Full Time for RSS

Duncan has an interesting post on his blog, DoctorVee, about the futility of partial RSS feeds and why everybody should be publishing in full.

I completely agree with his argument – for blogs – but don’t think it’s completely necessary for news sites or even for blogs with a more news style.

I prefer full feeds for blogs and partial feeds for news sites – not that I’m a big rss reader though – I find it easier to just have a bookmark folder of all my favourite blogs and open them in tabs.

However – the reason I prefer partial for news and full for blogs is because of the difference in approach to writing posts.

When you write for news you construct your story like a pyramid – with the basics of the story being told within the first paragraph and the meat of the story within the first four – anything after that is just padding or extra info.

So with this you only need a partial feed as you know what the story is about within a couple of paras anyway.

Whereas with a blog post – the feature tends to be more like a book, short story or magazine feature where the article builds to a conclusion.

This is why with a blog you need a full feed to get the story and read the conclusion.

I know sploggers can be a pain in the rss but it’s as much of a fact of life of blogging as comment spam – something you’ve got to sit back and accept.