If you’re worried about scrapers, there are many recourses. Lorelle on WordPress posted last year about whatto do when someone steals your content. As she puts, it if you put content online, it’s a certainty that at some point it will be stolen. Remember that partial RSS feeds only protect you from the laziest of scrapers. Scrapers don’t just attack your site through your RSS feed; scrapers can steal content from your site itself or even search engine results pages. The price of publishing–online or offline–may be eternal vigilance against plagiarism.

Let me reiterate what I said in my post: The CEO of FeedBurner (the service that has “burned” millions of blog feeds to help people subscribe) says that they have seen NO increase in click-thoughs just because of partial feeds. If you want people to see the design of your site (and I think we all do), partial feeds won’t “force” them to click through.

Other advantages of full feeds include your visitors be able to read your content when your site is down. I had this happen to one of the blogs I read this week; I would not have taken the time to go back and track down the post again if it had only been a summary.

I subscribe to a few partial feed blogs and they annoy me pretty much every time they come up in my feed reader. Kind of a “Why am I subscribed to this again?” reaction. Erika is far more generous with her click-throughs than am I.

Bitacle got me too, and after that I did partial feeds. But I started blogging to get read, and full feeds are the way I accomplish that.

But I have a high risk-tolerance and not everyone is the same way…

Thanks for the pet food link. My kitties are on Hill’s CD — and Hills MD was recalled…. Scary stuff! It’s so sad that people are losing pets from this.