Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

FiveFilters.org — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:05:51 -0000

There are a few services out there that can convert partial-text feeds into full-text feeds. If anyone's interested, I've been working on one here: http://fivefilters.org/cont...

It's a free software project so the source code is available and you can host it yourself.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Kate_L — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:30:40 -0000

I apply with hope on your tender hearts!
A little girl needs your help, she has a cancer.She is just almost 1 year old, now she has treatment in an oncologic institute every month.
It is necessary to do an expensive operation quickly!
Her mother is in difficult financial position, she educates her daughter by herself, as girl's dad left them, when he found out about the daughter's disease. They will appreciate any your financial help!

WMZ for helping: Z109187995692

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

John MacMillan — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:40:20 -0000

I'm a reader not a blogger, and I fall in the camp that much prefers partial feeds because skimming is easier for me with them. If I want to read more, one click is not hard. I generally unsubscribe to full feeds if they regularly have long articles, except the few I really, really like.

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Nicholas Quixote — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:45:49 -0000

Oh, does anyone have a list of full content feeds?

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Nicholas Quixote — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:45:16 -0000

has anything changed? I'm looking for a list of full content feeds. It seems all the ones I use...ws journal, sfgate: none are full.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Stephen — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:11:51 -0000

We're in a niche that gets high eCPMs from AdSense. Most of our traffic is from incoming Google searches.

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Dharmesh Shah — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:01:00 -0000

Thought folks might this article interesting on how FastCompany.com totally doesn't get the whole online content thing:

Lessons From A Laggard: FastCompany.com Shows How Not To Do Online Content

Talk about not getting the whole online media thing...

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Lee — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 03:00:53 -0000

Definitely in favor of full feeds! Check out http://www.fullfeeds.com/

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

file hosting — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:34:18 -0000

Hello,

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

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

fahad — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:22:52 -0000

Home based Internet research Jobs

We are now hiring home based workers to complete simple online research assignments.

No selling – no recruiting – no adplacing

For details visit

http://www.typeinternationa...

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Benjamin Berube — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:09:28 -0000

I would like to comment on the bandwidth issue of RSS. Like some mentionned previously, there do is a concern regarding RSS (feeds) and their bandwidth usage. Currently only 8% of Internet users know what RSS are, but with all the browser-RSS integration that are coming up (like IE7), this number will increase a lot.

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!

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Mark Wilson — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:44:21 -0000

I totally think full feed is the way to go. What's holding us back is the old mindset. I blog about this here:

Blog content ownership and control
http://reblogger.wordpress....

FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts
http://reblogger.wordpress....

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

weiyen — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:31:50 -0000

hi scoble,
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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Nick Mudge — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 12:35:44 -0000

Thanks Scoble. This is some really good data.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Scott M. Stolz — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 11:54:45 -0000

One problem with full feeds though is other websites can now reprint your entire article for free on their website and users never have to click through to your website. Its an easy way for competing websites to steal content.

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

James Monroe — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 02:43:37 -0000

The bigger conversation around clipped feeds of interesting information makes you click through.

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Tim Child — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:01:22 -0000

Excellent post but I think there is another reason that Companies and users don't always like full feeds and that is branding.

So I put up an article on my blog about it:

http://blog.timc3.com/archi...

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Helder — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:44:38 -0000

Aside from the great reasons you gave why full-text feeds are better, they're also the *only* type of feeds that can get subscribed to BlogBurst:

"Blog Requirements:

* Full text syndication feed in RSS or Atom; most common blogging systems will work fine"

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Scott M. Stolz — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:05:29 -0000

I've been debating the full-feed / partial feed thing myself. On one of my sites, I decided to use partial feeds because quite frankly the feeds on that particular site weren't targeted at people using newsreaders. What I was aiming for was other websites picking up the feed and displaying my headlines, all of which link back to my website. And with the feed only being there a couple weeks, I already have websites displaying my feed on their websites.

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Scott Royall — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:03:07 -0000

Robert,

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.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Aaron Pratt — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:30:13 -0000

I don't have time to read all the comments or the entire post but let me just say that using full text over partial feeds gives you a duplicate content penalty in Google if a news aggregator copies your text. This eventually pushes your weenie blog down into supplemental results in the search engines (mainly google) where you suffer, never getting your head above water. If you are not a weenie blogger you have "authority" which allows you to go forth and prosper in the engines. The main reason partial feeds have to be used by the rest of us Robert. I know, most people do not care or notice this stuff...

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

solomonrex — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 12:29:15 -0000

"too full of smart people", I think you mean too full of self-absorbed arrogant people.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Rodney Rumford — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 04:11:58 -0000

WOW, The debate is hot and heated.

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

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

Jon — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 03:23:15 -0000

Jeremy, just one thing: the people of Cork would be surprised to learn that you believe they are part of the UK.

Re: Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work

bubba — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 03:12:20 -0000

Hey Bobby, here's some real numbers based on a vertical community/information site with 250k uniques a month serving just over 10 million pages. It's soley supported by advertising revenue, mostly from an in house network with a bit from Adsense that grosses well into six figures a year. For a while they used RSS to distribute feeds for the forum (which many of them are sort of blogs) and current news/feature content. During that time the feeds were offered, page views didn't seem to decrease, impressions didn't seem to decrease and CTR didn't seem to decrease and conversions on the target advertiser's sites didn't seem to change. No one really seemed to care though some people used RSS the to keep an eye on the forums. The forum content was also available via email updates and NNTP. No one really used NNTP, some used RSS and many more used email, by a factor of 5 times or so compared to RSS.

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.