Feeds and comments – for and against…

Robert Scoble has posted that he is trimming his blogroll – one of the qualifications he is using – if the site doesn’t provide full feeds, he unsubscribes. Robert has said this previouslyI agreed with him then and I agree with him still. Partial feeds are a pain – they force you to click through to get the full story, whereas when you get there you may very well find the full story is not as interesting as you thought from snippet in the partial feed – waste of time.

John Roberts on the other hand has come out in favour of partial feeds. John says:

If I ever did anything offline, maybe I’d be crazy for full-text, but I think of those rare moments when I’m away from a computer as deliberate, so why not enjoy the connection and the focused reading experience available in a browser?

John, I enjoy the focused reading experience available in my RSS reader – I go to browser to leave comments. Speaking of comments – you don’t appear to have comments enabled on your site – are you aginst comments as well?

I find it impossible to take anyone seriously if they don’t have comments enabled on their site – it shows that while they are obviously fond of the sound of their own voice they not interested in hearing anyone else’s opinion.

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10 Responses to “Feeds and comments – for and against…”


  1. 1 John Roberts

    Not against comments. They are not enabled on my blog at this point because the Radio Userland comment server is no longer available to me, as I let my subscription lapse in anticipation of moving to WordPress… but the migration also requires moving my family’s e-mail addresses, and I’ve been busy.

    Up to you whether you take me seriously or not. The lack of comments is a bug, not a feature, I freely admit.

    Cheers.

  2. 2 Michele

    Well as we are on the topic of feeds.. The copyright notice on yours has been annoying me for months.

  3. 3 Tom Raftery

    You should have said so sooner Michele – it is gone now!

    Cheers,

    Tom.

  4. 4 Michele

    Tom

    But I did :(

  5. 5 Billy The Blogging Poet

    So you want me to give you the whole cow when you came to borrow a cup of cream?

    RSS is supposed to INCREASE traffic to a site, not give the traffic away. If a blog is usually interesting, fun, or informative then readers will come, but if they don’t like what they read then why bother putting the entire post in an RSS feed?

  6. 6 Tom Raftery

    Billy, that’s fine and is entirely your decision. Others, however, will give me full feeds and I will subscribe to their feeds, not yours – that’s my choice.

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