Full Text vs. Fishing for Pings – RSS Feeds

I’ve been reading an interesting discussion in the blogosphere about feed configs this morning.

It all started when Scoble said he was deleting any feeds that were not full text. and I couldn’t agree with him more on this. I HATE partial text feeds, they are pain and barely worth keeping in my aggregator. Scoble explains in another post that a lot of it has to do with his reader – he’s using newsgator.

There’s some back and forth about whether using full feeds is what people like. A partial result of it all was that performancing.com went full feed and I did a little dance

I have two takes on this. 1) It is my opinion that many blogs that are only offering partial feeds are blogs that are looking to make money off ad clicks. Which is fine, except that I’m not very interested in reading them if they don’t give me a full feed. 2) It seems that a whole lot of people think that their experience interacting with RSS, blogs and the web is the way that everyone else interacts with it. I’m willing to bet that in a poll of precisely how you read blogs and interact with them there would be as many answers as there were pollsters.

I use NewsGator to aggregate my feeds and use Outlook 2003 as my reader. I download and store (I never delete them) every single post that I subscribe to (there’s a reason for that that I’ll explain in a minute). On average I pull down about 600 posts a day from the 300 ish feeds I subscribe to. When I read them, I scan through a list of headlines in one pane and the text of the post shows up in a pane to the right of it. If the headline is something of interest to me at the time, I read the post (I read about 50% of them). When I read news it’s often with limited time and I’ve developed this system to optimize the time I spend reading.

If there is a post that I might be interested in reading but it’s on a partial feed, I have to click the link and sit there and wait a few seconds while the thing loads up. It’s a waste of my time and an interuption to my rythm. If I had to do that with all 600 posts for the day I would never get anything done!

Furthermore, the reason I keep all the posts I download is that I use Outlook search folders to categorize things I’m very interested in. For instance, I have a search folder that looks for ‘camp, dinner, mindcamp, codecamp’ this gives me a folder that has all the posts I’ve ever downloaded on that topic in it. That’s important to me because of my DevUtah project, it enables me to focus my reading when I need to. I have about 30 search folders. I also have a ‘Must Read’ folder that certain blogs feed into. These are a combination of the blogs of my friends, blogs that are extremely focussed on topics of critical value to me, or blogs that push breaking news to me. On top of that, I use both Google and MSN’s Desktop Search Tools. They both index Outlook, so when I do a search, I’m also searching all the best blogs I’ve found. These methods give me a very powerful toolset for finding information when I need it – and when I need it, I need it NOW! A partial feed is useless in this scenario because I’m not searching the full text of the post.

On clickthroughs – I OFTEN click through on a post that I’m really into so I can read the comments on them. You want my clickthrough? Write a really good post. Another good way to get my clickthrough is use a link reference to a post on your own blog – I’ll click it if the topic is a good one.

I have no doubt there are people out there that really like partial feeds and surely have some system optimized to reading partials. If we’re serving our readers, there’s only one viable solution I can see.

Offer multiple feeds. Let people choose whether they want your partial feed, full feed or just headline feed. There’s no way you’ll serve every reader satisfactorily by offering just one feed method. Hmm. I only offer a full feed, guess I’ll have to look into that!!!

How do you read blogs? Do you prefer full or partial feeds?