RSS Feed to go the Full Monty?
And no I do not mean to strip all the way … not exactly. It has more to do with RSS being truly and exactly copy of a post on the blog. There has been a long and on-going debate whether it was better to have the full text or not. I am of the opinion that most of the times the feeds should contain full text of the post.There are times though when a summary or even a paragraph or two would be better. For one if the original post was really long. Then again things have happened that seemed to have over taken this debate. The question now is would it better to enable comments in the RSS reader. Would you? It is already happening. For example there is Shyftr.
Louis Gray tackled this issue in the post, Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?
There are advantages, disadvantages and concerns about allowing comments within the RSS feed. One advantage would be it might increase the pull or traction of the blog. However, there are also concerns like content theft. A number of bloggers were concerned about generating content for others.
Now let me ask this question or questions:
1. As reader would you want to be able comment on the RSS Reader?
2. As a blogger you want your reader or punter to be able to comment on the RSS feed?
My opinion’s been made fairly clear here already. I believe you should be able to make comments in RSS, and as a blogger, I would embrace it.
The problem with fractured commenting is that it can ruin a good conversation. Twelve people commenting to one item is a pretty good dialog. Twelve people commenting at a dozen places is just a bunch of people talking to themselves.
Sites such as shyftr need to ask themselves what they are doing for the bloggers whose content they are using. We should be in the business of rewarding original content on the Web, not trying to make money or take audience from it.
Of course, this is a decision that should be left to the individual blogger, but it seems clear to me that bloggers do have the right to say no. That could pose a big problem for these new companies…