5. Michael Arrington sticks to the facts on his Twitter account, @techcrunch. Subscribers to his account are updated with the latest headlines coming in from Techcrunch.

4. Justin Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review gives readers and insight into not only the latest tech news but also his life from his account, @jason_pontin. Reading his tweets you get a sense of what is like balancing publishing a magazine with the trials of being a new parent.

3. Marc Ambinder, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly. provides the latest news and rumors off the campaign trail on his page @marcambinder. The one draw back to Ambinder’s insightful posts is the site’s ugly blue backdrop.

2. People probably know Brian Stelter as the head blogger for The New York Times TV Coder blog. S telter’s twitter account at @brianstelter gives readers the benefit of both his timely articles and the latest happenings in the media.

1. What makes a great Twitter user is a mix of fact, personality and a touch of what is happening in the rumor mill. This is exactly what John A. Byrne, editor-in-chief of Business Week, does with his account, @Johnabyrne. While it’s still only followed by a small amount of people this talented writer is becoming an equally talented twitterer.

The number of journalist using twitter to spread news instantly is growing. It seems now more then ever journalists are starting to learn just how much of a virtue brevity is.

But neither Matt nor I could find any examples. How unbelievably sad.

But not for The Guardian — they get to be the first media company to actually take RSS seriously, to actually make the offering something users would want to USE.

In fact, I think The Guardian holds the distinction of being the first mainstream media company not to actively SUPPRESS RSS adoption by publishing abbreviated feeds.

What every other mainstream media company does with their RSS feeds is publish a brief excerpt of the content, forcing readers to click on the headline and visit the publisher’s site in order to actually read the content.

Why? So the publisher can serve ads.

And the problem with this? It defeats the entire purpose of RSS!

The value of using an RSS reader is that you can read content from dozens (or more) sites all in one place without having to visit all of those sites.

But if all the RSS feeds you subscribe to have only an excerpt, and you have to click through to read anything, you spend your entire time clicking to other sites. Which is completely annoying!

And that’s why most people who use RSS readers don’t bother to subscribe to partial content feeds.

And… I think this is one of the reasons why RSS adoption has not gone mainstream.

Mainstream media is still mainstream because that’s what that largest number of people consume. Can you imagine sitting an average web media consumer down and trying to convince them to use an RSS reader with partial feeds from all their favorite mainstream media sites?

FAIL!

Every mainstream media company will argue that they need to use partial RSS feeds to MANIPULATE their users into coming to their sites so they can serve ads.

Which makes sense, if you believe that manipulating users is the best way to build brand loyalty.

The only problem with that argument is… you can serve ads in RSS feeds! That’s what The Guardian plans to do.

The Google Reader blog reported The Guardian is the “first major newspaper in the world” to have full text RSS feeds.

I’d argue that The Guardian is the first major media company in the world to have RSS feeds AT ALL.

All of the others with partial feeds — it’s a joke. It’s something that they bury at the bottom of the site so they can claim to have fully embraced web technology.

But they haven’t. They are supressing web technology. And they are surpressing the potential both for mainstream adoption and for advertisers to take feeds seriously as a channel for advertising.

I hope for The Guardian’s sake that they are able to build a sizable RSS audience that is appealing to their advertisers, and that they are able to profit while everyone else sits on the sidelines.

I’ll be on the panel alongside Justin Williams, Assistant Editor at the Telegraph Media Group, Martin Stabe, formerly of Press Gazette and now online editor at Retail Week, Tim Gopsill, who edits the NUJ’s The Journalist magazine, and Mike Rowley, who’s director of digital publishing at Northcliffe Media. Chairing the event is writer and consultant Nico Macdonald.

It’s a panel which, in an otherwise empty room, could probably have a heated debate… and these NMK events always bring in a lively and knowledgable audience too. This should be fun.