A few blogs I read only have summaries in their RSS/Atom feeds instead of the full content, I know one fellow who just made this change recently on one of his sites and I think some of the others have made this change recently as well.
One of the reasons I’ve often heard for doing this is to make people come to the site instead of just reading the feed (I haven’t asked any of these folks about their reasons or motivation). Interestingly enough, I’m finding I do the opposite. Where I used to read (or at least thoroughly skim) every post as it came through NetNewsWire, now I only read the posts that have an excerpt compelling enough for me to leave the aggregator and go to the browser.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this:
- What do you offer in your feeds and why?
- How do you react to excerpts vs. full posts in feeds?
Popularity: 2% [?]
Tor adds this Comment:
I offer only summaries simply because if I have any formatting, it prolly doesn’t work in the little aggregator window, and of course, because I want to drive traffic to my site for people to see *other* things that interest them.
How do I react to excerpts vs posts? To tell the truth, I almost always go by the title of the post to see if it’s something that’s interesting, so the point of excerpts vs full posts is moot, for me at least. Other blogs where I consistently find the author stimulating, I always pull up the actual site in the browser. I guess it’s ’cause I just don’t find that damn little aggregator window appealing. FYI, I use NetNewsWire Lite and the Firefox RSS Panel.
June 23rd, 2004 at 9:39 pm
Anthony McGuinness adds this Comment:
Well to be honest, my blog is currently undergoing a bit of a rethink and a redesign. When it’s up again I plan to offer full posts instead of excerpts as I want people to read my content right away instead of having to jump through another few hoops to get to it.
I also find that I enjoy full posts as I may have a few windows open reading different posts which only gave excerpts.
June 24th, 2004 at 2:26 am
Geof adds this Comment:
Alex: I use the excerpt because of wondergeeks.net. I’m either trying to write a funny lead or give a brief synopsis. Sometimes I fail miserably.
June 24th, 2004 at 6:54 am
Paul Beard adds this Comment:
I offer full and excerpted feeds and let the reader decide what they want. I haven’t looked to see which is more popular (and if memory serves, I stopped logging anything but html files anyway, so I can’t check).
June 24th, 2004 at 11:19 am
Michael adds this Comment:
I serve excerpts. Mostly because I like for people to visit my site. Also I think it motivates discussion.
June 25th, 2004 at 7:43 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Michael, I actually don’t visit your site or read your posts very often because you only serve excerpts. I’d probably visit your site more often if I read more of your posts. I’d read more of the posts if the full content was in the feed.
This is the irony I’m referring to.
June 25th, 2004 at 7:08 pm
Miraz Jordan adds this Comment:
I find I want different things from different sites and so on some feeds a title alone or title and summary are sufficient while on others I want full feeds.
For example, some sites are largely not that interesting to me, but I want to monitor them in case of the odd item of interest. A summary suffices there as I can quickly skim for the items of interest.
On other sites which mainly have items interesting to me I want the full feed. I find summaries irritating on those feeds and am likely to ditch the feed (and therefore never visit the site) unless that site is a compellingly unique source of information.
I offer full feeds on my Blog and my Tips archive since I see the feed as an alternative delivery mechanism.
June 25th, 2004 at 10:35 pm
Koz Speaks adds this Trackback:
Full Content Feeds
Alex King asked why
July 6th, 2004 at 3:19 am