Problogger was running a poll last week to see if people preferred full or partial RSS feeds. The results are in with 75% of the respondents liking full feeds better than partial feeds.
I personally have to agree with the poll results. I prefer full RSS feeds, especially now that I have switched to a better reader where I can actually read the entire post without visiting the website. That is the biggest reason I prefer full feeds and one of the reasons why I offer a full feed here. I am more interested in having people read my blog posts than I am in having people come and actually visit the website. Of course it would be great if you decided to come and leave a comment or two but that is optional.
I can understand the reasons why many people use partial RSS feeds. They want to encourage people to visit their website for various reasons, but I have not read of any hard evidence that says partial feeds encourage people to actually visit more.
Scrapers are another big pain the a** reason to have partial feeds, although I have found that website scrapers are just as likely to scrap a partial feed as they are a full feed. One of the best defences against scrapers is adding comment into the RSS feed similar to this:
This way the copywrite notice is included in the RSS feed and published on their blog/website. I have used this for approach for close to a year on Video Rambler, and started doing it here for a few months now, ever since my feed was scraped. I have changed the text to be more like the one from Blogging Tips.
If you are new to RSS check out this video “RSS in Plain English”:
I prefer full feeds. I tend to skip those that use partial feeds when I’m in my feed reader.