Now Offering Full-Text RSS Feed

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying hard to promote my rss feed. I've put the subscription link in the most visible part of my blog. I've added the instant email subscription widget. I also formatted the heck out of the link and text so that it can go at the top. My efforts were repaid by watching my feedburner subscription rate yo-yo up and down for the last week. I couldn't figure out why.

While looking for something else today, I happened upon an article that might explain why. It said to always offer a full text feed not a partial one. Meaning that your rss feed should include your entire content. At first, I just skipped over the advice mostly because I didn't want to hear it.

The reason I didn't want to hear it is because I've been so afraid of my content ending up on a splog. This is a very real and ever present danger for legitimate bloggers. If you never heard the term "splog" it means a "spam blog". These internet bottom feeders use people's feeds to automatically download content from legitimate sites, and then post it on their own. They create massive, fly-by-night websites, and collect the ad revenue from your content and 1000s of others' blogs. This hurts you because since their websites are so massive, their content may come up first in a google search. Worse still, google can then penalize your blog for not having "original" content. Therefore, to protect my blog's content I didn't publish the full text of my posts. I figured it wasn't that big of a deal for my subscribe's to click over to the website for the full text.

So like I said, I didn't listen to the advice even though the person said even he himself will not subscribe to blogs that offer partial post text. I figured I'd rather protect my content and search rank than cater to such lazy readers. The idea was then pushed to the back of my head. Well it festered for a while and eventually I did a google search to get other people's opinion on full vs. partial feeds. Well, the argument is pretty one sided and is in favor of full feeds. A small sample of what I found: here, here, and here.

Most of the other sites I found were bloggers asking their reader's opinion on if they mind partial feeds. Those comments were usually about 2/3 hated partial feeds, 1/6 didn't care, and the other 1/6 don't use rss feeds. It was while reading those comments that I realized something. I'm making the same mistake that the RIAA (music industry) and MPAA (movie industry) are making right now. I'll explain.

The RIAA, MPAA, and myself we're punishing our customers(in my case, readers) for the crimes of others. The RIAA and MPAA are forcing all this anti-copyright technology on your cd\dvds and digital downloads. All it does is piss off customers who use the content for legitimate purposes, and at most provides a brief speedbump for those who want to use it illegally. Not providing full text feeds provides the same end result. A lot of pain for my readers, and nothing more than a speedbump for A-Hole sploggers.

That all being said. I am now offering a full text rss feed. For those who might miss this post I'm indicating it in the subscribe text that it's now a full feed. So if you like my site, be sure to subscribe. If you don't have an rss reader, you can alternatevely sign up for email notification.

As for protecting my content, I plan on using 2 different tools to try and monitor malicious use of my rss feed. Of course, there is Copyscape which lets you put in a webpage and will spit out any urls that appear to have the exact same content. Also, blogger Kate has an absolutely brilliant tactic to prevent scrapes of your rss fead. I'm not going to quote or summarize. Just go read the article. It's clever, and free.

BTW, This isn't just a meta post. The recommendation extends to anyone who runs a blog fiction site. There really are advantages to allowing the full text. Fans of your site can let recent posts build up and then read at their own leisure - even if not connected to the internet at the time. Hopefully, if your content is liked well enought that someone will subscribe to your blog, they'll also be willing to still visit your site and leave comments on posts that they really like.

One last thing, If anyone knows of anyway to increase my subscription number, I'd love to hear it. Now that I'm getting some traffic I really want to try and convert that to subscribers. Right now I don't know what else to do to promote my feed besides writing good content and making it easy to subscribe. Thanks!