Many have writtten about the need to publish full text feeds. Most from the perspective of the reader who is not likely going to be bothered with excerpts in their reader. I subscribe to 74 feeds but only one of them requires me to click through (Good Morning Silicon Valley if you must know, I just love their headlines) so I guess this puts me in the "full text please" camp. Anything that requires extra action on the part of the reader is adding friction and is going to lose out to others that provide you what you need without any extra clicking around.
Today Richard MacManus brought up another compelling argument for full text feeds that I had previously overlooked.
. . . I’ve been trying to find a way to say for a while, it may mean that the future of blogs isn’t so much people subscribing to full text feeds of individual blogs. But people subscribing to amalgamated feeds of more than one blog, or mixed-author ‘on the fly’ feeds that have a limited shelf life. In that scenario of course, the full-text feed becomes an integral part of the system. Because if you don’t publish your full content in your feed, you will miss out on all the remix and topic-focused feed action.
I’ve lately been playing around with systems that take notice of what you read and try and learn something about you based on what you subscribe and read. Thinking this through, the more full text information you can give such a system, the more information it’ll have to work with.
In the world of mashups, you don’t want to show up to a mix tape party with a cd of 30 second samples.
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