The link blog effect

Yeah I don’t get partial feeds. Oh and by the way thanks for sending me some new subscribers. That was huge. The flood of new readers made my day.

You are a fellow Montanan. Well your mom lives there. And you like the printing company I use. So what the heck.

Happy Birthday Dude!

Not a big fan of partials myself. I know it’s been done to death, but they just bug me. I recently unsubscribed from photographyblog.com because of their partial feeds. Not only were the feeds partial, but clicking on them brought you to a page that had only part of the article as well! Then you had to click another link to get the full story. Also, he uses IntelliTXT (even in comments readers make!), which I find to be the most annoying and intrusive advertising around.

Your link blog is like another digg feed for me, everytime I refresh my feed reader, I find a dozen intersting/good posts

As a reader, I prefer full text for obvious reasons. But as a blogger, I’ve had problems with unsavory types taking my content via my feed and using it on their own spam blogs.

So far, I’ve chosen to grit my teeth and deal with it, but there have been plenty of times that I’ve considered switching to partial text.

Good content is good content, and the easier it is to access, the better. But if I have to jump through a hoop or two to get to good content, so be it.

Rob: that’s happened to me too. I just ignore the jerks.

Hi Robert, the feed I get from your blog is a partial text feed and it irritates me. I’ll have to unsubscribe and look for your full text feed.

Sorry Scoble, partial feeds is a click away from full feed, whether or not the publisher has a full feed at all. What you only need is one of those scraping services which grabs the actual full feed for you. This is purely technical, so stop whining.

As for link blogs, I think this is the future of blogs. Now, if only Google could add support for Ajax sticky notes so that the author can add inline visual comments, that would be it.

Re: partial feeds vs full feeds

It’s an argument between “slightly inconveniencing spammers who don’t care” and “grossly annoying your readers”.

It makes perfect sense that RSS linkblog content would translate immediately to subscribers — it’s an audience that already uses RSS.

I’m interested in seeing how “A VC’s” experiment in advertising his blog through the Feedburner network works.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/a_feed_subscrip.html

Hey thanks for the link Robert!

While I’ve published a full feed for a while, I understand the desire for a partial feed. However, as I see it now, a full feed gives your blog/website much more reach. My example can be applied to any marketing endeavor. If I a published a partial feed and Robert included it, but my download link was after the break, how many downloads do you do you think I’d get vs having the full post?

RSS has become, IMHO, an extremely important way to reach people. The potential hasn’t even barely been tapped yet.

I don’t mind partial feeds as long as they’re authored, rather than just the first N words. If the blog author takes the time to write a summary that’s a complete sentence, it’s a lot more likely to hook me and lead me to actually click.

Interesting that, while some posts featured on your linkblog get a healthy boost of extra traffic and subscribers, others get none. My site, for example, was prominently linked to in one of the posts you featured a month or two back, and I didn’t get a single hit.

I write a site on Russian politics, so it’s not surprising that no-one clicked through, but I find it fascinating how people reading even varied feeds such as yours unerringly home in on the topics that remain dearest to their hearts.

By the way – please don’t take this as a complaint! I very much enjoy reading your link blog and (being primarily a politics nerd myself!) love it when you feature political blogs from time to time…!

I couldn’t agree more … partial feeds make RSS and newsreaders worthless in my book. Might as well not have them if they are just links to a Web site and the rest of the story.

Robert for some reason your feed shows up as a partial text feed in my GReader. Maybe I’ve got an old feed? The full text would be far less annoying…

Mark: my feed is definitely full text. So, unsubscribe and resubscribe to this feed: http://scobleizer.com/feed/

It’s kind of interesting to watch you share items. No, I’m not meaning literally, but almost…

I have all of my feeds in folders w/ Google Reader. Your shared items is subscribed, but not in one of the folders. It shows up below all of the folders. I do that because we often look at the same stuff and it gets redundant to see your link blog (shared items) feed mixed in with all the other feeds I subscribe to. So, while I’m reading, and when Reader refreshes (which it does pretty quickly), your counts go up. So, in essence, I am “watching you” as you share items.

Is there scary music for stalking someone’s public RSS feed? Hehe…

I’ve unsubscribed from your partial feed and subscribed to your full text feed as outlined above. Big improvement! Wonder how many more of your subscribers are stuck with the partial feed?

Still defending the spam (link) blog Robert…despite the fact the “Scoble Defence” (defense in US Eng) has become the *STANDARD* response now amongst the blog spamming community?

Let me quote someone on the topic, who you might know:

“Blogger says “it’s OK to steal, if they use RSS”

Mgreenly says, basically, that by putting a full-text RSS feed out there it’s like giving everyone a license to copy my content and use it however they want.

Ahh, so if it’s easy to copy it’s OK to steal?

American copyright law says “not true.”

And, I’m calling bull on this. It’s one thing to use it in an online news aggregator like Bloglines and its a whole nother thing to steal my content and put a different name on it and then spam everyone I link to with trackback spam.

This is content theft and its not OK. If you are advocating this is OK you simply don’t understand copyright law.”

Remember who wrote this? YOU on the 27th of August last year. You’re taking FULL feeds and you’re putting another name on them, just because you don’t have ads doesn’t make a shred of difference under the VERY SAME copyright laws you once proudly quoted.

Om’s site seems to use full text feed. I’m subscribed to it and I always see the full text.

I’ve been annoyed lately with the AOL owned blogs (Engadget, TV Squad, etc.) going to sometimes partial feeds. It looks like if a post is so many characters long, it becomes partial text. I tend to read the Gizmodo feed more often than the Engadget feed these days, but it used to be the opposite.

Duncan: there’s a HUGE difference between a splog, that copies EVERY post I write, and a link blog, that only posts 1,800 out of 29,000 posts I read. Copyright law also has something called “fair use” which allows using a portion of the content.

So, my claim is I use one out of every 10 posts on a blog.

I also will stop doing it for anyone who asks, sploggers don’t do that. And, if you publish partial text, I’ll use you a lot less (and, then, even if I use you, it’s only part of your text, which, again, is covered under fair use).