This week I started a new experiment. My RSS Feed only shows the summary of the post i.e. people have to visit my blog to read the whole message.
Up to now I have always published the full blogpost through RSS.
I noticed that a lot of blogs only publish summaries and this may have to do with the fact that they want to generate webtraffic for one reason or another.
I dusted of my pole widget and welcome your opinion (Pole on the left). I will change my feed according to the pole results …
Thanks in advance.
Unless you’re trying to drive traffic to your site for web advertising dollars (or if site traffic is part of your review 🙂 ), then posting summaries will be counter-productive. People are too used to getting things through RSS, and having to click through means I’m likely to just mark all your posts as “read” without bothering. The only items I would click through are ones that pique my interest, and you’ll never be able to anticipate that for all your readers.
Tom,
Thanks. This post pique-ed you interest I guess.
But I am in big doubt what good and tend to agree with you. I saw a post over on Ed Brill’s blog today about being selective overall in sifting through the 100’s of blogs daily …’
I will switch back to full posts and continue the poll …
It seems to be the general opinion …
It is corrected already 😉
Peter, no summaries please, I tend to read all feeds from google reader or newsgator, sometimes I see people switch to summaries and I have to leave the reader site to read the rest. Most of the time I unsubscribe because it’s to much trouble I don’t want to do at that time.
I would recommend giving your visitors the choice and published both full and summary feeds. My preference is for full posts as I can then download into my feed reader. I read while travelling with no internet access and therefore need the full post rather than just a summary. However I know other friends who prefer summaries!
Stu,
Thanks for commenting.
I will look into if Feedburner supports both full and summary feeds seperate.