Great post from fellow Good-blogger Kate on the bête noire that is partial feeds. I share her thoughts entirely on this issue. She’s unsubscribing from anyone or anything that only offers partial feeds. Unfortunately for me, since some of my most important news sources (every (?) UK newspaper and the BBC) only offers partial feeds that really isn’t an option.
Kate sums up the arguments:
(a) readers hate it
(b) full feeds actually increase traffic
The second point is, as she says, counter-intuitive, but basically it means that you can hang on to readers who aren’t committed enough to come to your site every day, draw in more occasional readers, and please your regular readers by giving them the choice.
Share this post:
Hi, Ian .. thanks for the link! Newspapers are tough ones. I had to move my CBC Arts News feed to the Hiatus folder today. I’m hoping that my customized news search feeds fare better.
Hey Kate. It may be more about the anxiety over missing an article than the actual risk. Someone else on your blogroll is likely to find and link to relevant stuff. But that’s putting the responsibility for reading broken feeds on other people, I suppose.
I agree for blogs, a partial feed is irritating. For news — such as the BBC — I prefer partial feeds though as I tend to use it to scan alot of stories very quickly picking out perhaps one or two to read in full.
mmm… good point. I suppose what I want is a full feed generated by something like this.
I totally agree, full feeds are the way forward and its easy to encorporate advertising if its needed. I actually got so frustrated with the BBC I wrote a quick script to translate their feeds to full content: http://www.barnesdmd.co.uk/site/blog/2006/11/27/bbc-rss-reparser/
Wow. I’ve just tested that and it works a treat. Thank you so much.