I love Amit Agarwal’s analysis on the full-text vs. partial text debate. I HATE partial text feeds. I am subscribing to a few now (Dan Farber, for instance) but I find I link to them far less often than people who give me full text feeds. What does that do? Well, read Amit’s analysis. And, yes, I did “steal” Amit’s content and put it on my link blog.
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Robert Scoble works at Fast Company.TV (title: Managing Director). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.
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December 8th, 2006 at 11:11 am
dude, that’s not a link blog, that’s a feedblog. If it were a link blog, I’d be able to scan the link without hitting the more button forever. Screw that.
You want a great implementation of a Linkblog?
http://macsurfer.com/
Much more efficient as a link blog.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Your own feed is partial, at least in Bloglines. Am I missing something here?
December 8th, 2006 at 11:16 am
A partial feed is like a good headline. It should tell you enough to entertain and make you want more. What’s wrong with it? It’s a good compromise. You get notification of content and the people get paid.
December 8th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
[...] Robert Scoble hates partial text rss feeds, and so do I. RSS is still a rather foreign concept to many casual internet users (at least the ones I know), and partial text feeds pose enough of an annoyance for many people to just give up and say “why bother.” We are in the middle of a big movement towards a completely customizable internet experience. People can already tailor their portals to contain popular sites they often visit, arrange their blogs or social networking site profiles to include people they know and want to keep up with, and many power users have RSS readers constantly feeding them the latest news from dozens of sites. With busy lives putting a premium on free time, people might start to cut out partial text feeds if they have to trim the list of sites and sources they follow. Amit Agarwal provides many more reasons that full feed is the way to go. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
I find it humorous that someone that “HATES” partial text feeds, is one of the few(must be because it’s Scoble) that I always have to click to get the rest of the story.
December 8th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
WHY DO SOME FEED READERS IMPORT PARTICAL TEXT INSTEAD OF FULL TEXT. I HAVE NOTICED THIS FOR QUITE SOME TIME. PLUS COULD YOU TELL US AGAIN WHY YOU LIKE GOOGLE READER OVER LIVE.COM. PLEASE THAT WOULD BE A GREAT CONVERSATION TO START. SORT OF LIKE WHAT YOU DID WITH THE SEARCH ENGINES
December 8th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
I agree, Robert. Now, fix your feed. ;)
December 8th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Gary: the feed at http://scobleizer.com/feed/ is a full text feed. At least it’s full text in Google Reader. Not sure why other readers aren’t showing full text.
December 8th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Incomplete: >What’s wrong with it?
It wastes my time.
December 8th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
I agree with you Robert, and so I opened this post on your website after reading it in my aggregator :-)
December 8th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/feed/rss/ is partial, to which is what I used to subscribe. There’s a wordpress.com setting in Options - Reading for full/partial feed.
December 8th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
[...] There’s always been a huge debate in blogging about whether to use full feeds or partial feeds. I *hate* partial feeds. They only display a fixed amount of text before the cut-off, and it is so unsatisfying to click more only to find out that you were missing two sentances. As a feed reader, I find I stop subscribing to partial feed sites unless I really like them. Currently I only read three partial feed sites: [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
[...] I used to be among those that felt using a partial-text RSS feed would bring more people to my site. About a year ago, I realized the error of my ways - mostly because I figured Robert Scoble would never subscribe (you do now though, right Robert?) - and switched to full text feeds. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
> It wastes my time.
A page display takes 200-500 msecs, you must be very busy. And while that’s loading you scan to the next entry to see if it’s worth your time.
December 8th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Robert your feed is full in Google reader for me as well. I also checked it in my backup, bloglines, and it’s full text there for me as well.
Perhaps someone has their options set up incorrectly in bloglines? I hesitate to say that as I may get flamed, but I’ve made that mistake before.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Robyn: I don’t know. I don’t know how people got to that URL.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
incomplete: most pages take seconds to load. But, yes, that wastes my time. Especially when I’m looking at 350 feeds and thousands of items every day. Most of the time there’s someone else who gives me full text that I’d rather link to.
December 8th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
I think that full feeds are really important. I don’t come back to websites that don’t have a feed, and I hardly ever read partial feeds. I often click through on the full feeds.
And really, how hard is it to put an ad in a feed??
Zach
take more photos
December 8th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Couldn’t agree more. I’m reluctant to subscribe to partial text feeds; they’re a pain-in-the-@$$.
Frankly, I’m not too thrilled with short postings, either. Personal preference. I’d rather get fewer, but longer postings: More analysis, less background noise. (Honestly, I really don’t care if a blogger is taking a trip to visit their mother — or even if they’ll be too busy to post over the next several days. Make a brief annotation to the final post prior to going on a trip rather than making a separate post that a trip is pending.)
December 9th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Robert… what do you think of full postings for commercial feeds (like newspapers, etc.). Frankly it drives me nuts to only get the first two sentences (see The Economist, or The New York Times…). I’d prefer to pay for the subscription and get an authenticated feed…
December 9th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Jame: I so wish that were a choice that would be possible!
December 9th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
[...] Af first i don’t want to do this because i’ve been scraped by those lazy guys out there that just want to make some money without doing real work (even it’s just creating a post) for a few times .. but after reading Robert Scoble comment on Amit Agarwal blog, i decided to change into full feed (actually i read about it first on his post about full text feeds pay off for this blogger .. and on problogger post about full feeds or partial feeds discussion) [...]
December 9th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Not that anyone read the feeds from my blog but after reading one of your rants on hating partial text feeds (I was guilty as charged putting partial feeds to drive additional traffic to my own little blog) I enabled full text so that those who do subscribe to my RSS don’t have have to go to the site but can consume what I put online from their RSS viewr of choice….. nof course hopefully what they consume wont give them an upset stomach. ;-)
December 9th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
[...] Full text feeds pay off for this blogger [...]
December 9th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Count me in the crowd that dislikes partial feeds. Perhaps more people should offer people both options.
I also get the full feeds for this blog in every feed reader I have used (nowadays Google Reader)
December 10th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Is there any reason Robert that you don’t include ads on your feeds?
December 10th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
[...] Scoble detests partial feeds as much as I do. Whilst I tolerate it on news sites, I really cannot be bothered with elsewhere. Scoble points off to a great analysis of the full-text versus partial-text debate by Amit Agarwal. In the analysis he outlines why he has moved from a solid two-year position of only providing partial text to now providing full feeds — the economic and ‘reach’ evidence are compelling. [...]
December 10th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Paul: no reason, it’s just I’m not driven by the money that I could make and I’d rather you get just me on my personal blog.
December 10th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
Of course, the delicious Irony for me here Robert is I’m still reading you blog in Bloglines via a part feed, not a full feed. Feel free to switch the full feed back on though :-)
December 10th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Duncan: again, WordPress.com publishes a full-text feed at http://scobleizer.com/feed/
I never turned it off.
If you can’t see a full-text feed at that address, maybe you need a better news aggregator. Google Reader shows full text there. So does NewsGator.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Wizz RSS also shows me partial feeds, and I changed from the WordPress, URL to the Scobleizer URL. Ah, well, it isn’t hurting me any. Perhaps Wizz will have it right the next time I use it.
January 28th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
You should get accepted from Text Link Ads as soon as you hit Google PR4 as long as if you have a decent enough looking site.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:50 am
[...] to get on the radar screens of eminent blogging personalities like Jeff Jarvis, Nicholas Karr, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Darren Rowse, Michael Parekh and Steve [...]
February 25th, 2007 at 2:01 am
It seems as if a few uninformed people think that getting partial text from a feed is the fault of the feed reader (See post #31 for example). A feed reader reads what is presented in the feed XML. If the publisher of the feed includes full text in the feed, the reader will show the full text. Conversely, if the publisher of the feed only includes partial text in the XML, the reader will only show partial text.
April 21st, 2007 at 1:31 pm
well we like full text feeds because if they are not it make our system seem to not work, lots of our customers have two feeds one for short and one for full text for “special” uses.
like this one: here is this blog as a podcast
http://www.feed2podcast.com/player/podcast_player.php?url=http://www.feed2podcast.com/podcast/93596840.xml
July 20th, 2007 at 12:14 am
[...] back to real full feeds There’s always been a huge debate in blogging about whether to use full feeds or partial feeds. I *hate* partial feeds. They only display a fixed [...]