Roberts v. Roberts

John Roberts is beating the dead horse slowly once more on full text feeds. Yet his most compelling argument against his position is his own blog. Unless he front-loaded enough of his argument in the first graf to compel me to click on, I never would have read his rebuttal of Scoble's feed-pruning rationale in the first place. John's clock blog, of course, is well-written, always state-of-the art, informed by the dynamics of his day job as strategic officer of CNet's Web services, and full text. By contrast, Jeremy Zawodny's blog has all the same characteristics except full text, which doesn't lessen anything about his authority except the amount of attention I can pay to him given his insistence on putting significant content "below the fold."

Right now it may seem like a small tradeoff, with page view juice traded for loss of customer control. But those days are numbered, and as gestures become the lingua franca, those who have broken the time pact with their customers will find themselves more and more below the attention fold. John's best efforts at rationalizing the current CNet business model are marginalized by his own elegant and intelligent choice in favor of full text. Watch the feet.