Improving the Blog: Full-Text vs Summary Syndication

Here at Gadget Wisdom we are testing distributing full text of our posts over RSS. This will be available to you in your feed reader.

Every so often, we spend some time doing a redesign of sites to see if they can be any better. None of the things we are putting in are revolutionary. What we really want out of all of them is increased participation in our sites. Over the 5 years we’ve been blogging, we’ve always wanted to produce more interaction with readers. We enjoy the topics we write about.

In researching improvements, there were a lot of points for and against full-text feeds. The biggest risk is that others would scrape our content and place it on other sites. To that end, we’ve added a link to our site at the bottom of every feed. We may take more measures. We, like most, want to protect what we’ve written from being used by others without attribution.

To those of you who use feed readers, we hope you will enjoy the improvement. You can add it to your favorite feed reader and read without interruption. We know how much people hate truncated content.

This also allowed us to release Gadget Wisdom to Google Currents. You can subscribe here(http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAow4NsZ/gadget_wisdom). We’ll see how that works as well.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we might protect ourselves from being scraped by other sites, and how we might improve your experience here at the Weneca Media Group collection of sites. There is more to come.