Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Another Note About Feeds

I poked around Blogger's feed settings yesterday and found that how much of a posting gets fed is configurable. That is, Blogger will feed all or part of a posting.

This explains a phenomenon I've observed in Google Reader: some blogs' feeds give me complete postings, some don't.

I don't think there is any cost to you, the blogger, if you provide a full feed. You might want to check your blog's settings to see what kind of feed you're providing.

7 comments:

Chris Foley said...

I tend to subscribe to feeds that are in full format and publish my blog in full feeds. There are generally two reasons that bloggers go with partial feeds--1) to generate more hits on their site, and 2) to prevent having their content stolen through feed scrapers.

It's generally easier to build large subscriber numbers through publishing full feeds. For the record, I would subscribe to Iron Tongue whether you used full feeds or not.

Lisa Hirsch said...

Thank you!

3) The default feed is partial and the blogger doesn't know.

A.C. Douglas said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
A.C. Douglas said...

I don't think there is any cost to you, the blogger, if you provide a full feed.

There is if you have Google AdSense ads on your blog. Those AdSense ads pay for my TypePad subscription, and more. Also, context affects content. I want my posts read within the context of my blog's design. Lastly, if one feeds the full text of each blog post to the RSS feed, readers won't visit your blog, and so one then gets no fix on one's readership, both number and quality, which the stat function on one's blog provides.

Accordingly, and needless to say, my RSS feed contains only the first 25 words of each post.

ACD

Lisa Hirsch said...

That makes sense, as it were; most of the blogs I read don't have AdSense ads running on them.

I would expect that there are people who won't read blogs they have to to visit personally.

One disadvantage of feeds is not an issue for you: Google Reader, at least, does not capture comments.

mostly opera... said...

Thanks for this informative post and discussion due to which I now realize,that I provide a full blog feed. This also goes some way to explain my impression that my blog statistics don´t adequately reflect on the number of people reading my blog. Thanks to ACD´s post, I´ll now have to think hard whether I should change to a partial feed..

Lisa Hirsch said...

You're welcome!