When Yahoo launched Pipes about a year ago I spent a LOT of time playing with it, in fact you could say I got a little bit addicted – but I managed to break the addiction and leave it alone.
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.