Jack Vinson, in a recent article expanding on my thoughts about automation, lamented, “Now if we could just convince Dale to provide a full web feed [in his RSS feeds] instead of the brief teasers.”
Someone else (I forget who) gave me a similar nudge many months ago. That makes two nudges in 17 months of blogging.
I publish only the excerpts in my RSS feeds because that helps me to “see” all of you, to know that you’re out there reading what I write. My web server logs what pages people visit. When your feed reader tells you that I’ve posted a new article and you click the link to read it, my web server notes that. Every day I look at the logs to learn what pages are being visited. I don’t know who is visiting, but I know how many people are visiting each page. I care about that little bit of information. It helps me to “make contact” with you, if only in a very small way.
If I were to publish the full articles in my RSS feeds, I would lose information in two ways. First, my RSS feed is a single page that includes my ten most recent blog articles. When your feed reader reads the feed, my web server logs a visit to that single page. That would give me little information about what entries you read.
Second, feed readers are automatic. They read my feed once per day, or several times per day, or once per hour. If I were to notice a jump in the number of visits to my RSS feed, that might mean that a whole bunch of people subscribed. Or it might mean that one of you configured your reader to check my feed once per hour instead of once per day. The visit count for my RSS feed tells me very little about how many real people are out there.
So my “excerpt only” feeds give me a teeny tiny bit of information. And that information is important to me, because it gives me a teeny tiny connection with all of you. I’d miss that if I didn’t have it.
I’m aware that by publishing only excerpts, I make things less convenient for those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed. And I care about that.
I try to make sure that the excerpts are not mere teasers. but are themselves informative. Most of the time I try put the main point into the excerpts, to help you decide whether you’re interested in reading the full article.
I revisit this issue from time to time, especially when someone nudges me. Consider me nudged.
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Some random thoughts:
* Are you more interested in people reading what you write, or knowing that people read what you write?
* I know people who don’t read content outside of their RSS aggregator - they’ll never read what you write
* I often read my aggregator on the train which, sadly, doesn’t yet have wireless net access.
* Nudges and demand are not necessarily correlated
(consider this another nudge