Total Article Blog

Not so much “full text” focused but generally worth reading as to the benefits of all RSS to content producers. Here is the clickz.com article via Pheedo.com’s blog (as a side note, anyone’s opinions on Pheedo.com would be appreciated, I’ve used their blogsnob ads for other sites and it seems to generate almost no traffic).

Key positives for RSS:

Drive traffic to your content. For media entities, this can be important if content lives behind a firewall and isn’t spidered by search engines. Be sure to promote your top stories on the relevant pages to encourage further reading, as visitors don’t entered your site through the home page.

Increase e-commerce. Target product information feeds to meet customer needs and interests. As with e-mail marketing, where product is pushed to customers, ensure presentation, promotions, and timing are relevant. Leverage existing offerings on your site, and you may not need additional creative development. A regular content schedule is important. To keep RSS users and attract new ones, develop special RSS-only promotions.

Extend advertising and branding. Readers perusing your headlines on a regular basis helps keep your brand top of mind. Further, branding can be incorporated in the way feeds are written. From an ad perspective, you can wrap branding into an RSS reader or buy advertising on RSS feeds using a service such as Pheedo. If your advertising, whether video, audio, or static, is engaging, consider using links to encourage users to view and interact with it.

Distribute corporate communications, press releases, and investor relations content. Keep a broader constituent base informed. When disseminating corporate information via RSS, bear in mind the user decided to get your content, and your feed is public information. Make feeds short and informative to ensure recipients read them. Remember, you may not have control over the information environment in which your content is consumed.

My key takeaways continue to be that it expands your audience, and publishers should make their content available in as many forms as possible so that the user can decide how they want it. I’m simple like that.

The Big Picture is the best site on the web when it comes to following the larger themes of the financial markets. Barry Ritholtz takes on the “big picture” from a myriad of angles and his perspective is always fresh, rather than the regurgitated hedged positions which constitute most market commentary. It helps that Barry’s interests are diverse; his website is not just a one note market commentary. Just a click off the main page is a more relaxed and personal blog, and he frequently lets his love for movies and music flow into his macro posts.

It also helps that he is a veteran investment professional, a current money manager and a regular in the financial media with his theStreet.com column called the Apprenticed Investor and as as a regular guest on such shows as MSNBC’s Power Lunch and Kudlow & Company. He is the single best one-stop shop for the 20,000k foot view of the market.

Now the bad news. His feed only has excerpted text.

The Big Picture feed was part of my top 5, the feeds which I check first and which I always read as soon as new updates arrive. But it’s tough when the feeds aren’t full text; I just can’t read it as quickly, and over time, these low (but existant) barriers forced it slide down my list, until I find myself checking it, but only when I knew I had time, and not neccessarily every day. Barry’s site is just too good to axe altogether. So, for now, it’s found its steady-state in my rotation. I emailed him back in early June ane he said he’d look into full text, but when I followed up in late June I got no reply. With the new site behind me, I think I’ll be sucessful this time.

Reasons: I see no reason for him not to have full text feeds.

• He doesn’t advertise, so that’s one potential hang-up circumvented right out of the gate.
• He’s internet savvy and wise enough to see the benefits of full text.
• He’s benevolent; he loves the masses.
• He seems more interested in sharing information than anything else (so hopefully he’ll hear my plea).
• The revolution has to start somewhere.

Barry, free the Big Picture, make its feed full text rss!

My email sent in conjunction with this post:

Barry-

Just following up from an old email. Hopefully you can make your site’s feed full text rss when you have the time. I have actually started http://www.fulltextrss.com/ for the very sake of advocating that websites and blogs decide to use and continue to use Full Text RSS feeds.

You are the first person I’m going after, since you’re the best non-full text site which I read. My strategy is to start at the top and work my way down. Let me know if you are against full text for some reason and possibly I can help you see the light. Thank you for your time.

Regards,
Will Holt

James Hamilton, I’m coming after you next.

The genesis of this site was that I had a ton of sites in my newsgator account and I wanted to be able to read them as quickly as possible. Newmark’s Door was the first site which I emailed. The author is a professor of economics who combines a steady flow of econ-related topical posts with a hodge podge of quick links to interesting articles about almost anything. Also impressive is that his almost his whole family is blogging at a high level, with both his wife and his daughter’s blogs being of quality, if with different focuses than Newmark’s Door.

I loved his site but, in May or so, his feed became an excerpted feed, where before it had been full text. I began getting frustrated, especially when some of his shorter posts would end up with only a couple more words when you clicked through. Totally inefficient. So I shot him an email.

Is there any reason you have only a summary in your RSS feed? I know you used to have a full feed. I like your site but I’m pruning my aggregator of links to sites that dont have a full feed, as the additional 30 seconds it takes to go to each journal entry may seem short, but when one subcribe sto 100 different feeds, it starts adding up into dozens of minutes of wasted time a day. I didn’t know if I was just missing the full text feed for your site or not.

Let me know and keep up the good work,
Will

His response was prompt.

O.K., I’ve changed the configuration of my RSS feed to what Typepad claims is a full feed. Give it a little while to take effect. If you don’t have a full feed tomorrow, please let me know.

Thanks for your kind words and thanks for reading my blog.

Craig

It took only a couple minutes for all involved and it showed the responsiveness and the accountability inherent to the internet, things I appreciate more than any of the 50 things in this post by Craig. He didn’t have to switch and , who knows, maybe in the future he will decide that excerpted feeds are better for him. But he has saved me a lot of time and kept a loyal reader. Newmark’s Door was the first site of our “Full Text Rss” revolution.

This post is late, I’ll come up with a good excuse later.  Will Holt nags like a stereotypical housewife, by the way.

Several weeks ago, I stumbled across a post by the $15k AdWords guy discussing the reasoning behind crippled RSS feeds.  The post was spurred by a comment made on the Marketing Sherpa site:

#1. Don’t give it all away

Whether you’re promoting in a third-party RSS feed or using a feed yourself to get content from your site to users, the rules should be the same: entice them just enough to lure them to your site.

If your entire goal is to get people simply to read your feed, then fill it up with as much copy as you want, Lawrence says. But if you’re interested in actually driving traffic to your site, give just enough content to draw them further in.

This sums up the conventional wisdom.  For people really interested in building site traffic, RSS should only serve as an advertisement would.  RSS should be used like the modern day version of the crusty old system for sending email notifications about new content.  If you give away all your content, people won’t come to your site.  Meh.

Let’s try a new theory.  For people interested in building site traffic, RSS should serve as a means for getting people to read the site when they otherwise wouldn’t.  RSS should have include as much content as possible specifically for those people that would never visit a site otherwise, because getting content out in front of people will build site traffic.  Yay!

Build site traffic, you say?  Yes, and here’s why.  There are a number of bleeding edge RSS readers who have subscriptions to several hundred feeds.  The number is small, but like any other industry, they’re the influencers.  Influencers are worth reaching.  They’ll pass interesting content around to their friends, post about it on their blogs, and write it on scraps of paper that are sent out to sea in bottles.  The thing is, chances of getting their attention are low without exceptionally good content.  Even worse, if they have to jump through hoops to actually see the content, chances are they never will.

A buddy of mine falls into this group of influencers.  He’ll spastically subscribe to RSS feeds when he sees content he likes (regardless of whether he’s ever heard of the site before).  However, if he comes back to the feed in his aggregator, sees that it’s blurbs only, and doesn’t really remember what good it is, he nukes it.  Esoteric site A just lost an influencer.

If you think I’m smoking crack, and don’t subscribe to the above theory, try this angle on for size.  RSS feeds will soon be first class content distribution channels.  Sites will be forced to ask themselves why they’re trying to so hard to attract users to an outmoded http:// location.  What real advantage does a visit to a website have over a visit in an RSS reader?  Infoworld is already delivering full fledged ads in some of their feeds.  Every time I load up an Infoworld post (a site I’d never visit otherwise), they get an ad view.

There’s quite a bit more ground to cover, including the whole fear of copyright abuse using full text RSS feeds.  I’m a copyright fiend, so I guarantee it’s coming at some point.