Blawgers….Pony Up Full RSS
Nothing drives me more nuts than legal blogs that do not provide full RSS feeds, instead requiring you to click through to read the entire post. A.k.a., “summary” or “excerpt” RSS feeds.
Other law bloggers (who know what they are talking about) agree with me:
Google’s new Blog Search engine only indexes RSS feeds. So if you want to be found, publish a full-text feed. Please.
I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds – that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher’s site – is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.
When I switched to full text RSS feeds more people read my blog posts and more people, other bloggers and the media, cited my blog posts in their writings. My reputation as an authority on lawyer blogs grew and LexBlog’s business increased.
I’m dumping all weblogs from my feed reader that only offer partial feeds (annoying, isn’t it – and I didn’t even make you click through to my website) instead of full feeds. To these sites, I offer two free pieces of advice:
1. Get a clue. It doesn’t matter if your contents is read in a browser, in a feed reader, on a cell phone, or elsewhere.
2. Get FeedBurner. This will also help you with #1.I’ll come back if you get a full feed. Until the, buh-bye.
Don’t make me follow Dennis Kennedy’s advice:
Over the years, people who use newsreaders to consume RSS feeds often reach a point where they feel that they have subscribed to WAY TOO MANY feeds. They then decide to prune their list of feeds. Historically, one of the easiest ways to cut the feeds you subscribe to is to delete those that offer only excerpts of posts.
The reason should be apparent. You save yourself the time and effort of clicking through to see the rest of the post. If you read feeds offline with a stand-alone reader, as I often do, then you will prefer full-text feeds because you can read everything in the post.
So, give me a full RSS feed! Don’t make me start naming names.
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