State of indian newspaper websites
its bad. substandard. stuck in 19, i dont know, 20's.
Well i was on a lookout for a good website for getting my daily dose of india's news. I figured I should checkout the website of the major indian news papers. I use google reader to follow all my feeds. The places I looked were Times of India, Indian Express, Hindu, Rediff. This is what I found, none of these sites provide full content feeds. The news feeds just contains a line or two and then you have to jump to there crappy, ever slowing, GIF ridden website to read the full story. The Hindu is even worse, its feed just contains the title of the story. Just the title !!
The way this site support news feeds is as if they are trying to discourage the users from using it. Furthermore, the "summary" content is not even a summary of the full story. At times its just the first line of the story from the actual article truncate abruptly. This doesn't help. If the reason this sites do not provide full content in the feed is to drive traffic to there website than at least they should provide enough information in the summary to make me interested so that I follow thru on the actual article. With almost no useful information, it completely defeats the purpose of subscribing to feed.
The problem is even worse for the people who are used to reading there news on there mobile devices (like me). As, for any news story you want to read, you will have to go to the actual site on your cell phone. and THAT IS A FAIL. These sites are loaded with images and other moving things. GIFs, Flash animations, popups. Anything and everything which will distract you from reading the actual story. I mean what's the point of all this. Are this newspaper companies so much in need for ad money that they are have to resort to this kind of things? I am not against ads on web pages. I am not. I cannot be coz everybody knows that is the only way people know to make money on the internet (oh no i dint). But there are definitely better ways to do this. Please, there are people who specialize in such things. People, please, bring down the bling level on your website. We are there to look at the news and not the pretty graphics.
end note: have a look at all the news site listed above, they look SO much similar. That is not a good sign.
Well i was on a lookout for a good website for getting my daily dose of india's news. I figured I should checkout the website of the major indian news papers. I use google reader to follow all my feeds. The places I looked were Times of India, Indian Express, Hindu, Rediff. This is what I found, none of these sites provide full content feeds. The news feeds just contains a line or two and then you have to jump to there crappy, ever slowing, GIF ridden website to read the full story. The Hindu is even worse, its feed just contains the title of the story. Just the title !!
The way this site support news feeds is as if they are trying to discourage the users from using it. Furthermore, the "summary" content is not even a summary of the full story. At times its just the first line of the story from the actual article truncate abruptly. This doesn't help. If the reason this sites do not provide full content in the feed is to drive traffic to there website than at least they should provide enough information in the summary to make me interested so that I follow thru on the actual article. With almost no useful information, it completely defeats the purpose of subscribing to feed.
The problem is even worse for the people who are used to reading there news on there mobile devices (like me). As, for any news story you want to read, you will have to go to the actual site on your cell phone. and THAT IS A FAIL. These sites are loaded with images and other moving things. GIFs, Flash animations, popups. Anything and everything which will distract you from reading the actual story. I mean what's the point of all this. Are this newspaper companies so much in need for ad money that they are have to resort to this kind of things? I am not against ads on web pages. I am not. I cannot be coz everybody knows that is the only way people know to make money on the internet (oh no i dint). But there are definitely better ways to do this. Please, there are people who specialize in such things. People, please, bring down the bling level on your website. We are there to look at the news and not the pretty graphics.
end note: have a look at all the news site listed above, they look SO much similar. That is not a good sign.
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