Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Every few months in the mid-2000s, the blogging world would repeat the same struggle. Full or partial tapes? Give readers everything in an RSS reader or force them to click through to your site? It was the kind of debate that produced strong opinions and little resolution—because both sides were actually right about different things.
To understand why this is important, it’s important to remember what RSS was in 2005. Feed readers like Bloglines and NetNewsWire have been the main way for serious readers to follow blogs. Instead of visiting dozens of sites every morning, you subscribe to their feeds and read everything in one place – a single inbox for the entire blogosphere. For a certain heavy reader, it was transformative. Some people were following hundreds of blogs at once, processing thousands of posts a week.
He went to the world Robert Scoble. At the time, Scoble was the most-read tech blogger. 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 envy. When Scoble said something about how the internet worked, people paid attention. Developers, journalists and bloggers read it. His thoughts were heavy.
In late 2005, he used this weight to switch sides. Scoble announced something close to an unsubscribe against any blogger who didn’t provide a full feed — the full text of each post delivered directly to the reader, no clicks required. She said she was too busy to be concerned with nutrition in part. The extra step wasted his time.
It was Duncan Riley previous attack on full feeds prepared meat – a voice that has thrown its weight behind one side of a previously passed argument at least once. And it pulled exactly the kind of push you’d expect.
Two workflows, two legal arguments
The case Scoble made was about friction. A full feed meant you could read, scan, and rate your entire post without leaving the reader. For someone processing hundreds of posts a day, this made sense. Each click added latency – you had to load the page, render the layout, and then come back. Multiply that by a dozen posts and you’ve burned a significant portion of your morning.
The counterargument, made by voices including John Roberts and voiced by the Blog Herald at the time, was also based on real business process. A partial tape with a decent summary gave you enough to decide whether the post deserves your full attention. You can quickly scroll through a large list of subscriptions by bookmarking posts to open in background tabs and return to later. Clicking wasn’t a tax – it was a filtering mechanism.
Dave Winer, long considered the godfather of RSS, struck a smart middle ground: a summary that was reasonable enough to tell what a post was actually about was what he preferred. Neither catered to extreme readers, nor was it a well-crafted piece.
What’s striking in retrospect is how individual each position is. Both described real, functional systems that worked for the person using them. The problem was assuming your workflow was universal.
The trip was more important than either side admitted
Beneath the UX argument was a quieter, more important debate about what a site visit actually means.
When a reader clicks through a partial feed, they don’t just create a page view. They tagged in a way that the blogger could see and respond. Traffic statistics, BlogAds metrics, CPC ad clicks, comment threads – all of this really depended on who came to the page. A reader that consumes your entire post in its feed reader and continues leaves no trace. No page views. No comments. No advertising impression. Statistics on just one feed subscriber show that most advertisers don’t know how to rate anyway.
This was not an insignificant concern. In 2005, for bloggers trying to make an income—even a modest one—clicks were the only thing that mattered. Complete tapes, however convenient for the reader, made it invisible.
Scoble’s position was essentially this: your problem of making money is not my problem. And in terms of pure reader experience, he wasn’t wrong. But he was asking bloggers to put up a real cost for his convenience, which is a tougher sell when you’re the one trying to pay the hosting bill.
Neither side was quite ready to say
The full and partial feed discussion was really a proxy argument about two different views of what a blog is for.
Scoble’s vision was about the flow of information. RSS was a river. Content should flow from writer to reader as frictionlessly as possible. Any obstacle, even page loading, was a problem to overcome.
In part, the vision of the fodder camp was about relationships and community. Visiting someone’s blog wasn’t just consuming content. It was participation. Comments, contextual ads, responsive site design — these were all part of the experience. Reducing all of this to plain text in the reader was efficient, but also reductive.
No frame is perfectly weathered. The vision of information flow eventually led to social media feeds that were so aggressively optimized for frictionless consumption that they rendered the idea of visiting a site meaningless. Community review sometimes turns into traffic ownership that puts blogger interests ahead of reader experience.
Lesson for content distribution today
The RSS never resolved this dispute. It mostly became irrelevant to him—replaced by Twitter, then Facebook, then algorithmic recommendation engines that made the full and partial question seem strange. Most bloggers today distribute via email newsletters, where full content is the norm, or through social snippets, which are effectively partial feeds whether they intend to or not.
But the underlying tension is the same as the questions creators face now. Are you posting locally on LinkedIn or driving traffic to your site? Do you put your best content in a free newsletter or put it behind a paid tier? Do you post full videos on YouTube or use them as teasers for your membership platform?
Each of these options involves the same trade-off: reader convenience and creator visibility. Frictionless consumption and measurable connectivity.
The bloggers who best navigated the RSS era weren’t the ones on the right side of the feeds argument. They were the ones who understood their true audience – who those readers were, how they consumed content, and what would bring them back. Format was always secondary to relationships.
This is still true. It has probably always been true. Distribution technology changes every few years. That’s not the question at the bottom of it.
