Australian blogger Lee Nutter has added an interesting twist to the full vs. partial feed debate. He has created an online petition against partial RSS feeds.

Though the petition isn’t targeted at any one site, it aims to encourage Webmasters and bloggers to switch their feeds to full to facilitate easier reading and subscription.

As of this writing, the petition has approximately 150 signatories and is growing steadily. Many of the signatories complain that partial feeds go against the “principle of feeds”, many more claim that they are significantly less likely to subscribe to a partial feed than a full one.

In an email conversation with Nutter, he said that he is “absolutely against” content theft and RSS scraping but pointed out that one would not “intentionally build an awful looking web page just so
someone doesn’t steal your layout”.

Nutter goes on to say that bloggers “should be writing for your honest readers”.He also highlights the point that, in many cases, people are more likely to visit a site regularly and participate in sites with full feeds than if the site only provides partial feeds due to higher subscription rates.

Though, in my previous writing on the subject, I agreed with most of Nutter’s viewpoints, I still feel that this is an individual decision that must be made based upon what is right for a particular site.

Still, it is important to consider that the backlash against partial RSS feeds, at least in some corners, may be even stronger than anticipated.

Tags: Content Theft, Copyright, Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, Plagiarism, RSS, Scraping

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