Full-Text Feeds are Dead

Full text. Because. Yup. :)

Personally, I tend to drop feeds that don't provide full text. I don't want to have to fire up my browser and/or look at all the extraneous stuff on the page, _unless it's my choice to do so_!

Hmm.. When I recieve the Lockergnome Newsletters, most articles are cut off after a certain length, then you click the link.
It's annoyinig (but bearable) to me how really short entries get cut off, only to show a couple of more lines after you click the “Continued” link, or entries quoting or referring to other websites lead you to another slightly longer 'teaser' followed by a link to the whole article or whatever the article was about, of course, that goes for the feeds as well.
I have mixed feelings about this though, I don't mind clicking a few times, and in ways I feel silly for complaining about pushing a button a couple of times but full text would be more of a convenience, at least for those looking at the feed directly. heh
-Dan

I'm totally with you Chris, I've dropped full text RSS on both my blog and my podcast for that very reason. Past that though, I think I like it better myself with just a “tease”. Easier for me to get through things that way rather than having to be tempted by reading an entire article. If your tease works, I'll come read. If it doesn't then I can move on to the next topic.

Chris: out of 1,366 feeds I only read a few that aren't full text. I really HATE your feed and other non-full-text feeds. When I talk with audiences that use RSS I find the same response.
You're lucky: your content is good enough that I'll put up with a great deal of pain to read it. But, I do hate that you don't have full text feeds.
And, yes, my content is repurposed on these types of sites too. I really don't care. I'd rather take a customer centric approach and serve my best readers the way they'd like to be served.

I don't care. My reader (intraVnews) can download the full post so that I can read everything (even offline). :)
If I didn't have that option available via my reader, I would never subscribe to partial text feeds.
-Maurice

A. I don't know what an NGOS search feed is. Probably something obvious but I guess I'm not awake yet. Probably not “Non-Government OrganizationS” (top Google hit).
B. If you are complaining about crappy pseudo-search sites that turn up in Google, they may be scraping RSS, but they apparently use other spidering methods as well. I think Google eventually gets wise to these guys and de-lists them. It is a never ending battle though, just like SPAM.
C. Ironic that you are complaining of multiple clicks. I unsubscribed from all Lockergnome feeds for exactly this reason. 1) Click on a ambiguous LN RSS feed link 2) Get a short, poorly written summary (surrounded by a gazillion ads) 3) finally get to the original article (unless THAT author was referring to somebody else).
D. Why not be straight with people Chris? You are doing everything possible to drive your ad engines and make money. The fact that you now even use short, cryptic summaries on your main blog page (forcing another click) proves that. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make a buck – we all gotta make a living somehow – but I think you have gotten so wrapped up in AdSense that you have forgotten CommonSense: provide something interesting and worthwhile for your readers. I think there is a good message for you in Episode III Chris, your fear of losing something (revenue in this case) may be what drives you to the dark side and causes you to lose that very thing (sorry, just saw it last night :) ).
Daniel

One other thing I forgot to mention (”D”, if you will :) ):
Have you noticed Chris, that the excerpts you use from other sites are longer than the excerpts you use in your RSS feeds and blog summary page of your own posts? Sometimes, like in the Newsgator interview, for example, these “excerpts” are not attributed and don't include reference links, which in turn leads to confusion as to who wrote what (see the Trackbacks in your Newsgator post).
Do you think it is fair to scrape content from other sites and then complain about it when it happens to you?
Maybe you feel that those other sites should be glad you even mentioned them given your Google page rank and all.
Of course, I guess the crappy pseudo-search sites are probably saying the same thing.

And this is from someone who copies the full text of other sites and reposts it without attribution? Surrounded by ads, of course.
Mr. Perillo, folks see this site for what it really is. Don't pretend otherwise.

Chris:
Sorry, but you are dead wrong on the full RSS feed issue. Here's a parallel:
People want downloadable movies, but the MPAA doesn't understand how to make a revenue stream with them, so the people get lawsuits.
In the RSS world, people want full text feeds, but content providers don't understand the ad/revenue stream model, so people get pithy teases and (in your case) entries that are NOTHING but ads for adsense. This is a case of trying to curb a market because it isn't profitable, rather than figuring out how to make a WANTED service (full feeds) profitable.
I am all for yours and others ability to make a living providing content, but making it annoying to your users is just a bad way to go about it, man…
The sad truth (and this may sting a bit) is that very rarely does a content provider provide the ONLY source of news or information. Especially in the tech sector, new stories are reported in duplicate all over the web, so if one feed is annoying because of lack of full text feeds, etc, it's pretty simple to go somewhere else to get the same information, and that is what I do…
I still read this feed because I'm coming to Gnomedex and I want to keep up with what you're up to, but I read about half of your posts because the tagline just doesn't catch me. If I had the full text, at least I'd scan more before I moved on…
That's my opinion…
-Jim from Technodaddy.com

I've come very close to unsubscribing several times in the last few months. The _only_ reason I'm here is that I remember how much I used to enjoy the _content_ of Lockergnome. And I thought this item might explain why you are going the way that you are.
If I were new here, I would've been long gone.
BTW, this is the first time I've clicked your feed since you went to 1 liners.
Scoble has it right:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/05/18.html#a10147
The best balance is Full text feeds with ads.
I'll stick around a little longer to see what you do.

Let me put it this way. When your feed was full text, I read every post. Now with the teasers, I don't read most of it.

What am I doing……only reading Headline articles that REALLY grab me…..otherwise I'm passing on over…….

Frankly, I wish it were year 2000 all over again. The daily Lockergnome was a morning favorite … complete in every way. Screw RSS.

Many others above have said it much better than I ever could, in short: return to full text RSS or lose even more readers.

I subscribed to your feed a while back, but I almost never actually click through to read anything. Yup — yet another proponent for full-text feeds.

Chris, Chris, Chris. I agree with most of these guys. Partial RSS Feeds SUCK BALLS! I hardly ever check out your site since you switched from full to partial rss feeds, because it's a waste of my time. I'm about to delete every feed that has ads or only has partial entries. You know why? Because there is NO GODDAMN REASON that we should be forced to click twice to see an article, only to have it surrounded by ads. and I'm sure you hate ads… But you still put them on your site. I'll admit, I tried ads on my site. I promptly removed them, because I hate ads on other sites. I'm not in blogging to make money. And I think you have switched to needing to make enough to live to goddamn, I can get rich at this, if I just add 20 more ads to the page, that already has 25!
Chris, you suck. I don't know why I still come here.

All of you who are complaining about ads in blogs (or on websites in general) need to wake up. Advertising is never going away, and you can only ignore it to a point.
What about billboards on your way to work, or TV commercials? Those aren't going away anytime soon, and you already have obviously accepted those forms of advertising.
The point is that you are never going to get something for free. You might get it for free, but it will always be at someone else's expense.

You are not going to like this, but I rarely go to lockergnome because I hate have to scroll two screens to get past all of the google ads to read the body of your post. You've got ads on both sides, why have to go past even more ads. I am only here now because MicroPersuasion (which I do read) linked to you.

I just put the option to full-text yesterday because I want that the readers read my posting not just coming to my weblog. I will see if the hits will decrease. I do not think so, because as one reader commented: “if it is interesting enough I want to read more of your postings and will come to the weblog to give a comment:.

I'm with Scoble full-text feeds are the ONLY way to go. It's so inconvenient to load up a browser. Say I can read a full-text post in a minute. If that feed isn't full-text the page has to load, I've got to find the content and then read the post in the format (i.e. handwritten?!?) given. All this will probably take double or triple the time. So you tell me is full-text worth it?

Chris: A few thoughts…
(1) The problem isn't full-content… the problem is sloppy attribution in poorly designed aggregators. If I subscribe to you using my web aggregator, it will produce a feed that point to you via the rss:link and a text/link credit in the rss:description. So even if a downstream aggregator consumes your content through me, it's still your link that's being passed on, not mine… that pointer-to-a-pointer business is nonsense.
(2) Failing to provide full content isn't just an annoyance… it cuts out a whole lotta options. If you provide full content, I can read your feed on my TiVo, on my cellphone, or my iPod. If you don't, I can't.
(3) I've been back-and-forth on the issue myself, so I'm sympathetic to those struggling with the decisions involved.

You should have asked C.Doctorow about this question in your great interview with him a little while ago. It was obvious that you really admire the guy, I think we can all guess what he'd say about this issue: don't give us a locked up version of your product so obsessed with profit for you and attempts to control the users that you don't trust that all of us end up missing out on our ability to use your product the way we see fit.
I also hate partial feeds and find contextual ads in rss feeds interesting enough with appropriate ratio. Good luck with your psyche after this discussion. I'm sure you're just trying to figure out the best way to do things but obviously many people think you're taking adverts too far.
Marshall Kirkpatrick
http://marshallk.blogspot.com

I see it this way. I enjoy reading full-text feeds more than I do partial. I'm more likely to link to full-text. So, ya, you won't have the link problem with partial text. I agree!
-Randy

I give this site 1 week to bring back full feeds or I am gone…I figure I won't be the only one in this camp. I don't have time to fart around digging for a story that is ultimately nothing worth a crap anyways….

Alrighty then. I'll just hit this little unsubscribe butto

As the guy who runs technology updates, I just wanted to say that we have removed xmlmania as a source. We really try and avoid aggregating aggregators for the reason chris pointed out above. It just annoys everyone.

another reader gone… just unsubscribed