Prompted in part by the gentlest possible peer pressure, I’ve changed the ErosBlog RSS feed from partial to full-text. I don’t promise to keep it that way, but we’ll see how it goes.
I’ve long been aware that partial feeds are sub-optimal (to put it mildly) for many users. But, sadly, the scummy spam-blog RSS scraper bots that were, for a time, spamming the web with many uncredited and unlinked copies of every ErosBlog post, were sub-optimal (to put it mildly) for me. The partial feed was a highly unwelcome but, I thought, necessary response.
So, what changed?
Well, for one thing, over time the number of people who read (or at least pull) the ErosBlog feed has been growing faster than the number of people who read ErosBlog via the front page. In looking at my stats, I just noticed that this month the curves have finally crossed — the feed is now the single largest ErosBlog delivery route. Now, given that feedreaders often pull feeds that don’t get looked at, I doubt this means people actually reading ErosBlog via the feed are a majority; but they are obviously a large and still-growing constituency. It seems reasonable to accommodate them if possible.
What about the spam blogs? I’ll admit I’m still concerned about them. But it seems to my jaded eye that this whole blogging “thing” is starting to cool down a little bit, at least as a target for fast-buck artists. There are probably more blogs than ever, but in a declining economy with declining online advertising revenues, there seem to be fewer hopefuls out there who think that cheating and stealing and plagiarizing will make them fast dirty bucks in the blog space. My hope is that the worst of the quasi-criminals have moved on to running porntube sites full of stolen porn videos, or whatever the currently trendy get-rich-on-the-internet fad is.
Am I right? Time will tell. If a thousand scraper robots use the full feeds to plagiarize every blog post I make, I might be forced to go back to partials. But I hope it doesn’t turn out to be necessary.
