Short Feeds vs. Full Feeds

I have been using Google Reader for a few months now and have enjoyed the experience. The one thing that I have decided that I do not like is when publishers publish a short feed. The experience is not seamless when I am constantly clicking and opening up new browser windows. I want to read my content in one location and the short feed interrupts that. Worst is the news sites that publish a one sentence teaser.

To this day, I have published abbreviated feeds for Marin Modus. This means that if you read Marin Modus content in a feed reader, you would be to read the first paragraph and then would need to click through to the site to read the rest. I did this for two reasons:

1. I was afraid people would steal my content if I published my full feed. It is very easy to convert a feed to content on one's website. So long as you have the feed address, you can convert the content onto your own website. This happens a lot and it is very frustrating to see your content published on an automated website trying to make money by tricking people into clicking its ads.
2. I wanted people to come to my website. I have an ego and watching the stats on Google Analytics and Feedburner can be very addictive. Seeing which topics spiked the most visits and which topics have hardly registered is always interesting. It is also interesting to see which keywords people used to find the site. Mostly, I just liked it when people came into my environment.

I have realized that the experience of the short feed is not as good for users as the long feed and because my content gets stolen no matter how long the feed is, it does not make sense to punish my readers.

So today, I enable long feeds for Marin Modus and I will be methodically unsubscribing to short feeds over the next few weeks... while I might miss great content, I want a more seamless experience.

Post-Script: The news sites and blogs who do publish short feeds probably have similar reasons as me. They also have to make ad revenue and to do so requires building and retaining your audience. However, they should consider RSS feed advertising (display and text ads embedded in the feeds)... it might help them make some more money and open a new channel during this tough time.

UPDATE 2/24/09: Ouch... Hearst is going to close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe SFGate.com should try RSS ads and release full feed formats? I do like their columnists and bloggers, but can't stand the one line teaser in the feed.

UPDATE 4/3/09: News Corp is investing in a mobile reader. Now we're talking! I don't need my news to be free. I just need it to be up to the minute and easily accessible. I'm not sure I love this idea, but at least someone is trying to innovate technology to see how to solve the problem. In the same article, Rupert Murdoch, "questioned whether the newspaper industry should continue to allow online news aggregators, such as Google Inc., to aggregate newspaper content without being compensated..." I think the news organizations should want products that send traffic direct to their site to continue doing that; it is free marketing and search engines are not going away. The issue content producers face is when their content is not original (eg. it is an AP article) or someone else scoops them or outright steals the content. I think the latter issue is the real problem. Anyone can appear in Google News, but the issue is not with Google because they enable it, it is with the content producers who are being scooped or being out optimized or having their content stolen.