Without really wanting to open this whole can of worms with regard to whether small publishers should syndicate summary content of their articles or the full content of the articles, it looks like it’s unavoidable.
Currently, I syndicate only a summary of any given article. There are a variety of reasons for doing this, but the two main ones are attention and eventual business model.
Attention in that I’d really like to drive you to my website where I have a shot at either selling you something or getting you to hire me to do something.
Eventual business model in that I firmly believe that eventually someone will come up with a sustainable business model for micropublishing and I’m pretty sure it will involve RSS or some variant.
If I configure my feeds to syndicate the full content of the articles, then I don’t get either of the things that, right now at least, matter the most to me.
On the other hand, there are drawbacks to syndicating only summaries of articles: you can’t tell how long a given piece is; you have to exert yourself by expending the energy to initiate an extra click to get to the content; the content is less portable (if you’re offline you can’t read content that’s not on your local computer); and so on.
To my mind there are additional positives to syndicating only summaries as well: it’s easier to scan; it forces me to not bury my lede (or at least forces me to concoct a usable summary); it’s a more efficient use of bandwidth (you only click on the articles that interest you); and so on.
A couple days ago, Paul Boutin proposed some new tags for an imaginary RSS 3.0: byline, publication, wordcount, and section. Boutin says these are crucial for big publishing’s acceptance of RSS syndication; I think they’re crucial for micropublishing as well. “As metadata, they would help us decide rather or not an item in a feed is worth looking at, based on important traits,” writes Boutin. Such an implementation would go a long way to keeping the RSS fire stoked. It seems unlikely that big publications are going to syndicate the full content of their articles, and Boutin’s suggested tags would help make RSS aggregators and desktop readers more usable.
ExpressionEngine allows me to control pretty much every aspect of RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom feeds. By specification, RSS 1.0 only includes the summary of each article anyway, so maybe the best approach is to use RSS 1.0 for summaries and RSS 2.0 and Atom (or the merged hybrid, if that happens) for full content.
Since ExpressionEngine allows me to define content access restrictions based on template, I could easily make the full-content syndication feeds accessible by subscription only. Right now that’s not viable, but it might be in the future. Hmm… could be the makings of a sustainable business model for micropublications.
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