Robert Scoble has posted that he is trimming his blogroll – one of the qualifications he is using – if the site doesn’t provide full feeds, he unsubscribes. Robert has said this previously – I agreed with him then and I agree with him still. Partial feeds are a pain – they force you to click through to get the full story, whereas when you get there you may very well find the full story is not as interesting as you thought from snippet in the partial feed – waste of time.
John Roberts on the other hand has come out in favour of partial feeds. John says:
If I ever did anything offline, maybe I’d be crazy for full-text, but I think of those rare moments when I’m away from a computer as deliberate, so why not enjoy the connection and the focused reading experience available in a browser?
John, I enjoy the focused reading experience available in my RSS reader – I go to browser to leave comments. Speaking of comments – you don’t appear to have comments enabled on your site – are you aginst comments as well?
I find it impossible to take anyone seriously if they don’t have comments enabled on their site – it shows that while they are obviously fond of the sound of their own voice they not interested in hearing anyone else’s opinion.
Comments
10 responses to “Feeds and comments – for and against…”
[…] 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 […]
Not against comments. They are not enabled on my blog at this point because the Radio Userland comment server is no longer available to me, as I let my subscription lapse in anticipation of moving to WordPress… but the migration also requires moving my family’s e-mail addresses, and I’ve been busy.
Up to you whether you take me seriously or not. The lack of comments is a bug, not a feature, I freely admit.
Cheers.
Well as we are on the topic of feeds.. The copyright notice on yours has been annoying me for months.
You should have said so sooner Michele – it is gone now!
Cheers,
Tom.
Tom
But I did 🙁
[…] John Roberts disagrees, and writes that partial feeds allow him to scan more quicky and then open the posts he’d like to read to read later. Others, including James Robertson, Dave Winer (who is actually very reasonable on the argument) and Tom Raftery chime in as well. […]
Full Feeds or Nothing – but that’s just my vote
The partial vs. full feed debate is back. Duncan at Blog Herald provides an overview of the debate.
I’ve always made my preference for full feed clear, yet I am still reading your partial feeds, Duncan 🙂 Admittedly, it&rsquo…
So you want me to give you the whole cow when you came to borrow a cup of cream?
RSS is supposed to INCREASE traffic to a site, not give the traffic away. If a blog is usually interesting, fun, or informative then readers will come, but if they don’t like what they read then why bother putting the entire post in an RSS feed?
Billy, that’s fine and is entirely your decision. Others, however, will give me full feeds and I will subscribe to their feeds, not yours – that’s my choice.
[…] Full feeds, however, allows people to read your entire article in their RSS reader without ever visiting your site. That is the format I favour and I have argued in favour of this several times in the past. […]