You may or may not feel it is important to bring people to your site rather than send them the posts in their entirety…

I personally would lean in favour of full feeds but I have to acknowledge that their are those that may prefer that I visit the site… and as a reader I will always have the choice myself whether to visit or not.

If one could write compelling enough content to draw people back to the site by only publishing partial feeds, and once there make a pitch to sell me merchandise - well, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. The choice remains mine. Certainly it poses more of a challenge, but all I’m saying is that it’s a viable option, and I’m sure there are many other hypothetical examples that could be put forward as reasons for partial feeds…

What about a theoretical organisation something like Amnesty International - they could have a blog and only publish partial feeds. The content would appeal to a certain audience and that audience would probably also feel ok about being led back to the site in order to explore further information and possibly donate or become a member. The partial feeds are, potentially, more likely to bring more people clicking through - especially if the content is not commercial as such… full feeds will keep the org in the eye of the reader and may help build relationship but less likely to bring regular click throughs…

I know what you mean about publishing full feeds and in a way respecting your audience by doing so and thus building a trust relationship, but I just think it will depend on too many variables to come down on one side or the other for *all* sites…

Anyway, I’ve been blabbing on for too long now!

Damien - you need a bit more tinkering - you are still on partial feeds!

Chris - No, you didn’t come across as belligerent - I understood your concern (hence I made the edit!) - thanks for the kind words on the post!

Frank - I agree to an extent. It depends on your constituency, really. If you are a stats whore (like me!), then full feeds are probably better for attracting and keeping a readership. On the other hand, if your blog is only for your own edification, then it doesn’t really matter whether you use full or partial feeds.

At the end of the day, I think people should be educated on the benefits of full vs. partial feeds and they can make up their own minds.

I too blog as ‘notes to myself’ - my blog serves as a nice knowledge base for myself. When I’m working on projects I often hit problems I had previously - with no memory of when I came across it before or how I solved it. That’s why I now often blog the solution to an irritating problem… also a nice way to record sites I stumble across and like. I used to have unmanageable bookmarks full of stuff I would never visit and never able to find what I wanted. Now I have the essentials in my bookmarks and everything else I might want to reference in future goes in the blog.

Thanks again for your prompt action and humoring of an alarmist!

Do we really need to slow these people down by only giving them DRMed feeds or else distract them by sticking in ads between posts?

Great, so will you be converting to full feeds shortly Damien?

As a regular reader to quite a few blogs I’d even become a paying subscriber to keep the blog going

Excellent - start sending the cheques in!!!

The RSS readers to me are the ones who tune into you every day. They are probably the best advertiser for you by linking to your posts and thoughts via their own blogs and webforums and so will up your pagerank. In addition to this they are the also ones that will comment a lot more and inspire some constructive debates, adding to the quality of your site.

Do we really need to slow these people down by only giving them DRMed feeds or else distract them by sticking in ads between posts? I’d much rather someone link to me than click on an ad but then my blog wasn’t created to make a living from it. Cory Doctorow did an interview with Chris Pirillo and Cory said how BoingBoing was him really sending interesting notes to himself more than posting stuff that anyone else would be interested in. That’s mostly the same for my blog, though it’s also me honing my writing skills if I ever want to get into journalism or even pr. If people get value out of that then I’m delighted.

I can undertand however those that invest a lot of time and money into writing for their blogs and want to be compensated. Due to this I would much rather see ads in feeds than crippled feeds, it’s one less click and it allows me to see a whole lot of articles in my aggregator. I’m not sure are ads the best revenue model for regular readers as they’ll become immune to them pretty quickly. As a regular reader to quite a few blogs I’d even become a paying subscriber to keep the blog going.

Damien.

I apologise if that impression came across to you - that was never my intention.

I have modified the text of the post slightly to mitigate your concern.

Hope it reads better for you now,

Tom

Interesting article, and good to know this conversation is going on other places that my site.