Last week, I spent a decent bit of time working on a side project of mine, a podcast homepage that also features the latest excerpts from campus news sources. As I worked to implement an accessible yet intellectual property-respecting aggregation page, I came across a surprising find: not a single one of my university news sources’ RSS feeds provides the full feed; rather, each only syndicates the excerpt of each article.
Although managing the excerpts was more convenient for me in the long run, the experience was enough to encourage me to bring up an oft-discussed issue and apply it to higher education: if you’re not syndicating your full content, you ought to start.
Why syndicate the full article?
One of the seminal posts on Full vs. Partial syndication, directly from the Official FeedBurner Weblog, contains in a quote why you want to share as much information as possible with your readers (emphasis added):
“…the primary justification often given for partial feeds – that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher’s site – is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.”
That last sentence there is key. FeedBurner is the premiere RSS syndication enabler online, and if their wealth of data fails to find evidence of a benefit to partial feeds, it’s highly unlikely this advantage exists. (FeedBurner manages over 1,800,000 feeds.)
But what about higher education?
For colleges and universities, full feed syndication might be even more critical. As most campus news writers are neophytes, getting into the trade or even perhaps seeking to prepare themselves for a future in media, it’s important that their content gets out there, even if it means a news scraping site will duplicate that content every once in a while or an article will be copied without attribution. For entry-level newswriters, the benefits of a wider reach far, far outweigh the consequences of content theft, especially when the incentives of duplicating a specific-to-campus article are quite low.
Unless you only want students, faculty, and staff to read your excerpts, you might want to start sharing more. Plus, there are still plenty of ways to protect your material.
Change my mind!
If you’re involved with campus or higher education news and syndicate excerpts, why? Just for safety’s sake, or did a specific incident or two encourage the decision? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
(And even if you syndicate excerpts, at least you’re using RSS. I can’t even find a feed on the official William & Mary News Page.)
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