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RSS is the Tivo of information, the iTunes of text.
How would you feel if your tivo only recorded the first 15 minutes of a 2 hour movie? How would you feel if your iPod only had the first 30 seconds of a 4 minute song? Not too happy now would you.
Content needs, wants, and should be unleashed so that I don't even need a typical browser to read content anymore, just some device that takes an RSS feed.
I too am like you Scoble, the moment I subscribe to a feed and see that it's partial I just email the host, and unsubscribe.
Unlike me, many publishers do experience substantial decrease in revenue. The problem here is that it might push publishers to use in-content advertising that will be aggregated as legitimate content. I'm not sure I'm ready for that just yet.
Once something hits the net, there will be someone who will churn out a clean, raw, usefull form of said content to be distributed amongst the people.
Bad website design, server timeouts, pop ups that hide content, none of that has been present in my world ever since I started using RSS about a year ago. The web browser will always be about surfing, but anyone serious about their news, and I know you and I Scoble are certified news addicts, will use an aggregator for everything.
The thing that will make full feeds obvious in the coming years will be the rise of eBook readers based on eInk technology. The whole definition of newspaper will change. Those people who read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal on their eReaders will start a trend that will only grow. RSS will be THE ideal way of communicating content, and that's when you will see 75%+ people using RSS (without even knowing it too!)
Look at it from a blog writer's perspective. Should they write for the fringe reader or those that participate, comment, link etc? It's classic business scenario - you want to cater to a core consumer base, and opportunistically to a casual customer base
You need a better RSS aggregator if you think partial text feeds are better.
My personal blog supplies a full-text feed, but my website's RSS only provides an abstract and a link. Some of the tutorials are long and full of graphic elements, if the abstract interests you, click the link, if not, you can skip it and you just saved us both some bandwidth.
on your second point, not every reader is Scoble. Too much of blog world is based on us feeding each other. The business IT audience I write for barely comments or links...but does read blogs...
1. YES, we see an increase in pageviews when we move to partial feeds.
2. YES, we see an increase in ad clicks when we move to partial text feeds.
3. Your argument that going full text encourages more people to visit the site, while also admitting that less than 1% of peopel actually use RSS, is a little circular.
And, finally, if we can't "prove" (note: I've NEVER backed down from you on this discussion) that full text feeds result in less traffic to a website (which, really, is just common sense), then how are you going to PROVE that it somehow means more traffic?
Saying that you have gobs of traffic and you *might* read the blog, and then out of your 10 posts *might* link to it and that some of your readers *might* visit isn't motivation enough to most publishers.
Personally, I'd rather give readers BOTH a full-text, ad supported feed AND a partial-text non-ad feed. Choice. But, either way, users are 'paying' with their eyeballs to view the content. Which is the way it should be.
Also, I've done 2 conferences this month already. Both of them were 'industry' conferences (one marketing, one fashion). In both, RSS readership, blog readership AND blog authorship were above 30%.
It's growing in the mainstream. Maybe not in Cork (hello, the UK is well known to be behind the curve, no idea why you raised Cork as some bastion of normality). But it is growing.
I am not opposed to content producers providing BOTH full text and partial text feeds. On my cell phone I tell NewsGator to only bring partial text so that I can get the headlines faster, for instance. But it's MY CHOICE. I love choice! I hate it when a content producer thinks he or she knows how I'll read his or her content better than I do (or, worse, if he or she adds a business model decision into that).
But, that's beside the point.
I didn't say that. I said that if you want me to read your site, you need to provide full-text feeds. I'm far more likely to link to people who have full-text feeds than those who have only partial text feeds. Why? Cause I read them more often.
I guess if you're doing fine without me, no reason to worry at all. Just keep doing what you're doing.
No, it's not. Let's say I have 10,000 readers today. Let's say 1% of them read my blog in an RSS Aggregator. That still leaves, what, 9,900 in the Web browser, right? Now, what you and I both know is that those readers are not all the same. Some of those readers also have 10,000 readers. Let's say that's you. Do you read my blog in an aggregator? Based on how fast you answered here, I'd guess yes.
So, now, not only are you much more likely to link to me cause you're pissed off at what I wrote, but you're much more likely to have 10,000 readers (like you have noticed, RSS users are highly likely to also be bloggers or journalists or connectors -- in my research they are FAR more likely to have 10,000 readers than those people who only read me in a browser).
So, now, let's say you link to me. That'll probably send me 2,000 people (if you had 10,000). So, now I have 2,000 more readers today that I otherwise would have had. Let's say those are 99% Web readers, and only 1% RSS readers. So, now, I have way more traffic.
Now, continue this out. Let's say I turned to partial text feeds and 10% of my RSS readers unsubscribed. What kind of hit is that to my traffic?
You have 10,000 readers. When you link, you send maybe 500 people. Of those, 10% will read again, and 10% will become "readers". So, 5 readers for your link.
"Now, continue this out. Let’s say I turned to partial text feeds and 10% of my RSS readers unsubscribed. What kind of hit is that to my traffic?"
Ahhh, here's the meat of it. Say 10% unsubscribe. But, if they are 40% more likely to click, the 90% of readers are generating much, MUCH more traffic than the 100%.
Yes, I know you'll go all "but what if those 10% were connectors" on me. It doesn't wash. I've been in the game long enough to know that connectors are fickle, their audiences are fickle and that readership transference isn't as simple as 1 link. If it was, EVERYONE would have millions of readers.
Think about it. If EVERY link you sent had 10,000 people going to it, and if EVERY one of those became a reader, you'd be turning hundreds of blogs into million-reader blogs EVERY month.
And you and I both know that just isn't happening. Yes, once every week or so you hop on a big "conversational thread" whereby some nobody gets a few dozen links.
Like that guy who was on top of wordpress.com for a few days. Now where is he? Nowhere.
Traffic doesn't equal readers. RSS subscribers don't equal traffic.
To say otherwise is to, again, get pretty circular. The reason you want full text RSS feeds is so you don't have to visit a site, after all.
And, as far as you not visiting or reading sites that have partial text feeds, the irony must be lost on you. The Blog Herald is one of our partial text sites.
And, as far as "so not sure where all this traffic on your sites is", our sites aren't for you. Sure, we have a few that fall into the techy realm, but most are for topics that A Listers and "connectors" don't care about: aviation, crocheting, personal finance, handmade creations, wrestling, etc.
That doesnt' mean our traffic doesn't matter though :)
Yep, I could put a copyright statement in the feed saying don't reprint everything, but people don't look at that. Heck, people reprint without permission right now even without a full text feed.
If someone has good content, I'll take the feed full text or not and clickthrough. Deciding that everyone must have full text feeds is simply assuming we are publishers who are all the same, and we simply are not.
Actually I love this. Lots, and lots of people LIKE partial text feeds. They're skimmable (and, no, lots of people dont' want to use feed readers that only give headlines - and saying they have to switch to get the efficiencies of full text feed reading is, well, ironic).
So, what if 10% of your traffic unsubscribes over time because your posts are too long?
It's a two-edged sword, which is why I'm a proponent of having both full AND partial feeds. You get all the benefits of both. Readers get to choose what is best for them.
I'm not as black and white as you, Scoble when it comes to full text RSS but I do prefer full text because some readers help me shrink the content (like the Safari RSS reader) with a handy slider so I can see it in smaller chunks if I want.
Many of my posts are long, so a partial feed probably would cater to some percentage of readers but we've even gone one step further for readers and made it so every keyword on our blog can become an RSS feed. Readers can get only the content they are interested in or suck on the firehose, it's up to them. They are in control. I like giving them that control.
Yes, Danny Sullivan, it means people rip off our content, retool and repurpose it and it finds its way to splogs galore, despite our copyright notice on every page and in the RSS feed.
Content being scraped and ripped from webpages without permission (a la the dishonest mashups) seems to be happening in this new Web We Rip Of You Point Oh revolution. So it just makes it easier for these thieves to steal your content when it's full text RSS, but it doesn't mean they still can't steal it right from your webpage.
There are three different concerns here: what to do about DMCA violations (publisher), how to give the reader what he wants (reader) and whether giving the reader full text RSS feeds has any significant impact on advertising (publisher).
I suspect those who worry more about giving the reader -- focusing on the content they are coming to see, instead of the content they aren't coming to see (advertising) -- what he wants will still be doing this in the years to come vs. those who try to squeeze every available penny out of their readers.
Scoble might be wrong about a number of things, but he does seem to care about readers and cares as a reader. I respect that and can see where readers like Scoble can be served and money can still be made.
Be careful of greed, folks.
This isn't about "greed". This is about a give and take business relationship. Readers get what they want (good content), how they want it (full or partial text feeds). And publishers and authors get what they want, which is eyeballs and the money necessary to sustain the content.
The only person losing out is the idealist, who wants content to be free, without ads, because it offends his sensibilities.
With all due respect, I think you're speaking from personal preferences (you like the full feed / hate partial feed) and not from facts or even research.
Have you in fact conducted representative usability studies across a range of newsreaders, platforms, and topics? Have you conducted similar studies of ROI?
Don't bother, I know the answer, as you're not in research but in blogging. But, has anyone? At all?
I don't mind full text RSS with ads, that seems like a fair tradeoff, but I do mind blogs where the focus on advertising overlaps and invades the reader experience.
This will just drive more readers to tools like GreaseMonkey and Norton's Antispam where the ads are stripped out. This scenario certainly doesn't benefit publishers as a whole.
Here there be tigers.
Newspapers have been sending readers to page 34 from page 1 for ages, just for the sake of advertisers.
For for-profit blog publishers (all kinds of publishers really, but blog publishers more than other types), RSS is the bread and butter of getting the word out there - but it can also kill you (server load, no return without ads in full text feeds, content theft, etc).
But I wouldn't trade it for the world. It's a great industry to be in!
However, SimonD has an excellent point; namely PDAs and for that matter smart phones.
Do you actually want full RSS feeds on those devices? Personally I would go for full RSS on the desktop/laptop: yes...on PDAs and smart phones: no.
Skimming through even full RSS feeds should be easy like in Quicknews on my Treo I just hit space bar to jump to the next article so I can see the title, maybe pueruse the first paragraph, if it interests me I keep reading otherwise I hit space and continue on, also there is probably some option to shorten the article display in the summary or something that you could enable.
Advertising in blogs as a concept doesn't worry me when there is content to justify it but nothing annoys me more than seeing Google AdSense on blogs like Joe Blow's Blog especially if they have like three panels of AdSense and even more so if they have other advertising as well.
However even when the content is worth it the advertising can go over the top *cough*Engadget*cough*, why does a site owned by AOL need so much damn advertising?
Why can't you give freedom to others, in reading and publishing media as they want, on their terms. I happen to like partial text, gives me a quick overview, instead of pulling the whole darn thing down, if I want I clink in, I clink in. And if you want FULL then go Avantgo or other places where full is default. A sydicational format, is surprise, a syndicational format.
Why do bloggers demand the world conform to their little own navel-gazing world? Geesh, not everyone has the same needs or motivations as you do. And funny, I don't see you whining about Memetrackes, like Memeorandum which are all partial. Or is that your next rant?
Advertising has to come second. You have to find ways to bring the ads to the readers, without annoying them or inconveniencing them or tricking them in any way. Google thought this way, and made a lot of money. Blogs should think that way too.
If you don't please your audience, they will go somewhere else.
http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/msw.xml
Basically, it gets the link from each feed and downloads the HTML from that page as the text for the entry. Some other rss readers have a built-in option for this. Fetchlinks does miss some links occasionally, but I find it better than nothing. Also, Newsgator allows you to set whether to use fetch links on a feed by feed basis (on the rendering tab).
While I agree with your points for the most part, I can see reason not to include the full content of a feed. Mainly from the perspective of MSDN, whose entries are very long sometimes. I do think only doing partial feeds for the sake of advertising is bad reasoning however.
http://graemef.com/?q=project/fetchlinks
Jeremy: when I linked to Podtech.net I sent him more than 10,000 unique viewers (according to him). So, at least some of my links pull a sizeable audience.
Christopher: I don't read memetrackers in RSS. I visit a handful of pages in Web browsers cause they change too often.
Also, I'm not saying you ONLY have to provide full text feeds. I'm perfectly happy if a content owner provides both full text and partial text feeds.
Mike: some feeds I want partial, some I want full (most I want full, though, even on my smart phone).
Yeah, I gotta use the FetchLinks product. I keep forgetting to load that.
I respect your perspective, but I'd suggest that your personal preference for full-text feed is just that -- one person's preference; not a sound basis for blanket advice to online publishers.
In my case, I've chosen not to offer a full-text feed for Contentious.com and RightConversation.com for several reasons. These are:
1) Partial feeds (and e-mail alerts based on those feeds) are the only way I can get clickthrough information about which of my articles are most popular -- one of my most valuable tools for planning and refining my content strategy.
2) Like you, I often write at a length which is unwieldy for common feed reader tools and services. I don't think telling people to "get a better feed reader" is very constructive for building a relationship with your audience.
3) My content already gets stolen and plagiarized often. I do consider that a problem, and I believe a full-text feed would only exacerbate that problem.
4) One core purpose of my blogs is to market my professional services. I choose not to cram every blog posting (or feed item) with marketing messages, but I do need to make that marketing connection. If people have no reason to visit my site, I don't get that benefit.
I realize you probably disagree with some or all of these considerations, and that's fine. Still it seems to me that your arguments in favor of all online publishers offering full-text feeds is based solely in your preference.
Personally, I think this consideration can vary widely by publication, goal, and target audience.
Thanks,
- Amy Gahran
Contentious.com
RightConversation.com
I wish you had full text feeds cause I want to read your content, but the competition for my time is fierce, so I'll stick with only full-text feeds, sorry.
- Amy Gahran
Thanks for considering my points.
Yes, scraping will always happen. But full-text RSS just makes it way too easy for the sploggers, and it's doubly bad because some do it and don't even realize it's wrong - they think that's what RSSyndication was made for.
I would put ads in my feed, but:
1. It doesn't work (financially).
2. I do want people to syndicate my headlines and partial text, which doesn't work with ads.
The next version (2.6, currently in beta) of NewsGator for Outlook includes this functionality built in. Check out the feature intro posted by the lead dev:
http://www.newsgator.com/forum/shwmessage.aspx?...
For more details on the 2.6 beta, see this post:
http://www.newsgator.com/forum/shwmessage.aspx?...
Disclaimer: I am a NewsGator employee
Robert: I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on bandwidth costs in regards to RSS. Should Jeremy Wright pay more than his $300/month in the competition for your attention? This Week in Tech pays tens of thousands on their full text feed for your attention. They have to make their time to live value a whopping 12 hours to cut down on requests (though many RSS readers supposedly ignore TTL)
You know, I would go so far as to say with RSS's bandwidth intensive stupid distribution model, the internet is simply not ready for full text RSS. Bandwidth is far too intensive. I think nobody has the right to tout full text feeds as essential and tell others to do that until you get your own server and start posting the bill for your RSS feed.
That is, unless your vision of the future is an internet made solely of bloggers on wordpress, typepad, and blogger.
Totally. But lazy bloggers demand the world spoon-fed them info. But missing important news as it just not full-text feeded, strikes me as well, stupidly clueless and arrogant to boot. Not a good practice either, as some of my best info sources are all partial.
Full, partial, snippet, abstract, hint, rumor, comment in passing, something overheard -- information is information, I am not going to have temper-tantrums over the format. This is yet another example why bloggers or citizen journo's will never replace real journalists. Unable to focus, or pinpoint the important, in the sea of information, they demand all now, no legwork needed.
HaloGate and RSSGate, even Scobles most diehard supporters are starting to think he's gone loopy. But thankfully, everyone is all ADD'ed, so onto the next big thing.
My advice to you Mr. Scoble: Never forget how high your horse is, the higher it grows, the harder the fall.
What worries me is the amount of Internet energy someone like Scoble manages to shift. As if any of what he had to say was REALLY that important in life.
Like British plawright David Hare once said in his play 'My Zinc Bed': "like Rome, Microsoft will also fall" which is actually similar to what my gran used to say when I was a girl, albeit in her own sort of way: "don't matter how well-to-do them folks think they are, they'll all end up 12 feet under like the rest of us".
Scoble's feed could be served up a total of 34,053 times for 50c of bandwidth:
1,073,741,824 bytes (1GB) / 31,531 bytes = 34,053.529
So for a typical month of 30 days, over 30,000 reads of the RSS feed a day would cost only $15. Now if you use a dedicated file serving plan for something like $60/month that gives you 500GB of bandwidth a month and generate a cache of your RSS feed there you would be able to support something like 480,000 reads of the RSS file a day based upon Scoble's current feed size.
Just how popular are the sites quoting $10,000 bandwidth bills?
Here's my case for full text feeds:
I worship Jon Udell. My opinion of him as a technologist and as a person couldn't be higher. Still I don't read his blog that often - probably less than weekly. I read a lot of less-worthy blogs on a daily basis.
Why? Because his feed isn't full text. I have a mental block from even checking his feed for new content. A partial-text makes me stop and think about each post "Click or skip?" Full-text lets me plow right through.
Also, at 17$/day, that's a hefty bill for ONE mildly trafficked blog. Now imagine content producers with 20 Scoble's, and all of a sudden you're in the 400$/DAY range (12K/month).
But you said you wouldn't subscribe to ANY partial feeds. More than once in the post, in fact. So which is it?
And is Tech.Memeorandum destined for the scrap heap? Or are they sending out a full feed that I am unaware of?
Just asking, carry on.
I'm guessing that is why comments often dissappear for short periods here on Wordpress.com as the caching mechanism must have a few kinks in it.
Jeremy: I use a free blogging service. Maybe if the costs are too high for you you should consider a free service like Blogger, MSN Spaces, WordPress.com. :-)
No to full listing!
The low response might be connected to simple time pressures. Frequently updating feeds on an aggregator and reading through them all can be low on the to-do list when there are so many other demands on time.
We could do with a 26 hour day over here.
I don't have strong opinions on the full/partial feed argument, but I do think that RSS will only become widely popular among casual internet users (who don't work in IT) when an aggegator is included as standard (not a plugin or third party add-on) in Office.
That's the stupidest thing you've said in this thread. Would that be your recommendation to the NYT too? Move their services to Xanga?
We couldn't PAY someone to give us the service and customization we require. And we tried, we worked with the Yahoo folk for over 2 weeks trying to make it all fit and it just didn't. We, as a growing content business, needed more than Yahoo can give. And you think MSN Spaces is somehow going to work?
I'm using Bloglines.I set it to complete entries on your subscription, but it still shows a few lines...perhaps it could be a setting in Wordpress? I checked Dave Winer's feed at scripting.wordpress.com and that works fine.
I love the article about growing your blog audience. Going to give it a go. :)
It doesn't matter one iota if you're talking about "protecting" content or increasing/reducing readership. It all boils down to what you like to read and how that material gets to your screen. Do you like to have it there waiting for you? Or would you rather only retrieve the items you really want to read?
Keep in mind this discussion is about human preferences. From an automated sense (i.e. what your rss reader can offer), big deal... as long as the feed has a back to the parent document, the full content is retrievable. It takes a fraction of a second for a program to pull the url from the link element and request the document. Done - the content is retrieved.
For an honest application, this means the content is placed alongside the feed's item so that the reader doesn't have to click on a link to view the entire article. As an example, my rss reader, intraVnews, does this exact same thing. I subscribe to a wider variety of partial feeds - some of them I prefer to leave them as partial, for others that I historically enjoy reading the full articles I simply instruct intraVnews to retrieve the full item. If your reader can't download a full item, get a new reader... don't take it out on the publisher, though.
On the flip side, this automated process in the hands of the less honest is a problem, but that is a problem that is defined by the RSS protocol. If you publish information and contain a link to a parent document, the process of cloning content is a no-brainer... partial or full rss feeds are effectively no different (unless your parent documents require authentication to access, but that is a different issue altogether).
jaseone: There are sites that get bills that high. TWiT is one of them and their RSS is already served from a separate server. You are underestimating how many hits RSS gets.
On a related note, the Mix 06 RSS is partial text. I guess Scoble doesn't want like-minded individuals to attend.
In an ideal world I'd make my feeds full text every time - I see a lot of advantages in it even though I prefer to read partial feeds in my news aggregator (and I set them to only show me a title and first paragraph or two so I can scan them).
However, every day I find another splog using my feeds to generate content for their blogs - quite often with no attribution and no links back. At least with partial feeds they're only publishing my first paragraph or two.
The other element I'll throw into the mix is that if your content is good enough and you give people a reason to read your blog - they will.
This is illustrated by Robert following his brother's blog - he wants to know what he's got to say to the point he's willing to go out of his way to do so.
I find this is the case on my blog with some readers who tell me that I am the only partial feed they follow. Yep I've obviously lost some readers like Robert, but I guess that's a risk I'm willing to take. It doesn't seem to have hurt me so far :-)
And by the way, I won't subscribe to any feed that isn't partial-text :) I much prefer to browse, then get the full effect of the corresponding website. Except I keep envisioning something that might be out of some Blade Runner kind of world: an RSS reader that sequentially "plays" 3D holograms of stories.
Leaving the RSS on wasn't a big deal, until one thing. An advertiser that was responsible for about 20% of the revenue plus a pretty big chunk in the parent corps trade mag of similar content started asking questions. They didn't seem to like it or get it that the content was being provided, in full without the ads that they were specifically targeting for that content. It was decided that until the staff had a chance to start shoveling the advertiser's rich media ads into the feed, they'd stop the feed for the time being.
My point is this Bobby, it's pretty easy for you to dismiss people not using full feeds, or not providing any feeds when you don't have to make a living selling ads on your site having to appease both media buyers and community members. Your site is not selling impressions and eyeballs and the people that run the site I mentioned had to decide on enabling a feature that hardly anyone in that community uses vs. generating some disdain from the people actually sending in the cash. It ain't all about you, babe. A business needs to make decisions based on what they know and how they feel, not on what some techno pundits think that don't have a financial stake at risk. The choice of having to risk 10's of thousands in revenue vs. not being linked by a third party that does not contribute to the revenue stream is a pretty easy choice to make.
I think the one thing that publishers should be aware of is the user experience. As a publisher of content I would want the user to have the best possible experience so I would always recommend publishing full feeds for this reason.
You have to understand that many publishers have no desire whatsoever to monetize their content in the traditional advertising model form (PPC or ads).
Perhaps the publisher makes thier money by delivering quality value added content to their user base or target customer base. The readers become evangelist, or extends the WOMM (word of mouth marketing). The customers become more loyal...etc...they increase sales.
Publish full content and extend the brand and don't try to make a dime from advertising is a model that works for many businesses. They let everyone syndicate the full content.
This is why a full RSS Content Delivery Strategy needs to be designed before businesses start blogging to make sure they can deliver what the audience wants.
My vote is for full feed content.
Rodney Rumford
http://leveragedpromotion.com
I am not going to slog through all 91 comments, but it seems that no one has yet made the observation that distinishing between aggregators and browsers may prove meaningless with time. We already see beginnings of integration in browsers like IE 7 and Firefox.
There's also integration coming from the other direction. My current RSS reader of choice is SharpReader, your typical tri-pane MDI app. The lower-right pane is the expected blog web page itself. You are reading this comment written in that pane. In fact, the third pane is simply an instance of IE. I often use it to tweak my own blog after emailing an entry in (MSN is still clueless about what to do with that burst of Word formatting data at the top of each entry). I'll also link off a blog page to follow up something without leaving the pane.
I therefore reject the thought that the future of RSS is an either/or proposition. Indeed, I think aggregators and browsers have to merge if we want people like our mothers joining the audience pool.
When you talk about feeds, you seems to assume that the only consumers are people using newreaders. In many cases, the consumers are other websites publishing your feed.
"Blog Requirements:
* Full text syndication feed in RSS or Atom; most common blogging systems will work fine"
So I put up an article on my blog about it:
http://blog.timc3.com/archives/297
I use RSS to gather information quickly about topics that are business and interest driven. If I have to click thru then I'm wasting time.
Another thing about full feeds I can tell pretty quickly if I need to read the rest of the post or not.
Imagine if news organizations all published full feeds? Their news would appear on tons of websites and people would never have to click back to the news website. Imagine how much money these news websites would lose in advertising when people no longer have to visit their website to read the news.
This more applies to non-blog websites publishing RSS feeds, though, but it would still be a concern for blog websites. Full feeds are NOT just used in feed readers by techies, they are also used on third-party websites to provide content from outside sources.
Although this could be used as an advantage if that was your goal. If your non-blog or blog website published an RSS feed with the entire article, you could encourage non-blog websites to published a automatically changing syndicated column on their website using XML-to-HTML and RSS technologies. You would just have to make sure that there were branding and links in the article itself to insure that most websites would still link back to you. Unscrupulous websites could still scrap your name and link and branding off of it, but most wouldn't.
So if you published full feeds, be aware that it might just appear... in full... on someone else's website. If that's okay with you, publish a full feed. It could be an advantage if you brand it and provide links to your website.
regarding the full text feed, i wonder whether the settings on your wordpress blog has it set....to that. Under options...in the dash board under reading you have the option for full text or summary.
Blog content ownership and control
http://reblogger.wordpress.com/2006/02/08/blog-...
FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts
http://reblogger.wordpress.com/2006/03/01/feedf...
In essence the change over will come if we design and change the way we think so that we accept permanent ownership of the post by the creator and earns for the creator for years afterwards (unlike artwork where the item leaves the creator and never earns for the creator again).
As long as we design for this, by retaining a connection with every copy of the post - no matter where it goes, for how long or how it is used - then we will have resolved the problem people have about giving out full feeds.
We have come up with a solution called RSScache. It actually cut down bandwith usage by about 90%. RSScache is targeted at enterprises and webmasters that have low to high RSS traffic. If you have bandwidth concerns (or need an effective RSS caching system to speed up your requests), take a look on our site: http://www.rsscache.com
Hope this can help some of you!
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Interesting post.
I usually use www.youpload.com myself for file uploading, it has a nice web 2.0 interface and is pretty fast.
Breg,
Marcus
Lessons From A Laggard: FastCompany.com Shows How Not To Do Online Content
Talk about not getting the whole online media thing...
Because of our niche, our RSS feeds are hijacked by many, many splogs. With full-feed we found our site ranking below some of these splogs on Google, so they were getting the traffic, not us.
DMCA notifications take care of a lot of this, but I was getting tired of devoting a couple of hours every Friday to sending them out and checking on outstanding complaints. (I was also getting tired of showing up in the Chilling Effects database.)
The straw that broke the camels back was Level 3, a Colorado ISP that hosts one of the biggest splog networks. Level 3 appears to have a DMCA contact point, but they do not in fact respond to e-mailed or faxed DMCA notifications. Time to call the attorney and start burning legal fees? I just went back to partial feeds and saved myself a lot of headaches.
Our partial feeds use hand-crafted summaries, not the first umpteen lines, so readers can get the jist and decided quickly to click through or move on. In most aggregators it's a simple option-click to get to the full feed in your browser, and you can do this for 20 posts and at the end of your RSS session you have a nice window of tabs that takes no time at all to scan through.
I recognize this is a personal preference, related to the style of reading and reader I use, and almost certainly not universal.
Robert, your response to Vinnie is not following your own advice: telling someone to change their tools and they way they want to read feeds does not "treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it."
Some folks are telling you what the easiest way for us to consume your content is, and you're telling us we're wrong. I've tried other readers, I like the one I use, thank you.
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It's a free software project so the source code is available and you can host it yourself.