The links in my last post provided a nice reminder of the oft-discussed topic of the continued value of good headlines and synposes in your RSS feeds.

Take a look at Hackermedia.org. Specifically at the titles of the various podcast episodes contained in the boxes on both sides of the screen. Which ones are interesting to you? Which ones would make you want to listen to that episode?

The nice thing about aggregating all these feeds and displaying them like this is that it makes it easy to do this comparison. For instance, on the right side, look at the box at the top titled "Off The Hook" (which I assume must have podfaded). The episode titles include the date of the show. Useful to understand the chronology, but not the content. Similarly, "The Linux Link Tech Show" episode titles all have the utililtarian text "The Linux Link Tech Show Episode #". Again, useful to know the progression... but not useful to know the content.

In contrast, keep going down the right side to "Phone Losers of America" which does provide descriptive titles. Now, I've never listened to the show and know nothing about it, but "PLA Radio - Episode 7 - Screwing with Other Podcasts" does admittedly make me want to click on it to listen. If you keep going down the right side, you'll see Steve Gibson's SecurityNow! where he includes the main theme of his show - and also nicely includes his sponsor's name. And then, of course, you get to Mr. Verbosity himself... yes, indeed, my feed for Blue Box includes a longer definition of what's in the show.

That was, of course, a conscious choice on my part... I wanted to include enough in there to entice people to listen. And the fact that I am seeing referrers coming in from this site indicates to me that the descriptive titles are working.

Note also in the "Latest Additions" part of the page the nice "Synopsis" underneath the listing of our recent show. I can't take any credit in that... I started out copying what Shel and Neville did over at For Immediate Release, primarily because I saw how it worked for them in sites like Podcast Alley which also display only short summaries for podcast episodes. Compare what is displayed for our Blue Box episode to what is displayed for some of the others, which I can only assume had very minimal show notes.

Again, all good things to think about when you are writing up your show notes and having those go out in your RSS feed. (Given that for most blogging platforms the title of your post becomes the title of the item in your RSS feed.)

Tags: blogging, podcasting, pr, rss