Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Maybe this is old news, maybe this is really really old news, or maybe it’s just an ongoing debate that I’ve finally decided to throw my two cents in (actually I did write about this on another blog, but I can’t show you that yet).

I have recently found myself discussing with other bloggers and blog readers the issue of RSS feeds. Specifically, which do people prefer – full or partial RSS feeds?

A quick recap -

Full = you can read the whole article in your RSS reader so there is no need to view the blog.

Partial = you get a truncated summary of the blog feed and if you want to read the full article you have to click through to the blog.

If you are new to RSS read What Is RSS?.

My original stance was that I voted for full feeds for two main reasons -

1. It bugged me when using my feedreader of choice, RSSOwl, that I had to click through and wait for a blog page to load to read the full article. In most cases I wouldn’t bother. I assumed there were other people like me having the same reaction and as such the content would never get read. I didn’t want this happening to my blog so I had full feeds on.
2. The purposes of my blogging is primarily to be read. Everything else is secondary, by-products of me being read. I may want people to click an AdSense link, buy an affiliate product, join my email list or bookmark my site but none of these actions can occur without someone first reading my blog. I want a loyal following of readers. I want people to know who Yaro Starak is. To facilitate this I choose full feeds to reduce resistance and ensure as many people as possible read me, either at the blog or in the feed.

I stand by this decision and full feeds will always be available from my blogs. However due to some recent conversations and reading I’ve realized there is an audience for partial feeds as well. In particular the “feed skimmers” are readers I may be loosing by not making partial feeds available. The feed skimmers scan through their feeds quickly, reading headlines and page summaries looking for content that might interest them. They want short summaries, not full text so they can scan quickly and digest only the content they want to read.

I believe good headings facilitate feed skimmers well enough but having feed summaries of could further help to capture this audience.

The Feed Solution

The answer to the full or partial feed debate in my mind is to let the people decide. Why can’t the choice of full or partial feeds be available within the feedreader itself? In simple form there could be a single option to choose between full or partial feeds. More complex options could include defining this choice on a blog-by-blog basis or a category-by-category basis. The options no doubt could become very customized limited only by the imagination and creativity of programmers and bloggers.

What About Advertisements!

One of the big concerns for professional bloggers is that their advertisements won’t be read if everyone is bypassing their normal ad-laden blog for the nice clean text-only feed. I could argue that advertisements perform better when they are subtle recommendations embedded within the article itself, but that’s not going to make the AdSense fans very happy. The simple fact is they lose income if people read their blog only through feedreaders. Unfortunately AdSense for feeds and other similar services for feeds don’t perform nearly as well as standard website AdSense so it’s not an adequate income replacement.

The answer could be that bloggers can choose to make full or partial feeds available as per usual, then if they choose full feeds the user can manipulate the feed in all kinds of ways within their feedreader of choice, converting to partial feeds if they prefer. Whatever the solution I think the power should be with the people, but of course the concerns of the publisher are important too. If they don’t get what they require to keep blogging then no one will have feeds to subscribe to at all.

Chances are all these ideas are already implemented somewhere over the rainbow or at least in development. The issue as always – how to keep it simple enough that people will actually use it and how to gain traction leading to mainstream adoption and standardization so as to reduce confusion.

For the meantime, I make full feeds available from my blogs and I only subscribe to other blogs that have full feeds.