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Partial or Full Feed?

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I have been thinking about this for a long time but when Problogger decided to do a poll about it, I just had to do up a post.

In summary, partial feed is simply ANNOYING!
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I have almost hundred feed in my RSS reader and when it comes to any post with partial feed, I just SKIP them. I just do not want to waste the time clicking on the header and then wait for the “whole story” to be up.

The reason why I have a feed reader in the first place is to have the post “downloaded” and ready for my reading – not for me to do a “further click”, wait for the full story to be up and then read it about it, sigh. And it is ok for full feed for long posts.

Here are 4 reasons why I think partial feed sucks, big time!

No. 1 – Time wasted

This is the obvious and biggest reason. I have a RSS Feed running in the background, “downloading” the stories silently as I am away working. The last thing I need is to “re-do” the process when I am in front of the feed reader.

No. 2 – Missing the continuity

Some of the feed have some short description or the story and then for the full story, asks us to click to “read further”. It is ok when we have plenty of time to burn but it is not the same, when one is on a “5 minute” break and wants to do a quick read. What starts as a good read ends up stopping abruptly due to “click here to read more”.

No. 3 – Cheap way of hiking up stats

Ok, reading it in a feed reader does not increase your readership stats but isn’t it downright cheap to get the stats by getting the user to click further to read? Which is more important – increase in stats or increase in readership? And if you are having reader like me, you lose both the stats and readership.

No. 4 – Does not make sense

Unless you are a damn good writer who can pull up high readership with just couple of words to spare, partial feed is a sure way to kill your writing. Short description or story seems to be too short to make sense – so the “sensible” thing to do to move to the next blog to read.

To make this up as Top Ten 10 list, reuse the reason No 1 six times…but perhaps it is also time for me to drop all those partial feed from my RSS Reader.

Read Also

Full or Partial RSS Feed – the Great Feed Debate

Full Vs. Partial RSS Feeds

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3 thoughts on “Partial or Full Feed?”

  1. I don’t agree….I use partial feeds on my blog that makes money because if I don’t the whole content gets ripped and reposted on splogs all over blogspot with other people’s adsense in it.

    Can you tell me how we can stop that whilst still offering full feeds?

    And yeah that blog has over 11,000 RSS subscribers so it doesn’t seem to hurt.

    It doesn’t completely stop the plagiarism but it certainly cuts it down a lot.

  2. ShaolinTiger – I guess plagiarism is still a pain in the neck with or without partial feed. As you said, it does not stop plagiarism but cuts down a lot.

    It is true, from blogger point of view but personally, from a reader point of view, it is a big turn-off when reading half displayed blogs that still need “additional work” to see the full display.

  3. Yah I agree in a way, it also depends how you use RSS, I have tonnes of feeds too but I never read them in the reader, I always prefer to go to the site, 9/10 times I base the decision to read on the headline/title alone anyway.

    If there were no spammers life would be better for everyone 🙂

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