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?


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