Howard Owens, formerly of Bakersfield Today VP of interactive media with the Bakersfield Californian, has some advice that bears repeating for bloggers:
If you’re going to have an RSS feed, give me the whole feed.
There are a number of bloggers I like (and some other news sources) that only offer teasers in their feeds, and if you want to read the whole article, you are forced to click through. I understand the importance of driving traffic to the Web site, but it fundamentally tries to change the nature of the Internet, which is all about user control.
Modern blogging software allows you to set whether the RSS feed shows an excerpt or the entire blog post. The issue of driving traffic to the web site is a sticky one, but one that can be overcome. If you write about material that is important to your audience and you give them the whole article in the feed, they may be more likely to link to your story, which will send more readers to your blog and widen your influence.
Doing a quick scan of my blogroll, I don’t think I have any feeds that I read regularly that don’t include the whole post in the feed.
on Oct 23rd, 2006 at 1:05 am
Thank you for the link and post … I would encourage your readers to check the comment on that post for an alternative view … As a user, I much prefer the whole article, but as the comment shows, that’s not for all.
Also, as a matter of clarification, I was formerly with The Bakersfield Californian (VP/Interactive Media). Currently, I’m director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media.