JL Reid Asks: What's Wrong with Partial Feeds

JL over at Reidwrite takes issue with my disparaging of McDonald's teaser paragraphs and partial RSS feeds. He rightfully assumes that when I call them "newsletterish," I do not mean it in a complementary way. JL argues that summary graphs followed by a [more] link save readers time and let's them decide whether they want to click to read.

JL, it is not my hottest of buttons, but here's why I don't care much for partial feeds. If you give me a partial feed, you give me as your reader total decision-making control. I never have to take the time to click through to your blog. There is nothing faster and easier for me than using RSS so that I never need to leave my desktop. If you have ads, or are selling things, I do not need to see them.

You save me n time with a partial feed or a summary paragraph, which is often an enticing "teaser," written to make me so curious I cannot resist clicking through. The summary paragraphs you describe worked in the newsletter Era, because we did not yet have the miracle of RSS feeds and we did not yet have ubiquitous broadband.

But a summary paragraph serves me no purpose in blogging Trust me, if I see your entire posting in a feed, I won't need prodding to know when to stop reading it, whether that's the first, sentence, paragraph or after 48 comments that are posted below.

As  said, this s not my hottest button. I still read my share of partial feeds and visit sites that way, but increasing less often.  But I seem to know an increasing number of people who just won't subscribe to partial feeds, ad as the novelty of blogging wears off and the need for efficiency increases, I would argue that the numbers of people who will disdain partial feeds will increase, not decrease.

Comments

[/pd]

I for one like summary feeds. If the first para does not get to me, I read no further, even if its afull feed.
I can cull information faster, without having to wait for the whole darn post to show up in my reader.

[Jake Ludington]

In comparing my bottom line today to the days when I published full text feeds, it's no contest which one wins in my book. My online ad revenue was less than 10% of what it is today in the full text world. While blogging isn't always about money, if I didn't make money blogging wouldn't be my full time gig.

Now if you're talking those annoying partial text feeds that cut off in mid-word, that's a whole different story...

[Roy Blumenthal]

If the feed I subscribe to is a partial one, I email the owner and ask them to open it up. It's normally just a mistake on thier part.

If they don't open it up, I unsubscribe.

I do all of my blog reading from within BLOGLINES, and teaser paragraphs prevent me from skimming for content.

And it DOESN'T take ages to download full text. I subscribe to three realllly heavy blogs with loads of pictures and text, and I never have to wait.

I second and third and fourth Shell's advice... simply offer the full feed and let the USER decide how much of it they'd like to get.

I don't know about aggregators, but Bloglines lets me choose whether or not I get a full feed. MY choice, not the blog owner's choice. I NEED that choice.

Blue skies
love
Roy

[steven e. streight who is vaspers in vaspers the grate the blogocombat king]

If anybody cares, I am so dirty rotten sick to my guts of being ill-informed on RSS esoterica, I got mad and hauled off and bought "Hacking RSS and Atom" by Leslie M. Orchard, in the Wiley Publishing "Extreme Tech" series.

It rocks.

[Shel Israel]

And Wiley appreciates the plug, Steve.

[Lee]

Full feeds are the go. http://www.fullfeeds.com/