All the zone feeds include "Daily Dose" articles which contain a handful of short news summaries. I open them if I see something interesting (which is often), but I'd open them much more frequently if they were organized differently.
Currently, the title of the article is just the title of the first news summary. Likewise, the RSS description I see in my feed reader is just the first few hundred characters of the first news summary. So there's no way to see what the other news summaries are before making the jump to the entire article. If the first summary doesn't interest me, I don't bother clicking through to see what else is there.
Look, for example, at the Daily Dose article for Thu, 2010/10/14. The title is "Daily Dose - Spring Web Flow 2.2 GA". The RSS description:
The final release of Spring Web Flow 2.2 is here bringing JSF 2.0 support and Portlet 2.0 support. This version of Spring Web Flow implements Dojo 1.5, dojox, and a Facelets tag library for Spring Security. 2.2 also adds two spring-js artifacts and a Spring Travel sample application built on JSF2 and PrimeFaces components.Oracle Still Supporting OpenOffice
The article itself has much more than just the item on Spring Web Flow. I'd change the title to either something that described more of the news summaries or make it super simple, like just "Daily Dose for Thu, 2010/10/14". But the title is a minor point.
The place where I think you can really improve is the RSS description. I propose that you list the titles of each of the news summaries in the RSS description:
Spring Web Flow 2.2 GA
Oracle Still Supporting OpenOffice
iOS 4.2 Beta 3
Chrome OS by November 11th?
J and I and Me: Spring vs. Java EE and Why I Don't Care
If you want some teaser text, you can still append the first news summmary after the list of titles.
Hope this sparks some discussion. Your humble reader, BB
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