Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2005, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Every few months in the mid-2000s, the blogging world would relitigate the same fight. Full feeds or partial feeds? Give readers everything in the RSS reader, or make them click through to your site? It was the kind of debate that generated strong opinions and very little resolution — because both sides were actually right, just about different things.
To understand why it mattered, you need to remember what RSS was in 2005. Feed readers like Bloglines and NetNewsWire had become the primary way serious readers followed blogs. Rather than visiting dozens of sites each morning, you subscribed to their feeds and read everything in one place — a single inbox for the entire blogosphere. For a certain kind of heavy reader, this was transformative. Some people tracked hundreds of blogs at once, processing thousands of posts a week.
Into that world walked Robert Scoble. At the time, Scoble was arguably the most widely read blogger in tech. He worked at Microsoft as a “technical evangelist” — effectively the company’s public-facing blogger — and his site, Scobleizer, had a following that most media outlets would have envied. When Scoble said something about how the web should work, people paid attention. Developers, journalists, and bloggers all read him. His opinions had weight.
In late 2005, he used that weight to take a side. Scoble declared something close to a subscription purge against any blogger who didn’t offer full feeds — the complete text of every post delivered directly to the reader, no click-through required. He was too busy to deal with partial feeds, he said. The extra step wasted his time.
This was Duncan Riley’s previous attack on full feeds made flesh — a voice throwing his weight behind one side of a debate that had already cycled through at least once before. And it drew exactly the kind of pushback you’d expect.
Two workflows, two legitimate arguments
The case Scoble made was about friction. A full feed meant you could read, scan, and evaluate an entire post without leaving your reader. For someone processing hundreds of posts a day, that was meaningful. Every click-through added latency — the page had to load, the layout had to render, and then you had to navigate back. Multiply that by dozens of posts and you’d burned a significant chunk of your morning.
The counter-argument, made by voices including John Roberts and echoed by the Blog Herald at the time, was just as grounded in real workflow. A partial feed with a decent summary gave you enough to decide whether a post merited your full attention. You could move quickly through a large subscription list, flagging posts to open in background tabs and return to later. The click-through wasn’t a tax — it was a filtering mechanism.
Dave Winer, long considered the godfather of RSS itself, landed somewhere sensible in the middle: a reasonable short summary, enough to understand what a post was actually about, was what he preferred. Neither extreme served readers as well as a well-crafted excerpt.
What’s notable in hindsight is how personal each position was. Both were describing real, functional systems that worked for the person using them. The problem was assuming your workflow was universal.
The visit mattered more than either side admitted
Underneath the UX argument was a quieter, more important one about what a site visit actually meant.
When a reader clicked through from a partial feed, they weren’t just generating a pageview. They were signaling engagement in a way the blogger could see and respond to. Traffic stats, BlogAds metrics, CPC ad clicks, comment threads — all of it depended on someone actually arriving at the page. A reader who consumed your entire post inside their feed reader and moved on left no trace. No pageview. No comment. No ad impression. Just a statistic in a feed subscriber count that most advertisers didn’t know how to value anyway.
This wasn’t a trivial concern. For bloggers trying to build income — even modest income — in 2005, the click-through was the unit that mattered. Full feeds, however convenient for the reader, made that invisible.
Scoble’s position was essentially: your monetization problem isn’t my problem. And from a pure reader experience standpoint, he wasn’t wrong. But he was asking bloggers to absorb a real cost in the name of his convenience, which is a harder sell when you’re the one trying to pay your hosting bill.
What neither side was quite ready to say
The full vs partial feed debate was really a proxy argument about two different visions of what blogging was for.
Scoble’s vision was about information flow. RSS was a river. Content should move as frictionlessly as possible from writer to reader. Any barrier — even a page load — was a problem to be engineered away.
The partial feed camp’s vision was about relationship and community. Visiting someone’s blog wasn’t just content consumption. It was participation. Comments, contextual ads, the design sensibility of the site — these things were part of the experience. Stripping all of that down to plain text in a reader was efficient, but it was also reductive.
Neither framing aged perfectly. The information-flow vision led, eventually, to social media feeds that optimized so aggressively for frictionless consumption that they hollowed out the very idea of a site visit. The community vision sometimes shaded into a possessiveness about traffic that put blogger interests above reader experience.
The lesson for content distribution today
RSS never resolved this debate. It mostly became irrelevant to it — displaced by Twitter, then Facebook, then algorithmic recommendation engines that made the full-vs-partial question seem quaint. Today, most bloggers distribute through email newsletters where full content is the norm, or through social snippets that are effectively partial feeds whether they intend them to be or not.
But the underlying tension is identical to questions creators face right now. Do you publish natively on LinkedIn or drive traffic to your own site? Do you put your best content in a free newsletter or gate it behind a paid tier? Do you post full videos on YouTube or use them as teasers for a membership platform?
Every one of those choices involves the same trade-off: reader convenience versus creator visibility. Frictionless consumption versus measurable engagement.
The bloggers who navigated the RSS era best weren’t the ones who picked the right side of the feeds argument. They were the ones who understood their actual audience — who those readers were, how they consumed content, and what would make them come back. Format was always secondary to relationship.
That’s still true. It’s probably always been true. The distribution technology changes every few years. The question underneath it doesn’t.
