Recently, I've been quite intrigued by the many combinations of syndication, comment, and trackback options that bloggers use. As I surfed blogdom over the weekend, I began to keep track of how bloggers handle these three issues. Here is a summary of what I noted about syndication options.
Syndication
The question: Syndicate full posts or excerpts?
Seth Godin syndicates excerpts only. I use to like this and think it was the appropriate thing for all bloggers to do. However, as I add more feeds to my reader it gets really annoying to have to click on a link just to finish reading something. With catchy titles and carefully written descriptions, it will probably increase the chances that readers visit a blog in person ... but it also poses the risk of losing subscribers all together.
SEOmoz currently syndicates full posts as you can see in their feed. However, they recently asked for reader opinion on the subject. There are several good points made in the comments of their post which include splogs, mobile users, and users who read blogs exclusively from feeds. You may also notice several interesting suggestions about a paid subscription for syndication of full posts.
The notable number in the SEOmoz poll (to me) was that 27% of the voters said they would unsubcribe entirely if only summeries were syndicated. Hmmm ... of their ~5000 subscribers they would lose 1350? That seems rather significant. I'll be interested to see how SEOmoz handles this issue moving forward.
In a petition for syndication of excerpts, Danny Sullivan makes some interesting points primarily focused on copyright infringement. Danny definately has a strong opinion on the subject. His post was in response to Scoble's push for full post syndication. Scoble doesn't give much reason for his position other than that he "hates partial RSS and Atom subscription feeds." The number of people who have actually signed the Full Feeds Petition, 316, tells me there must not be too much passion for the position. Although I'm not aware of a similar petition for partial post syndication ... so how can one tell.
To be continued...