better soultion would be to give readers more powerful feed filtering functions. Let us decide what we do and don’t want to receive (filter by keyword) with each feed. By default or with a wizard these filters could be set to trim duplicates and notify readers that this was the case.

Microsoft, please change this line of thinking before Outlook 2007 launches. Or at least allow this functionality to be open for change by the user (checkbox option that isn’t buried, hopefully). Re-reading the post I see they also activated this functionality in Internet Explorer 7. Bummer.

Microsoft, please change this behavior and/or at least offer it as a checkbox option by user, otherwise you are going to get an unintended side effect: publishers recommending other RSS readers that do allow for updates to already published posts.

Update 11:41am PST: And here I made a mistake — completely unintentionally — of not linking to Michael’s blog when the post was originally published, so I am now making this update to add this information. Since it’s so close to the publishing time, I normally would just add the hyperlink without a distracting update message like this, but since the whole topic is relevant I’m putting this extra text here which readers using IE7 or Outlook 2007 would never see. They could have gotten the link by visiting Nathan’s blog post, but I had intended to have it linked from the beginning.

Update 4:45pm PST: Michael Affronti stops by (thank you) to offer another post (see link in comments below) clarifying what he meant. He didn’t mean “best practice” as he said, he actually meant “recommended way” but I still think the methodology is fallable. Considering that people might not want their folders to fill up with stuff so they will delete posts as they come in, but that’s not the same thing as saying “I don’t want to know if this content is updated/changed” which from what I understand will be the default behavior. All this means if you had seen my original post here and deleted the post from Outlook you would not have seen either of the two updates above.

Michael points out that Outlook would see it, but it wouldn’t download it because you had deleted after reading the initial message. Sorry Michael, this is still broken behavior. Just download the messages as I recommended above and let the user filter what they do/don’t want.

Note: Michael points out that this option can be disabled by the user. That’s good.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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