A monthly feature wherein I opinionate on other folks’ blogs.

Blogbats to… (things that are annoying me this month)

1. Blogs that tell everyone who is visiting and from where

Maybe if I lived in New York or London or anywhere but Immediately Identifiable Place No One Else in the Blogosphere lives, I wouldn’t mind. But sometimes I want to visit and lurk, and I feel I’ve been outed when I look at the sidebar and there I am.

Irrational, I know, but there it is.

2. Blogs that provide partial posts in feeds.

There are two arguments for this heinous practice:

1. If your blog is monetized (you want to make money off it), partial feeds get you more traffic.

As to this argument, I (and many other smarter people) say bupkis:

Survey after survey has shown that users overwhelmingly prefer full feeds. Some have even said that they refuse to subscribe to a short feed and, according to FeedBurner, who manages over 800,000 feeds, there is virtually no difference in the click-through rate for partial vs. full feeds.

2. Partial feeds make it more difficult for sploggers to steal your content.

Again, I (and the experts) say bupkis.

[T]he flaw in this logic is that it ignores how scrapers find the content and how they use it. Spammers do not locate articles and feeds to pull content from based upon length, but through an automated process that detects keywords and phrases. They also obtain RSS feeds through large RSS lists, much like email lists, that are passed around and sold among the black hat crowd.

Either way, little evaluation is given to the length of the feed when choosing where to scrape from.

Finally, truncating the feed may not limit the benefit many spammers get from the content. For one, since spammers are typically targeting keywords, truncating the feed might increase the keyword density and actually help them. Second, many spammers are voluntarily truncating the feeds they scrape to avoid duplicate content penalties and reduce their copyright liability.

So, hear my plea: give me all of your wonderful words in my reader!!!

Bouquets to… (things I love this month)

1. The Book Smugglers’: New Look. Awesome, easy to navigate, and they even got hot likenesses in their banner.

2. Romancing the Blog: How awesome is this blog? It’s one of the few author blogs I visit. Lots of different voices (readers, too), always saying something just interesting enough to keep my attention, and just long enough that I can actually finish the post in one sitting.

3. Ramblings on Romance For the tone — Kristie and Katiebabs keep it not just civil, but positively benevolent. I was reading Kristie’s “Best of 2008″ post and this sentence caught my eye,

There are a couple of books not on the above list that I think would be on it if I had had time to read them.

That sentence just typifies what I love about this blog. In another, more recent post, “Enough Already”, Kristie rants about a few things that have been bothering her. But even in the midst of this “rant”, she has the diplomacy to refer to JR Ward fans as “passionate”.  Even when they don’t like books, the gals at RoR have read them carefully, and will intersperse the negative comments with “sigh” or “sadly” rather than (as would be more my style) evil cackles and the search for ever more perjorative adjectives.