Five reasons to offer full posts in RSS and five reasons not to
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Nic on 14-09-2007
Tagged Under : feed readers, feeds, RSS, tips
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Disclaimer: I am writing this post as a blogger, an RSS layman and an amatuer RSS user. These tips, reasons and justifications are from the perspective of someone who isn’t an RSS expert but loves RSS like nothing before! I am an RSS addict and subscribe to tons and tons of blogs and websites that I read daily. I emplore you to tell me that I am wrong, give me better options and let me know what you think.
I have recently been very interested in the RSS/Blog debate.
In case you didn’t know that there was a debate, there is. It’s in my head for the moment and I think I’m on to something here.
The traditional argument when it comes to RSS and blogs is whether to display your full content in your RSS reader or to display an intro from the original post. This is definitely a good debate. Here is what I think:
5 Reasons to provide full RSS feeds:
1. Keep the reader happy - Many people don’t use RSS in SA. That’s a fact (I think). Those that do use RSS readers do so for a reason. I like to view all the blogs in one place, quickly and easily.
2. Your readers aren’t stupid - They know that you are shortening your content on RSS so they will visit your site. Don’t mock them and don’t confuse them with badly written intro’s that don’t explain the post.
3. RSS is a challenge - The challenge is this: Offer a full post via RSS and still get readers on your blog. It’s not that hard… write something interesting. Refer to another blog post of yours and link to it, refer to a photograph. They will follow the links or choose to read the post in your environment if the post is good enough.
4. Full post = comments - If your post is good enough it doesn’t matter if the readers has access to the whole thing, they wont be able to comment unless they are on your blog. Get them there.
5. Build up a stable network - Many of the top blogs in the world have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. There is a reason for this. If you have 10 000 subscribers you are almost promised that at least 60% will read the post, that means that if 10% of that 60% comment and visit your blog you are set. Without this RSS subscriber base you are fighting every post to get people to read, visit and comment.
5 Reasons to provide partial RSS feeds:
1. Full posts get no love - There is a strong possibility that providing full posts in RSS will take visits away from your blog.
2. Splogs - Splogs use RSS feeds to gather the content that they copy and rip-off. Limit your posts, stop the sploggers.
3. Write a good post - If you are a good writer or good blogger you know your audience and you know how to write for them. This means that providing an intro to them via RSS should entice them to visit. Therefore full posts are redundant and intro’s better.
4. The SEO effect - Believe it or not splogs affect your SEO. If you offer a full post on RSS splogs can take your post, duplicate it and mess with your Google pagerank and Technorati ranking.
5. Reminders - Partial posts can act as a reminder that your blog exists. Many RSS subscribers have tons of blogs they read. Your intro post could spark a memory of your blog, get the reader interested and send them over for the whole blog experience. While a full post will let them read and move on, never returning to your blog.
Knowing that some of the top blogs in the world have hundreds of thousands of RSS subscribers, I would love to know what the top RSS blog readership count is here in SA? Anyone have any ideas? I don’t but I am almost sure that I will knock myself out with a potatoe in a sock if any SA blog has more than 10 000 subscibers.
All I can add is, partial feeds drive me insane! I’ll often unsubscribe if partial a feed send me to a half decent post - a full feed I have far more time for.
A very fair and logical comment. On other posts that I have read re this topic, many people have felt the same way. They love full posts, hate partial and delete all partial blogs.
It does depend alot on personal choice I suppose?
It’s a difficult one. I only offer a partial feed and I do it for the reasons you’ve mentioned above.
As for my own personal reading preferences: there is something to be said for having partial feeds. I don’t have much time to read blogs and so I like the partial feed. I can usually judge from the intro whether I am interested to read more and then I will click through. Otherwise the partial feed is sufficient for my needs.
I suppose you can say that I could just choose to read the first paragraph of a full feed, but there is something very satisfying about scrolling quickly through a page full of partial feeds and being able to mark all your feeds as ‘read’.
there is a part of me that feels I am doing my subscribers a disservice by only offering a partial feed (especially for those on a slower connection - my blog takes a while to download), but I figure that they can then decide for themselves whether the intro is sufficient for them or whether they want more.
As for your subscriber stats - there is no way a local blog has anywhere near 10,000 subscribers? I probably have about 500. Max.
I love RSS feeds, I think it is a great thing. However I am still unclear whether I should be offering a full or a partial feed.
PS I subscribe to your feed and this is the first time I’ve clicked through. Not because your other posts haven’t been interesting (they have been very interesting) but because I mostly dont comment. If you had offered a partial feed, I would have clicked through quite a few times before (you have written some posts that have really interested me). Not sure what any of that means. Because what are we going to do with the hits anyway? If I lose 500 uniques a day, will that make any difference to me? Not. So why dont I offer a full feed? I dont know. I really don’t
I kind of think that I understand what you are saying and I even kind of think that I agree!!
I am also still very torn by the entire principal/concept/implementation of RSS.
I think that you have a great point about losing hits/visits. What difference will it actually make in anyones life if I lose 500 hits/visits a month due to full or partial feeds.
For EG, if you had visited every time you like one of my posts instead of reading in your RSS reader, it would mean nothing to my stats. So I think that is a great point that you make. I think I should do some experimentation!
I still don’t know which way to go…?
(I actually had to check which route I was currently on.)
I think I might actually have lost some readers because of longer posts…
@ Nic - beat yourself - film it and I’ll host it on my site (Lol)
PS - What you do after leaving St. Davids?
Hey dude, Hahahaha, don’t think im going to be beating myself!!
I went to Rhodes, got a journalism degree and the like, you know how it goes. Now I work at Johnnic at Financial Mail. As well as the whole blog thing, SA Rocks, nh.com, etc etc.
How bout you? How’s things?
[...] This is a fairly tough post to be writing because I really don’t have any conclusive answers to the questions I posed and thoughts I put forward in my first post about RSS feeds. [...]