I originally used summaries on RSS feeds too but as anon says, it’s not popular for those using newsreaders (who make up a sizeable proportion of the blog readership community).

What I have been doing until a few days ago is to use the “copyright” WordPress add-in which adds the appropriate little copyright message to all the RSS feeds. The problem with that is that what comes up on google news searches is the proper title for the post but the content is simply the copyright message which is fair to middling annoying and loses a LOT of readers.

Better perhaps is to use the “signature” add-in which is where my little copyright message lives at the moment. This has the side-effect of enabling me to include a mini-image in said signature and thereby count all the people reading the blog, which would be lost in the normal stats. Well, I’m assuming that this will work as I’ve not been running with the signature add-in enabled for long enough yet.

These don’t actually stop the growing number of sites which simply scrape off blog postings and create mini-sites full of it. For instance, my latest posting on Ryanair was picked up almost immediately by “Consumer News”, although on in extract form. However, whilst it ain’t gonna stop the illegit sites ripping off content, full-text plus copyright message does give you some comeback on the similarly growing number of legit scraper-type sites.

Down the road a little way is adsense for blogs but it’s just being trialled at the moment. When that hits the streets, I think our dilemma will be solved and, with a following wind, perhaps more of us bloggers will be able to devote more time to the writing with a reasonable return for our efforts.

If you are asking if I can change it so that full articles are shown in the feed, instead of summaries, I would not be inclined to do that because unfortunately there are people in the world who misuse it – by including the full feed not just in a personal newsreader but in their own public website as their own material. So visitors surfing the internet are as likely to find the other site, with my musings, as they are to find my own site.

This for me is a bad thing! If that isn’t what you are asking just let me know

Cheers