« Euterpe’s Classy Jackets and Calla’s Fab Textures | Home | Sweet sweet sin »

Poll: Should we continue to publish full text RSS?

By Celebrity Trollop | March 20, 2007

A lot of third party aggregator sites have picked up the RSS feed from Second Style Fashionista and it’s starting to bother me a little that they’re not just publishing the first paragraph or two and no pictures. They’re publishing the entire article with lots of text ads around it. If anyone is going to putting a lot of text ads around the content on this blog, it’s going to be me! (But don’t worry, we’re not planning to do that — ever, really.)

Because of these marginal third party aggregator sites (which mostly seem to be Google link farms/typo bait to me), I wanted to ask readers if they really enjoy having the full text RSS feed or if they would be annoyed by only getting a summary. Let me know what you think, please.

Will Lively kill Second Life?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Topics: Administrative, Polls |

9 Responses to “Poll: Should we continue to publish full text RSS?”

  1. I only go to one page to check blogs, it is so easy like the 25 grp limit group. I don’t have to spend 35 mins checking all the blogs I like, I just go to one. Sometimes see things I normally wouldn’t see form designers I usually don’t take the time to look at. So I love places that put them all in one place…ads or not :P

    Posted by: Mary on March 20th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

  2. I prefer full text. My aggr-thingee doesn’t put ads, so you aren’t missing out. And if something looks interesting or I want to see a picture bigger, I come to your blog anyhow :) But I can see why you’d want to go the other way for traffic/ads etc.

    Posted by: Kala Bijoux on March 20th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

  3. I get my feeds through Google Reader and I don’t mind clicking on a link to open the full story in a new tab. It stinks to have your content stolen by someone else and used to make money for them. My blog has been picked up by a few of the spam sites and I’m thinking about changing my RSS content, too.

    Posted by: Beth on March 20th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

  4. I like with an RSS aggregator having full text, but if you decide to cut back to a short summary I’ll support you. Personally, I use Firefox with a Ad blocker and an adblock so I only see the SL ads you have. Which I don’t mind seeing cause they are relevant to me (and not huge and intrusive or annoying like some RL blogs I read).

    Posted by: Tanya Book on March 20th, 2007 at 7:40 pm

  5. I use a web-based RSS aggregator to read the full feed. While it’s depressing to see others piggybacking on your hard work, maybe there’s a technical solution available to you through blocking those sites that are leeching full content and repackaging it with ads.

    Posted by: Nic on March 21st, 2007 at 4:34 am

  6. I prefer full text because I use an RSS reader, and I find that I will read articles more often if I get the full text in my reader. I’m more likely to skip them if I have to go outside, even if I’m interested in reading them.

    You could include a banner ad along the bottom of your full text rss article, if you’re concerned your advertisers aren’t getting their money’s worth.

    Posted by: Adri on March 21st, 2007 at 5:53 am

  7. It’s not so much *my* advertisers. It’s that these sites essentially take the entire post and frame it with their own google text ads.

    It’s marginally tolerable, only because they link back to the originall post (and could potentially influence my page rank in searches) but it annoys me very much to see someone else take all of this content from here, from other sites around the Internet, frame it with ads and make money off it.

    Posted by: Celebrity Trollop on March 21st, 2007 at 8:56 am

  8. I love reading your blog over others (with RSS reader in Firefox). :-)

    Like Adri said, summaries are an extra hurdle, instead of simply reading and getting the info happily, you have to read, decide to click through, find where in the article to pickup, then click back to repeat the process on other summaries… Blyech! I’ve dropped some of those feeds.

    I guess they do that so readers view ad on their pages? Don’t most web users learn to block ads before they learn to use RSS anyway?

    It is icky others can take advantage of your work to profit though. Maybe see it as a cost of doing business? And as you said, could increase your page rank?

    I’m afraid I’ll read less if switched to summaries, just because I know my habits.

    Posted by: Crystal on March 21st, 2007 at 10:17 am

  9. Be smart. Don’t publish the full thing. Write engaging first paragraphs and … trust me … one little click … we’ll fall out of the feed reader to see more — give us enough clues in the first paragraph to make it worth our visit.

    I mean look at how many you got to show up and comment on this … they didn’t do that from their readers.

    have fun
    pam

    Posted by: MarillaAnne on March 21st, 2007 at 10:30 am