I eagerly logged on to the much-trumpeted TPM Cafe on its launch today. The product of Josh Marshall, author of Talking Points Memo, TPM Cafe has both a number of group blogs with some good participants (Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Todd Gitlin, Ivo Daalder) and some individual blogs like Matthew Yglesias’s.

But as far as I can tell, there are no RSS feeds whatsoever. Not even the poor one- or two-line feeds that the original TPM provides, which is what I had feared pre-launch. How can a clued-up blogger like Josh Marshall do this? There also doesn’t seem to be any provision for trackbacks, which is odd, but not crucial. I don’t get it.

Just as the rest of the world is increasingly using RSS, how can a new venture — which I assume wants to maximize its audience — ignore it? I’ve sent TPM Cafe a bug report.

Update There’s a teaser feed here. Thanks to Mark Schmitt for helping me find it. (And following that syntax, you can get Matthew Yglesias’s teaser feed here.) That’s better than nothing, but it’s pretty poor. Here, for example, is what I get from Mark’s first post on TPM Cafe:

First, I’m very excited to be here, looking forward to great discussion. Josh started this off with two questions, and it’s the first, the big one, that Greg, Karen, Ed…

That’s it. There’s even no way to tell which author wrote it. Is it going to make me click through to read the entire post? Josh or someone should get in touch with Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber to see how to do decent feeds from a group blog. You can choose your flavor and the feed tells you the author, so if you prefer Kieran to John Quiggin (I like them both) that can direct your reading.