Sara Williams, the head of MSDN responds to the hailstorm of criticism spun up around blogs.msdn.com having trouble with their feeds due to bandwidth consumption and as a result, needing to make significant changes

Robert and I just had a nice chat about what we're doing with RSS on blogs.msdn.com. In a nutshell, our RSS traffic is neglible compared to all the traffic generated by Windows Update, MSN, downloads, and the rest of microsoft.com. We were motivated to reduce the size of the blogs.msdn.com home page primarily for operational efficiency's sake - why serve up 400k of content when we know that folks (except for Robert) don't read 400K of content on a web page. The truncation idea is borrowed straight from newspapers - read the first bit on the front page, turn to page 12 for the full story. We hear you that you don't want the aggregate feed to be truncated, so it's not. And we increased the limit from 500 to 1250 characters on blogs.msdn.com. We're also working on some smaller OPMLs, so that you can easily subscribe to a subset of our blogs - say, all the security blogs, or all the web services blogs. When we had 20 or so bloggers on MSDN, it made sense to have 1 opml. We've got 959 now, so a single OPML isn't as easy to deal with any more. Yes, RSS has room for improvement, but it's not bad today - you just have to understand what you're doing. At the same time, there's tons of headroom for improvements to the spec, improvements to the client software, and improvements in server implementation