Every blog post and article should begin with a succinct summary of what it’s about. A social media version at the top of each post. Like the standfirst of a news story. Or a TLDR. Without these, blogs and longer reads will never make a strong come back.

We need to make content easier to nibble at before tucking in.

I’ve had this feeling for a long time and have been musing about it since restarting efforts on this blog. But seeing Richard Rutter’s RSS feeds recently (which for some daft reason I wasn’t already subscribed to) I’m feeling even more certain that blog culture missed a trick of having a consistent summary strategy.

Summaries and RSS

Quite simply, Richard has two key RSS feeds.

feeds/summaries is basically what features on his Blog Archive page. It looks like the title and introductory paragraph of each post, but most often these paragraphs are separately crafted stand alone posts. Summaries, if you will!

feeds/fullposts meanwhile gives access to the more classic RSS format, with each post being offered openly and wonderfully in full.

Richard’s summaries highlight for me the problem with the classic RSS convention, in that it makes it hard to quickly browse all the feeds that I subscribe to, because people write in such wholly different ways.

There is no Twitter / Threads / BlueSky feed like interface where I can succinctly get the idea of each post before having to dive in and read anything between 100 to 10,000 words. At least, not in the way I would like it.

Yes, I could just read the first paragraphs, but, as I think Richard’s summaries feed highlights, first paragraphs are often written very differently to how you might write a stand alone summary.

If RSS feeds could be viewed first as succinct and consistently formatted Twitter like feeds, I’m certain that more people would get into (and back into) RSS. I’m pretty much describing a Twitter feed, where each post links out to a longer post on the same subject.

Composing, distributing, subscribing, consuming, contributing

We write for ourselves, but also to share. And to find what’s been shared, we need to gather and subscribe, so we can consume, and then possibly respond, and contribute to continue the conversation.

I think that’s a fairly complete description of the dynamics involved in writing, or creating and sharing anything online. It’s the dynamic that news websites and personal blogs (and RSS) fulfilled fairly well in the early days of the web. Then, web 2.0 and the social web minimised, productised, advertised and crushed it all into something slightly more grotesque and distracting.

But, along with firmly shepherding the network effect, social platforms focused on one basic thing that I think is still oddly underplayed. By systematising content formats, and methods of consumption, and making things predictable and accessible: they made content creation and consumption easy.

Making content easy

RSS did exactly this for blogs (and if you don’t know much about RSS then you really should start here with reading about Aaron Swartz. An immensely inspiring and wonderful seeming human who is tragically no longer alive).

Before RSS, blogs were bloody hard to get along with. There. I said it. I know a lot of people wish for the old days of the web, when blogs were bountiful and perfect and things were more creative and free. But, for the majority of people, they were also pretty hard to find and return to and keep up with. RSS totally changed that, and technically made it as easy and open as possible to make content come to you.

Bloggers themselves meanwhile didn’t add to the effort. It wasn’t enough to rely on RSS to ‘do the hard work to make it simple’. They should have have reviewed how easy it was for readers to get started with their posts, once they became part of a greater feed. Easy entry points aka. ‘summaries’ would have been an awesome addition to the standardised RSS world.

Instead, social feeds filled the user need for consistent and digestible chunks of snackable content, and blogs (actual nourishing content) became things you might find at the end of an occasional hyperlink.

Ways to retrofit summaries

A while back I imagined my RSS reader including an automatic AI summary feature. A view of my unread list that gives paragraph length summaries before I decide to click through to the real thing. While this would be possible, it would also likely be inaccurate or inconsistent at best, given the current state of AI. More specifically though, I bet it would piss people off, and so not the kind of feature that makers of RSS readers would support.

Like I’m trying here then (and like Richard has been doing for ages it seems), perhaps we just take the responsibility ourselves and write our own succinct intro summaries. A little bonus being that it could double as a social media post for linking back to the post itself.

Realistically, I think that means writing standfirsts at the top of every post rather than having separate RSS feeds, as that might prove too technical for some. That said, I know this aspiration isn’t easy or just a case of ‘just’. Writing a good standfirst takes time and means more work. What’s new there though? Again, ‘the hard work to make it simple’ is an adage (in some circles) for a reason.

Content design, isn’t it, basically?

I think this post comes from my feeling that there needs to be a content designer in all of us. I come from a generation that firmly held ‘content as king’, and that constantly repeated ‘content first’ when doing any sort of design. Content is as much an interface as any button or skeuomorphic UI feature.

People that are good at writing or ‘good with words’ however seem not to hold this idea as innately. I’d go as far to say that there’s a sort of arrogance to writers, that their skill, and the history of their craft, is an art form before a communication device.

It needs to be both. And if we want to make our content more popular and accessible, outside of wisely designed social platforms, then we need to be wiser with how we design our interactions with it.

Final notes on some word choices

Nibble – I like the idea that that’s how we consume short form content and summaries. Maybe we need to lean in more to eating metaphors when thinking about content design. An easier metaphor for everyone to relate to, perhaps.

Content – I think I’m more pragmatic about this word than a lot of people. I remember at some point in 2011, having a conversation with a curator (of exhibitions and art galleries) about her hatred of the word ‘content’. It was the first time I remember realising that content had become a commodity. The thing that people wanted to share in order to get clicks and impressions, without proper regard for what the content contained.

While I do see this point, and wish that a lot more people would respect the hard work of creators and credit them far more, I also think that ‘content’ is simply a useful word for all the stuff that we produce and consume and enjoy and share.

Perhaps it’s the content designer in me. We need to take a step back and consider things objectively and tangibly in order to figure out how to design with them. Far from disrespecting the creator, it’s a job of truly understanding the nature of the content, so that it can be presented in the most useful way.

Standfirsts – They’re ultimately what this is all about. The format problem is already solved. Nothing I’ve defined here is new or original. It’s all just a rallying cry for encouraging and implementing some more consistent and accessible content strategies on ourselves, outside of the platforms that employ them so well.