Not so very long ago, in a bookstore café not too far away, a knitting peep commented that she wasn't reading my full blog regularly because she reads her blogs at work through Bloglines and the office monitors the outclicks. If she reads the whole post in Bloglines, no outclick, no change of URL. She wished she could read the full post in Bloglines instead of the short version.
Being the accommodating peep that I am, I switched. She being the nice peep that she is, thanked me for it. And they all blogged happily ever after, right? Well, no, not exactly. Therein lies the quandary.
Pros of Full Feed:
- Fewer clicks for reader/ability to circumvent some URL tracking
- Decreased hit counts on blog - since the reader isn't actually visiting the blog
- Decreased comments on blog - see previous bullet
- Loss of referral/entry page/exit page/outclick/location information - again, see first bullet
- Pop ups do not work causing a loss of interactive behavior
- Aggregators do not preserve formatting
- Some unscrupulous aggregator services are violating blog authors' intellectual property by scraping content and splogging it
-- Thanks go to Chris for the heads up on this one.
Posts
17 yarns:
I knew there was more than one reason to not show a full post on Bloglines. Thanks for the heads up!
You're very welcome - and thank YOU for the nice illustration of pros and cons.
Hmm. I hadn't thought about the stat stuff. I just automatically click on [your] blogname from Bloglines to get the whole post.. there are a couple of others that I do that with, too.
So, for your blog, I'm just using Bloglines to tell me when there's a new post.
Oh... and you're definitely worth that extra click, donchaknow ;-)
Very interesting!! I hadn't thought about those cons before. Thanks for a provocative post.
I too use bloglines to know when you have posted something new.
I have no idea what you just said but I'm sure it was said very well. Are there any pretty yarn pictures I could look at?
More Vicodin for the lady on the couch.
We can't even go to bloglines from work - or any website that has the word "blog" on it/in the title of it. I just save 'em until I get home!
The short version on bloglines is best, all things considered.
That Rudolph, he is one pretty red though!
I was wondering if you could cue me in on how to change my feed for bloglines? Pretty please?
I'd like some info on shortening my changing my feed for Bloglines, too. I have a blog through Typepad and have it set to show only an excerpt but that doesn't seem to work. Am I missing something??
Thanks for 'cons' list. It was really well put.
I switched to the short version for that very reason a few months ago. Not that I get scads of readers or anything, but I like to think I have control over the content that I put out there. Sadly, I can't read many blogs from my school computer due to the filters. But, I probably should be teaching something anyway...
unfortunately, using the short feed doesn't help much with the the aggregator and splogging.
I hate short feeds as a reader (ie, my audience), so I stick with the long. I don't care much about referral/outclick/etc information for my blog (this would be an entirely different story if it were a professional site and not a personal site).
If I am reading blogs quickly I will skip over the non-full feeds that don't draw me in in those meager 3 lines.
I will read/skim the full feeds and click over to them to leave comments when applicable. But if I don't have anything more than three lines to go on... then you have to say something really brilliant/interesting in those initial three lines to get me to open it up in a new tab. ;)
hm.... I don't even know which one I chose, or whatever
Good discussion of the pros and cons. I mostly use Bloglines to tell me when there is a new post. It's not often that I read the whole post in Bloglines when they're available. I'm also a statistics whore. :) I love seeing how many people are visiting, where they are coming from, what they are searching on, etc. I don't do anything with it, I just like to see it.
I am with Jess--I like to read the entire story in bloglines and sometimes if I have to click outside to finish reading the story it kind of turns me off and I don't click out. I know that I am not a super busy gal but I only have about 30 minutes to read blogs and I don't want to keep opening up 1000 different windows. I do understand the cons though but I still enjoy reading everything from bloglines.
It was nice of you to change. That is sweet. I haven't figured out how people tell when they've been searched and found and how many peope hit their site, etc....
I'm a brazen brat and just go read when I can at work. Unfortunately, I have less time than ever at work to read these days. There's a pro and con to that in itself. Thanks for the info!
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