More About Partial vs. Full Syndication Feeds
A friend writes about my recent decision to experiment with delivering a partial (rather than full text) syndication feed.
If you are not aware of what we are talking about, click here
For a decent argument in favor of partial feeds, read this article.
Back to what my friend who DISLIKES partial feeds has to say:
[tease]
You still haven’t told me (not that you really need to do so) why you are following a dubious trend and only putting partial posts into the RSS feed for your blog.
I think it’s extremely annoying. It’s more efficient to get your keen insights with my feed reader (NetNewsWire Lite) than to have to boink on your feed and open it up in an already overtabbed, oversaturated set of browser windows.
Plus, my personal “must reads” including the Queens of Bloggers (Heather B. Anderson aka Dooce and Rachelle Bowden aka rachelleb), Guy Kawasaki, Wil Shipley, Dharmesh Shah, all post full information in their feeds. Do you know something that they don’t?
Thanks for asking. For me, the jury is still out on this topic. The reason I switch to offering a partial feed is because I have some evidence that a couple of so-called SPLOGS (spam blogs) are grabbing my feed and posting without attribution. That is annoying.
Full vs. partial feeds does not affect my pocketbook. Yet. I am not running any ads. Yet.
This blog is a hobby, but it would be OK if I were to recover a little of my (very modest) “hard dollar” cost of publishing. Besides, right now I do not know anything about ads until I experiment with them and get my hands dirty, so to speak.
If you are unfamiliar with the SPLOG problem, the Head Lemur (a fascinating read, by the way) offers an on-line PhD program in hunting and nailing these vermin.
Back to partial feeds and why I am continuing to experiment with them.
I am aware that some of the best-known, most popular bloggers despise partial feeds. Scoble, Winer and Doc Searles come to mind.
You also mention some other bloggers who offer full feeds. They are successful, and maybe they have it right, I’m just not sure.
Just for fun, I’ve switched to Google Reader as my feed reader, from BlogLines.. On reason was to see how my partial feeds were displayed etc. The answer – for Google Reader – is it seems to work OK.
My mind remains open.