Partial vs Full RSS Feeds
Jon from MondayByNoon has some lively conversation on his latest post which weighs the pros and cons of using full and partial RSS feeds for syndication. In a nutshell, full feeds are awesome for the user in terms of reading content and not having to visit the site if they don’t want to/have the time. However, it makes it extremely easy for spammers to aggregate your content for their malevolent ways. Partial feeds are more spammer-proof yet they might annoy your readers.
I have always used full feeds for PaulStamatiou.com, but I have run into many, many cases where spammers have used my feed on their advertisement-ridden site. These instances are headaches to say the least. Sometimes they can be solved with strongly-worded emails to the copyright-infringing author, where as other times you need to hit them where it hurts and contact their advertisers. (Check out the incident where A-list blogger Robert Scoble accused Cornell super-blogger Elliott Back of stealing his content and Scoble got Google to take Elliott’s ads down.) Regardless, it takes time from me that I could have been better spent whipping up a great post.
Out of pure curiosity, would you guys get annoyed if I switched to partial feeds?
I personally deleted all the partial feeds in my feed roll last week. Although I surely understand why people use partial feeds, in a standalone feed reader, I use FeedDemon, partial feeds are more an annoyance than in a web based (multi-tab browser) feed reader.
Yeah, I’m guessing that everyone’s comment will pretty much be like yours… from an RSS-user’s standpoint, I totally agree.
You should stay with full feeds.
Much better for your readers (like myself).
;-)
Actually, full or partial feeds don’t really matter to me because I don’t actually read feeds I prefer to actually go to the website that I wanna read. I know that may sound crazy but I don’t read eight millions websites like a lot of people do. Plus, I’ve not found a feed reader that I like.
Hehe… fast reaction. I distinctly make a difference between web based and standalone feed readers tho. In my browser, with a button+mouse click it is easy to open a new tab if the teaser was interesting enough. But I have choosen for a decent feed reader to use on a secondary screen.
FeedDemon allows me to set the update frequency for every feed separately (I also read forum feeds and even administer forums). If now everytime my browser needs to open/pop up (and eventually hide my active working window) I might get annoyed.
Thanks a lot for the plug, Paul. I didn’t think my post was going to bring up this much conversation but I’m *really* glad it did. When I had mentioned that little bit about popular blogs constantly running into the problem of having their content scraped, your name was near the top of that list. More often than not, I find myself reading even full feeds in browser simply because there’s so many great designs out there, I enjoy looking at the site too.
All in all I hope the content scraping dies down either because authors catch on too quickly, or some other solution comes about (I’m just not sure what that could be yet)
Personally, I find partial to be rather frustrating like I would imagine many other of your readers. Maybe if full rss is a disadvatage to your advertisers then consider doing both, partial w/o ads and full with ads….. just a thought.
both when using a web-based or a standalone reader, I’d much prefer full posts. but partial ones don’t have to be so bad.
what I think is the problem is that bloggers will often leave the size of the excerpt to the blogging tool’s discretion. and almost always, the user will be left with two or three lines of text, and no idea what the post is all about.
and that sort of thing is pretty annoying, and I have given up on reading several blogs because of things like that.
I love to read posts in their intended environment. I’m an extremely visual person - it’s why I’m a designer - so I remember the words and the author better when I see the article or post on the main site. I don’t sit and read feeds, but rather browse through the list of items in my reader and pick and choose which ones which sound interesting, then open each one in a new tab to read at my whim.
With my own posts I try to give the first paragraph or a summary to sort of “sell” the post or article. But then again, my whole business is visual. If people aren’t clicking over to see my site, they won’t see my work and they won’t hire me, so partial/summary feeds are important for my existence as a designer.
I appreciate the people who provide full feeds, but I don’t read them in my reader anyway.
In the case of your feed it doesn’t really bother me that much. I tend to read all your posts on your site as I like the environment you have created for it. Being a designer I like to look at good design, so those feeds that I read tend to be from well designed sites anyway. Some I read in Newshutch others I read on the site because its more enjoyable. I think part of the experience of reading content is in the way its presented, and you present yours well, so either suits me!
Phil makes a great point about the way information is presented. The most drastic change I’ve experienced was in Dustin Diaz’s change this year from the clean white butterfly design to the now simple but dark and neon look (which serves its purpose but is not for me). I found it really difficult to read his articles in the new environment so I’ve stuck to the feed reader.
@ben bishop: “partial w/o ads and full with ads”
That’s been a thought, but I would hate to have to manage 2 feeds. I would actually have to run 3 in that case because 9rules uses my feed for the homepage and it can’t have ads on it and must be a full feed. Too much trouble.
Personally I like teasers. I don’t always have the time so I have sort out by interest and if it’s the full article instead of just a sentence or two, I can only go by the title. I really dislike doing it, but I need to safe my time. I use Opera’s feed-reader. It’s exactly what I need. A dead simple one that just does what it should, get the feeds, no fancy schnick-schnack (German, not a word compareable in English, it’s like ‘all the bells and whistles’ just in a bad way)
Another reason I visit the sites (even when I have the time to read everything) is the ads. Some blogs have a banner, or one of those flash-things that comes over the page, either way, if I don’t visit the site it doesn’t generate money.
And probably the best arguments is comments. I like reading them
I would not mind, as I use an online feed reader and read posts based on titles and blog. I don’t even read a bit before coming to the site.
That’s how I am. I find an interesting title in newsfire, click on it and it opens in a tab in my browser. I just go through newsfire and click on about 20 items and then read them in my browser.
I decided to offer both (howto here) for different purposes: an excerpt feed for time-pressed regular subscribers, and a full feed for syndication (9rules). Personally I feel “headlines” are in the spirit of RSS/ syndication and like the idea of “click for more”. I read only the first sentence or two in my reader and move on if it doesn’t interest me.
I rarely click through feed items to get to the site – in other words, I do 90% of my reading in the news reader.
Please please please don’t switch to partial feeds.
Wouldn’t bother me at all. I only scan headlines in my reader, so whether or not there’s a full, partial, or non-existent feed doesn’t really matter to me.
As a side note, does Newsfire allow you to force excerpts? I might start glancing at the first parts of posts for a little bit more context if I can have even full feeds turned into excerpts.
Partial feeds are fucking useless.
Don’t do it… I’ll leave I will. Nah I won’t it just means to be honest you content has a greater risk of being “command+clicked” and sent to a tab to be read “later”.
I am not saying I don’t do that occasionaly at the moment but I am more inclinded to read the full article in Safari RSS as soon as I see it.
Hope this helps you judge reader opinion.
I’d like to request a minutes silence for the great loss, me, no Australia, no Nature - no THE WORLD suffered today. A moment please if you all wouldn’t mind for Steve Irwin followed by a rousing “Crickey” from all.
One more vote for not switching to partial feeds.
Yes, partial feeds would annoy me.
Partial feeds would annoy me, too, yes. It’s not because I don’t like visiting every site in my browser. No, it’s because right now I am in Thailand and will stay here for a while - and internet connection in this Country is not that good. So I am happy to read all my favourite blogs through one blog reader. There are some blogs with partial feeds - I kicked them out of my reader because I cannot read them.
Switch to partial feeds, lose another reader.
I use shrook, and love full feeds. Don’t change!
dont switch to partial feeds man…. wrong move
As I said earlier, I just wanted to know what you guys thought about the issue. I wasn’t going to do it. =)
How much spammer sproof will it be for partial feed?
Partial feeds actually help me with reading. I can skim and see if I’m interested. If I really am, I’ll open it, it’s in the context of the site, and then I’ll see the comments. But, I’m not some sort of power-RSS reader who reads hundreds of sites a day, just a select few that I would read either way.
Yes.
@Devin: most RSS readers have an option to show either full or excerpts from feeds. This may suit you, as you can jump between the two and still have full feeds when you want them.
Partial feeds are, mostly, useless. Slightly less so when the feed author writes a good introduction, but still annoying. The problem also occurs in photoblog feeds, but with people serving thumbnails of images. Understandable due to bandwidth issues, but sometimes the thumbs are so small and badly generated, it’s not possible to appreciate the photo.
Keep the full feeds going strong please :)
It’s great to see both sides in these comments. Just to clear things up, when I mention ‘partial feed’ I’m not referring to a truncated feed. I’m talking about a partial feed in that a summary is used as opposed to the first few sentences of the article. To me, that’s much less useful than a thought out excerpt which lets the reader decide if they’re interested in reading the article or not. On the other hand, as we can all read, lots of people won’t even be bothered with a partial feed and that’s just fine. The Web is what you make of it and you can use it as you please. Everyone absolutely has the right to disown a feed due to its lack of full-ness, therefore missing out on the content of that site (interesting or not).
Full feeds please
I’m with franky. Lately I’ve been going through and deleting all partial and headline feeds.
If I were you I’d go with partial feeds. I only read the first few lines in my feedreader anyway and if I want to read the whole thing I’ll click over to their site even if they are publishing a full feed.
You might annoy a few readers but you would save yourself a whole lot of trouble on the splogger end of things.
I’m the same as Natalie. I don’t read feeds in the feed reader. I like visiting the original sites and read everything there to check on the design and layout. Much better! Greetings from Brazil! Erika ;-)
why not change your feed address in the address bar to feedburner also?
Aaron, I use some nifty .htaccess rules to route everything to feedburner. So even if the feed is http://paulstamatiou.com/feed it all redirects to feedburner at http://feeds.feedburner.com/paulstamatiou
Lately, I’ve been using the new IE instead of “feedreader3.05″ I like the way it maintains and displays the feeds. So be it partial or full it still shows up very nice and orderly. (Not like in FeedReader3.05)
keep up the great work. AM
Hi guys,
I found this post indirectly, from our own tangential mention of this topic (http://seeksift.wordpress.com/2006/10/14/rich-format-email/).
From our perspective as an intelligent aggregator (http://www.seeksift.com), full feeds make more sense.
Not only for the benefits to the end reader (as other have mentioned), but also for feed publishers since any content, including ad images, tracking links, etc. get displayed in full.
With partial feeds, publishers lose out on people who would rather not (for whatever reason) click the item link back to the originating site.
Partial feeds have to go unless you are trying to protect your commercial content or limit access to information.
The FEEDBURNER automatically truncates feeds from EVERYBODY thats just killing the service.
Why does a Auntie Ann’s Baby Blog need have a partial feed?
Want to print your blog out like a newspaper or magazine? A new application I’m excited about is the FEEDJOURNAL.
Check it out at: http://www.Feedjournal.com
Tell em Becktemba sent you.
Becktemba - I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been using feedburner with full feeds for years..