I think we may have to accept there’s two kinds of audience: the engaged audience which will always come to your blog page regularly to see what they’ve been missing while reading your RSS feed, and the casual audience, who may never become engaged, or who may only convert are still spending time on your blog, just not on every post.

I know newspaper publishers who’d rather whole industries didn’t read their paper via media monitoring services, and magazine publishers who have to accept that some people will only read the magazine if they get it for free or borrow a friend’s copy. It’s not a new thing.

it’s not about respect for my readers – its about disrespect for others who in their lazy greed reproduce the work of others as their own. I’m not willing to allow that to happen unfortunately.

I find that most people are willing to ‘click’ a link in order to get quality content so that’s what I’ll continue to work my hardest to provide. It does mean I lose some visitors which is unfortunate but until I find a better solution that’s all I can offer.

I would read more of your stories if you had full text feeds. Right now I scan and give up on about 50% of your posts.

I do notice problogger only gives the excerpt but you give pretty good intros so I can tell pretty quickly whether I want to read more or not.

I wrote a similar post about this where I argued that only publishing partial feeds is a quick way to lose readers who use RSS as the one-stop shop for their content. I’ve been speaking to Merlin Mann by email about this, as he recently cut his feeds down to summary size. While some bloggers, as in your post, get bummed because people aren’t seeing the cool design of their page, there’s also the question of ad revenue. The ‘teaser’ I suggested in my post was one I first saw over at Wil Wheaton’s site, where he wrote a post a while back called ‘What You’re Missing if you read me through RSS’. Gives people a reason to come and have a look, and maybe find more content that interests them, which is far more compelling that a title and an abstract that don’t often tell you a lot.