Blogs and RSS: Full text or just excerpts?

Posted by scoop on September 26th, 2006 in Blog basics, Business Blogging, Promotion, RSS, Splogs |

Do you have RSS available for your readers? What do you give? Full text or excerpts? This question is something that came up as people discuss their thoughts on sploggers. After all, some of these splogs mainly rely on the feeds they could scrape from. Personally, I could say that I like giving full text in my RSS, more often than not, because that means that the readers could easily access my thoughts anyhow — be it on the blog itself or through their favorite blog reader. For someone who thinks about the accessiblity of the information, full text might seem to be the best way to go about it. However, as seen online, full text feeds are abused in so many ways so maybe it’s time to really think about things. Hmmm. If you choose the title only way, you’d have to really write your headlines very well. Might as well do that for the sake of readability and SEO all at the same time.

There is also the option that you only give out the titles of your blog entries on RSS. I have seen it before while going over some random feeds in Rojo and the thing I personally don’t like about having titles only is that you have no other piece of information to give your readers unless they click the link. There are still some positive points about giving only the blog entry titles on RSS: It could also help your reader sift through so much information by letting him/her gauge how relevant your blog entry is to him/her based on the title. However, I think that the drawback here is that the reader would have less information to compare your content with that of another blogger’s. If you have been blogging about coffee and you only have titles on your RSS, what are the chances that a reader would pick your blog entry instead of another blogger’s?

What is more important to you as a blogger? That your readers would have access to your material or that you are protecting yourself from the sploggers and such people? Trying to strike a balance is quite difficult and if you have any such suggestions, they are very much welcome.

[tags]blogging,rss,splogs[/tags]