Feed Me!
New comic! I’m breaking from my regular Thursday posting schedule to tackle a recently revived issue of social significance. Namely, partial text RSS feeds! (Yeah, I’m totally geeking out.) This actually works perfectly into this stupid brunch story, so consider this comic canonical.
It started (for me at least) with Mike Davidson posting an article about web article pagination and how much it sucks (which it does). He argued that it is mistreating your readers to paginate an article across multiple pages (which it is), requiring you to click through each page to get the whole article. The problem is, as someone pointed out, that Mike Davidson publishes a partial text RSS feed, which requires you to click through to get the whole article. Ooops. Davidson then argued that he did it because his blog is “design”-based and linked to a pair of two year old posts, and one three year old post, which illustrated his point. ZING!
At the same time Robert Scoble, previous victim of my ire, posted about Feedburner saying that partial text feeds don’t really increase click through, and mentioned how much he hated partial text feeds (something I already knew). I put a comment in Scoble’s blog about Davidson and Robert charged over there to tell him what-for. Hilarity, an exchange of insults, and general blogosphere assjackery ensued. Awesome.
Anyway, the point is that Robert Scoble is absolutely friggin’ right, partial text feeds suck. They are as wrong as feeding hungry children is right (Whoo-hoo! Thanks letter-writing guy.). All of the feeds I subscribe to are currently full text feeds, and I’m extremely hesitant to add a partial text feed to my reader. I’m just not at all interested by a small introductory paragraph, and don’t ever follow them anyway.
The one exemption to this that I’ve come across is John Gruber’s site, daringfireball.net. He publishes a partial feed to all users, but if you become a member of his site (read: give him money) he gives you access to some form of secure full text feed. At least Gruber is honest about what he’s doing: he’s trying to get more money for blogging. In his world, if you’re going to get the full text feed, and therefore not visit his site to see the little ad he gets paid to display, then he wants his cut. Now, Scoble has an answer for this rationale too, which is that if you write great stuff you’ll get more comments and therefore more people see your ad. Of course, John Gruber is kind of a douche and doesn’t allow comments on his site, so that goes out the window (I’m sure there’s another discussion to be had about douchebag-bloggers who don’t have commenting turned on).
In any case, I wanted to drop my two cents in, via the Angel Ants. If you have a blog, publish the full text feed. Everyone wins. Well, I win, and really that’s all that matters to me.
