Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Dear Other Bloggers...

If you do not have full articles posted in your feeds, or at least more than a paragraph, odds are I won't read your post. I'll jump over it in my feeder to go to someone else's post with the full text.

News sites are trying to drive traffic for advertising purposes. A blogger isn't. Therefore there is no good reason to force people to your site for content, especially since it means you are losing readers in the process.

Carry on.

2 comments:

  1. This falls under my only real rule/advice about blogging, which is "Be the blog you want to read." I suppose somebody could make the argument that they like just knowing that a new topic is up via their RSS reader so they can visit the site in question, but I am not sure I would believe it.

    And I wouldn't let commercial sites off the hook too easily. There are any number of sites whose RSS feed is nothing by titles. I do not pass over those posts, I remove those feeds from my reader. I think Ars Technica does it best, giving you a good, solid chunk of the article and indicating how much more there is to read via a paragraph count.

    My own disclaimer: I publish posts in full in my feed, but I make no guarantees as to how it will look in your reader. Some readers, like Feedly, do strange things with the pictures in posts. The definitive, artist's vision of the post is only available directly on the site.

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  2. Anonymous11:36 am

    Word. Put the whole thing in (unless its super wordy) or I'm on to the next one.

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