Wouldn’t we all love to read full feeds in our RSS news aggregators. It is definitely a convenience to read all your favourite feeds in one place and never clickthorugh to the site. I am not starting a discussion again on full feeds vs. partial feeds as it has been already discussed in several forums before.
Why don’t I run full feeds?
Well I have tried running full feeds several times, but have always switched back to partial feeds. You would be surprised how easy it is to republish your entire feed content as a blog. In fact there are several free tools easily available online for this purpose. Recently I read a large part of my blog on another site and I wonder what search engines think about the duplicated content…
Popular A-list bloggers and corporate bloggers have the legal access, authority and support to deal with such people who use your content without permission. I was fed up emailing and reporting unknown strangers who were intentionally using my content. Of course there are some ways to report spam blogger blogs.
In case you are wondering why I added the [Read Full article] and Copyright statements to the feed recently, you would be surprised to know many people are interested in republishing even my partial feeds…
I fully agree that full feeds is the best option for dedicated feed readers. Partial feeds definitely annoy feed readers, and I am sure my feed numbers would increase significantly if I switched back to full feeds.
Update: Every blog has their own kind of readers. Keeping a partial or full feed is your own preference and how comfortable you are with either of them.