Give me the whole article!

I love RSS feeds. I subscribe to just over 100 feeds. But I've had it with one particular type of feed... the partial feed. Let me explain. In feed readers, depending on how the author's site is set up, you can get the full feed (i.e., the full article or blog entry) or your can get the partial feed (i.e., the summarized article or blog entry). (And then there are those really annoying ones that have only headlines and nothing else.) There are valid reasons to go with or avoid either one. But personally, I don't get the idea of partial feeds. Some will argue that it's to increase click-through rates to the originating site. But I don't buy it. Especially when Rick Klau, VP of Publishing Services at Feedburner has said it's not necessarily true. The other argument is that scraper sites will pick up your feed, republish your content as their own and you could potentially get penalized by search engines for duplicate content. I really don't know how often this happen or how much trouble this can really cause. I've read that it can become a real pain, but without personal experience or more information, I can't say one way or the other (I may have to follow up on this after some more research). It may just boil down to personal preference, like so many things on the Web. For me, more often than not, I'm reading my news on my iPhone. And prior to the iPhone, I was reading most of my news on my BlackBerry. While clicking through from a summarized feed to the website with the full article is somewhat trivial (especially using NetNewsWire on the iPhone), it's just kind of annoying. It's even more annoying when the article turns out to not be as interesting as I had thought. And worse yet when I want to leave a comment and I have to jump through hoops to do so, but that's another story. I don't know about you, but for me, I think I'll be avoiding and unsubscribing from feeds that contain only summaries from now on. I figure if the blog is good enough and insists on summaries, well then I'll probably stick with it. But for the most part, it's bye-bye to those other feeds. In case you want to hear some other opinions and such, here are a few links I ran across on the topic: - Full Vs. Partial RSS Feeds - Rick's Ruminations: Full Feeds - Partial Versus Full RSS Feeds at Monday by Noon - Full posts versus summary in your RSS feeds - RSS: Full Content or Summaries? - Partial vs full feeds