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.

English: This icon, known as the "feed ic...
Image via Wikipedia

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.

Xmarks and Bloglines will Live

Image representing Bloglines as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

Cross-Browser Bookmark and Password Syncing Service Xmarks will remain alive, it seems. The company is in the final stages of a sale to an as-yet unrevealed new owner who will keep the product alive. The new service will have a free and a premium component, and details will be forthcoming. So those of you who have already switched, you can come back.

Another product, Bloglines, a once-popular RSS aggregator, also slated to shutdown, has been sold to MerchantCircle. MerchantCircle provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns. The free service will remain, and new services will grow around the technology. The Clippings feature will be discontinued, but all other features will remain.