I mean yes there is a guessing game in part – but surely you know from experience which of the blogs in your aggregator don’t do the ‘teaser’ thing and are worth reading and which do?

I like to think that I don’t ‘tease’ people – I just write the best quality posts that I possibly can. Not to get people to leave their news aggregator so that they see my ads – but because I believe in giving my readers quality.

I take your point though – full feeds would be ideal – they are more convenient and don’t break up the reading process – but are not some people worth a little effort to read?

I don’t care what any blogger does with their feed, and I will, in fact, (though seldomly) subscribe to a truncated feed.

But here’s what happens. When you serve me a truncated feed, you make me play guessing games: “is this post worth clicking on? Or am I getting a teaser lead?” Since my time is valuable, I almost never click through.

If you give me the full feed, though, I can read the first 3-4 paras, make a pretty good estimate of whether I want to read the whole thing and — and this is critical — decide if I should comment or post in response. In other words, converse with you. You also get a sterling opportunity, through good writing and close thinking, to remind me of why I subscribed to your blog in the first place.

(For those who claim that full posts waste their time, I can only suggest that if the first para bores you, click to the next post. None of us reads our newspaper from cover-to-cover; why should an RSS feed be different?)

Since I — not you — decide what blogs I read, you’re really not in a position to dictacte much to me. If your posts are consistently superior, then you can get away with a lot. But you’ve got a lot of competition out there — don’t make it too onerous or irritating to read your blog.

Remember that MSM uses advertising to make delivering content to your door cheap enough so that you will subscribe. It’s a tradeoff for the subscriber — I have to accept ads in your paper or program because I’d rather not pay the full cost of getting your content. But blog content is free (for me), and your attempts to make me visit the blog so that I can click on AdSense ads or buy your report are largely futile and ultimately not in your interest.

My 2c.

As is common in the “blogosphere” there’s another tempest in a teacup building. This one is over the issue of full or partial-feeds. On the simplest level there are two camps: Those who want full feed RSS and those who want partial feed RSS.

Aft…

Absolutely nothing.

Scoble is trying to make a point, but he’s going the wrong way about it.

If the summary was indeed a description of the what the post was about I wouldn’t mind so much.

I use Bloglines and prefer full feeds. Skipping over posts I don’t want to read is a matter of a few clicks; no big deal. Sometimes, (as I will in a moment), I’ll load up several pages of Bloglines from my various subjects and take them upstairs and read them off-line. So summaries wont get me to your site; I’ll just ignore them.

In the case of ProBlogger, most of your posts deal with links to other sites, so I can tell at a glance with your truncated posts whether I want to click through.

I don’t have a sense of entitlement about how you use your feeds. If you feed me truncated posts and I stop reading, I delink. I have 104 blogs at Bloglines, and plenty of interesting stuff to read, so one less is no big deal.

The only worthwhile thought I can leave you with (from a reader’s perspective) is that if you want me to click through, better make sure that the post’s title and first 50 words is the best you can make it, cause you’ll win or lose my click right there.

While I think Darren is right that if you have an active community you want to try and manage changes, I think it’s a mistake to fall into the belief that you have to pacify or satisfy everyone with an opinion in the blogosphere.

Not that the index isn’t getting hit often, roughly 80,000 times this month…but 150,000 hits a month to an RSS feed. At an average weight of 5.5KB, that is almost a gig alone. Consider shilling out a full entry feed; my posts are typically pretty long so this could make the feed around 30KB. Guess who just went from almost a gig to 4 and a half. On one site it wouldn’t be so bad; but spread it across several. I may come close to pushing my limits.

Plus you know. I don’t have ads and my feeds; and those 70,000 a month could have helped me out on page impressions. So if you want the whole feed come to my site and get me a page impression, it doesn’t take that much time and effort to click a link.

I do it all the time. I don’t care if it is just a partial post, if it strikes me as interesting I am not going to read it just because it isn’t in my news reader :/

Anyway, ‘just thought I’d mention that it looks like you’ve already been approved for Google AdSense for RSS, as I’m seeing them everywhere in your Problogger feed… ‘kinda strange, especially with them appearing in nearly every post – and the posts are ‘chopped,’ so the ads seem to overpower things a bit.

Maybe you’d consider publishing longer summaries now that you’ve got this? ‘Just a thought.

I’m not aiming this at Robert in particular, at the end of the day both publisher and reader have a choice. That’s whats so great about RSS.

If you don’t want partial feeds, don’t read partial feeds, seems simple enough.

You want to know that I think of it? If the entire post is on the feed, then, add the ads you want to it, I don’t really care.

I talked about the importance of feed’s content in february

and soon after I wrote about the addition of adds in feeds.

This is my opinion to the question :)

BTW, good brainstorming :)

Salutations,

Fred