GeekLimit

Blogs and RSS: full text or partial?

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

Interesting argument on the Scobleizer today on RSS feeds and the reasons behind full or partial text feeds. THis actually is a big deal as far as traffic is concerned, so I thought I’d throw in my two cents:

Jeremy Wright had this to say:

Traffic doesn’t equal readers. RSS subscribers don’t equal traffic.

FYI Jeremy, I just asked wordpress how hard it would be to map a second line on the traffic graph for RSS pickups. If you want it too, hit the feedback button and ask for it. I love the idea of being able to graph Web views vs. RSS pickups. (I realize that there are problems here, like people who have their reader set to update every 5 minutes, so there would have to be something to distinguish between unique hosts…)

..but getting to the matter at hand, he also had this to say:

The reason you want full text RSS feeds is so you don’t have to visit a site, after all.

I agree. I just went and changed my feed to full text due to that comment. Here’s why I had it in partial though:

The web-based readers NEED to have partial text, IMHO. Otherwise, with one post, you completely push out any other post a few page-downs from the bottom of the screen. I’ve been trying really hard to keep as many posts on the main page as possible. Compare this to my older posts that were imported from Blogger that I haven’t fixed yet. There is no way anyone is going to scroll past the ‘don’t get ripped off on a laser printer’ post on that page to see the rest. I’d much rather be able to give them 5 snippets that fit on a 1024×800 screen, rather than one monster post and hope they’ll scroll down to see the other 5 monster posts.

Based on these reasons going on over on the Scoblizer, I really think the way to go is to do partial text on the web, and full text on RSS. In this way, you tailor your content for the medium, as they are both very different.

Most people do full text on RSS, and full text on the web posts, which IMHO is pretty painful to the web viewers with all the scrolling they have to do to look at more than 1 or 2 posts.

As far as money making is concerned, that’s not what I’m interested in, but it seems that partial posts are indeed a good way to con people into loading up an ad-loaded page. Give them just enough text, them make them go to the site to see your ads and get paid.

Of course, Ozh makes a good point, in that the RSS aggregation sites will have an easier time indexing if you do full text RSS, which may get you more interested readers.

In the end, it’s all up in the air as to what will be the most profitable using RSS and Web publishing. Until more people use RSS, it’s not going to be clear, as there just isn’t enough data to go off of. In the meantime though, you can follow my suggestion of partial web posts and full rss feed to make it easier for people to get your work…

Comments (0) | February 22nd, 2006