Full-text feeds for all?

Scoble notes the eternal argument over syndicated online publishing: releasing an article's full-text or just an abstract in an RSS feed? Microsoft's chief blogger indicated he's cleaning out his subscription list, getting rid of feeds that don't use full-text, preferring to read entire articles. I agree...I'll stay within a single service and confine myself to working within my aggregator if I can help it and not be jumping all over the Web. But not everyone feels this way, following the thoughts of John Roberts.

(I'd fully recommend Safari's built-in RSS reader to that crowd. Although it's only for the Mac at the moment and forces you to read content on a site-by-site basis, if people want more granular control over the length of a feed's description, you can do this.)

Implementing an article's content verbatim was something I adopted early on when releasing Guam's first RSS feed (our news stories) in August 2004. I had been noticing the the truncated content thing didn't really work. I realize that displaying an article in its entirety sacrifices the chance that a user might click on a link, visit your site and be exposed to an ad, but for me, it's a worthwhile risk. We have other means of generating online revenue, so the subsidy is justified.

This liberal attitude might have something to do with the fact that my site's RSS traffic now exceeds its web traffic, but that's OK with me. People are still getting my content at the end of the day.