I’ve wrestled with full or partial posts in RSS for a long time and have chosen the partial one mainly because when I posted full posts I found I was being republished in many places with no attribution. I’m not willing to completely give my content away for someone else to republish in full and make money off.

This probably does cost me some readers – but when it comes down to it I also feel that if my posts are good enough, if I write quality posts people will do like you do and actually visit the site. My stats show me that over 60% of my readers seem to be coming from bloglines or some other news aggregator so it seems to work.

I also like this because it means that my readers have gone out of their way to come to my site – and in doing so invest a little something into it as they come. I find that if something costs something (time, money or whatever else) that people often value it a bit more.

And yes it does create more community. Until someone works out how to seamlessly integrate their comments button into their RSS feed (not as separate feeds) I think the only real way to have true interaction with your readers is for them to actually come look at your site and leave a comment.

They are a whole heap of random comments – hope that it somehow answered your question.

Now I’m going out for dinner!

Here’s a thought: all things being equal (everyone publishes full content feeds) would you say that a mark of how much you value a particular blogger/site – or how much you want to interact with that person and their readership – dictates whether you visit that site on a regular basis?

I ask because I think most of us want to get people to our site, rather than just perusing our feeds – for money and community-building – yet (particularly with so many feeds) it’s impossible to visit every site. Yours is one of the few sites that I regulalry visit. I think it’s the community aspect – wanting to read and share with other people – as well as reading you content, that compels me to visit here at least twice a day.

Anyway, ramble over… keep going – your writing is an inspiration.

Thanks for the kind words in the interview, but unfortunately you’re right, I do sleep to much, and miss far to many blog stories at 3am in the morning :-)