Creative Weblogging: listening to customers

One of the business blogs I read, Business Pundit, recently joined the Creative Weblogging network. Two things immediately changed about their feeds. First, Pheedo’s ads appeared. Second, the full-text feeds I’d become accustomed to were replaced by the Movable Type default of the first twenty words. The first 20 words weren’t particularly useful in most cases, giving me no idea what the entry was really about. Coupled with the ads, nearly 50% of the content of the feed was ads.

I left a comment on the blog, saying I didn’t mind the ads, and could live with summaries as long as they were hand-written, but could they please not do both ads and summaries?

Then I callled up Torsten Jacobi, CW’s CEO, on Skype and said the same thing to him. The reason they’ve gone to partial feeds is their content was being scraped by blogspam bots. So I reiterated my concern about both summaries and ads and he said he’d consider it, but no one else had really complained about the change.

Today I notice that Business Pundit is back to full-text feeds with Pheedo ads. Fantastic. Torsten tells me that they haven’t decided if they’ll keep it this way permanently, but I applaud CW and Torsten for listening to their customers and being willing to try new things.