On the other hand, I suspect most partial-feeders are simply trying to drive more traffic to their site. I will always offer full feeds of my sites.

(p.s. Found my way here via PB at onfocus — I’ll be adding this to my feeds. Great site!)

I was, of course, naïve to ’sign’ the petition without thinking through the issue much further, but my irritation was really with very short truncation of feeds which in every case require the reader to click through just to understand what the post is about. You can’t always tell from the title and the first couple of lines, especially if the first couple of lines are a quote from another site, stripped of any ‘blockquote’ styling.

Ideally, perhaps, different versions of the feed could be automatically created so that a reader has more choice when subscribing. There are probably quite obvious ways of doing this automatically; I just haven’t investigated it fully enough.

Some very popular/influential bloggers (e.g. Jason Kottke) do primarily blog links to the original sites, with short/pithy commentary, as Stephen mentions, and the growth of automatically generated del.icio.us linkblogs (with commentary) as sidebars (e.g. here) shows that this technique may be growing again.

One of my own feeds, for example, http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.xml will at first glance resemble a partial feed.

On closer examination, my feed turns out to be linking to longer posts from other sites. This sort of blog – sometimes called a link blog or a summary blog – is actually older in pedigree than the more modern blog, and in fact more resembles the original use of RSS – to provide content for what are now called webtops.

You couldn’t fit a whole article on a webtop, and that would really defeat the purpose. The whole idea of a summary (as in ‘Rich Site Summary’) is to provide enough info to make a choice.

Now of course there are commercial sites that use summaries simply to drive traffic. They also use links to drive traffic – that doesn’t make links bad. What needs to be examined is not the practice but the intent. If the intent is to provide a certain type of service – as mine is – then that should validate the technique.

Indeed, while I’ve pretty much reconciled myself to the current state of blogging, it has always bothered me that the RSS produced by blogging engines – every last one of them – produces ‘link’ elements that point back to the original site, instead of to some third party topic of discussion.

This virtually by itself ensured that blog publishing would be primarily egoist, which links to other sites something that would take extra effort and additional encoding, making it much less prevalent than would have otherwise been the case.

Imagine what the web would have looked had the default in blog posts and RSS feeds been as it was originally used, to point to someone else’s site. Imagine the conversations and linkages that would have produced.

Instead, the current system focuses on browsing RSS by source rather than by interest, with sites like my own the exception rather than the rule, and so the merging of content and ideas that could have happened has progressed at a much slower pace than it would have otherwise.

The modern equivalent would be to make “truncated” feeds give a title, categorization tags, and maybe a summary paragraph, *and size information*. You could then pull the full article or go to the site for the full article if it looked interesting. And you’d be able to do so for all of the comments too, individually.

What I’d like to see are feeds where the first paragraph of a post is a summary (if not the entire content) which also gives information on how long the post is. My favorite feeds, in say science, technology and politics, all have short summaries where I can easily decide in the reader whether I want to continue to the site to read the full post or not.

People who have explicit truncation of their feeds at points, often marked with phrases like “for more, read below the fold,” are probably the second ground you describe.

People who have automatic truncation of feeds (e.g., after 255 characters, add an elipses) are probably trying to drive traffic to their site.