Blog aggregator issues

One thing that bums me out about both BlogLines and Kinja is that both of them don't show me the full feeds from some of my favorite blogs: Gizmodo and Engadget. When I say they don't show me the full post, I mean that they don't display the pictures that go with the posts (I understand that posts get truncated by the aggregators -- especially Kinja -- or by the feed settings). The best part about the new technology blogs is looking at the pictures and that part is not provided to me.

I would assume that the feed settings on the Gizmodo and Engadget sites are set up not to show the pictures so that I have to actually visit the sites. There are certainly plenty of ads on Gizmodo that fund and probably generate revenue for the publisher -- I believe Gizmodo refers to these ads as "sponsors."

Part of the reason I click through any of the links on Gizmodo is because the picture they put next to the short post is intriguing and I want to see more. If you didn't have the same kind of interest as me, you might subscribe to the Gizmodo feed in your blog aggregator, never see the picture (and not care if you didn't), and click through only on interesting posts, thereby never seeing the site advertising.

So . . . what if the blog aggregators recognized that a user was pulling a particular feed and served up the blog advertising on that feed? Make sense? For example, Mirra is advertising on Gizmodo today. I pull up the Gizmodo blog in my aggregator, get to see all the pictures with the feed, but my aggregator places some Mirra ad spots within the aggregator window only when I'm looking at the Gizmodo blog. For this service, the blog provider is charged by the aggregator some small fee (note: this will not work if the aggregators go into the advertising business for themselves).

Just a thought/free idea.