Question About Feeds: Full Feed or Excepts? Which is better? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

It's not about laziness, it's about maximizing my time.  I subscribe to over 100 blogs.  By using a feed reader and having access to all the content, I can easily digest all the posts by all 100 of those blogs.  Do I read every single post?  No.  But, the opportunity is there to see if I want to read it, and if I do read it, I can then click into the post, leave a comment, re-tweet it, or other ways to give the blog owner the clicks, the links, and the promotion that a great post deserves.

I think it's also a majority rules kind of thing.  If 90 blog owners publish full feeds and 10 publish partial feeds, you are, in many cases, going to get overlooked simply because many will opt for the convenience that the majority is offering.  If you can convince 90% here to switch to partial feeds, then those people who want to read the articles WILL then move towards clicking through, but until that happens, you're swimming against the current. 

To me, publishing a partial feed is trying to get extra clicks that you wouldn't otherwise get with a full feed.  On the surface that's logical.  But, I've been blogging for three years and I'm skeptical of that reasoning because there are a ton of blogs that publish full feeds and still attract thousands of viewers to their blogs per day. 

If you think you're coming out ahead by a partial feed, that's fine.  I'm not saying you're not.  Each owner has to make that choice and I respect whatever choice they make.  I am just stating that as a reader, I know what I've come to expect, and that I made my decision as a blog owner with that expectation in mind.  That's the great thing about owning a blog, is that it's yours to do with as you see fit.

Thanks for your opinion MoneyBeagle,

Basically it doesn't look like there's right or wrong, it looks like it is simply a matter of preference. 

Cheers,

Beating The Index said:

Come on guys, no takers?

 

So basically you are all against excerpts in feeds because you're too lazy to click on a link to get to the content?

 

I am up for conversion here, give it a shot…

 

Thanks,

 

Mich

Exactly. We're time poor. Why wouldn't you make it easy as possible for readers to access your content? Partial feeds are a dealbreaker for me. There are a few blogs I really like that have partial feeds that I do subscribe to, but I almost always just scroll past them without clicking, unless the heading is exceptionally compelling.

Beating The Index said:

 

So basically you are all against excerpts in feeds because you're too lazy to click on a link to get to the content?

 Nope.  I'm against excerpts because my time and attention are valuable and I don't feel a need to give those valuable commodities to someone who demonstrates a lack of respect for my time by requiring a click-through.

OTOH, when I read a post in GReader that's I want to promote, I click through through to make it easier to share with my bookmarklets.

You are asking for a small piece of my life with every post.  Making that easy for me will only help you.  Make it hard, and I won't stick around long enough to see if you're worth reading.

Here's what the competition for my attention looks like:

From your 246 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,117 items.

Since June 4, 2009 you have read a total of 273,954 items.

2 of those subscriptions are filtered aggregations of about 75 news feeds through Yahoo pipes.  

That's on top of the 25 sites I directly visit each day.  You have to be really damn compelling (or on my team) to get on that list.  I even cut Facebook mostly out of my life when they killed a comprehensive RSS feed a few months back.

PKamp3 @ DQYDJ said:

Reconsidering my excerpts…

Hey, how annoyed would everyone be if they read a feed (for example, mine…) and all of the dynamic content didn't work in the feed?  I'm reconsidering just turning them back on and letting people complain about the javascript not working.

The problem is that's like a quarter of my stuff.

Could you add a line by the dynamic content that said "If you're reading this in a feed, click here to see xxx?"

I use a reader to read, not to bookmark.  If I wanted to bookmark i'd use my browser.

Beating The Index said:

Come on guys, no takers?

 

So basically you are all against excerpts in feeds because you're too lazy to click on a link to get to the content?

 

I am up for conversion here, give it a shot…

 

Thanks,

 

Mich

Jason@LiveRealNow said:

PKamp3 @ DQYDJ said:

Reconsidering my excerpts…

Hey, how annoyed would everyone be if they read a feed (for example, mine…) and all of the dynamic content didn't work in the feed?  I'm reconsidering just turning them back on and letting people complain about the javascript not working.

The problem is that's like a quarter of my stuff.

Could you add a line by the dynamic content that said "If you're reading this in a feed, click here to see xxx?"

That's the solution that I've seen the most. When I'm reading something in a feed or email, I know that I need to click through to see certain items, so it's not a big deal. Adding a line like that will alert everyone to it and you shouldn't hear anymore complaints.