There's a great deal of debate going on right now in the PR/Marketing/Advertising wing of the blogosphere on what a blog's RSS feeds should like like. The discussion points seem to be:

• Should full-text be included in the RSS feed or just the beginning of the post?
• What should advertising look like in an RSS feed?
• Should hyperlinks to other sites be stripped out of the RSS feed? 

For those who feel the full-text of a post should be available in their RSS aggregator the issues seem to be time and interest. It does (at least in terms of today's computer world) take extra time to click the headline of a post to go to that story on the original page. Especially, as Constantin Basturea points out, for those who still don't have broadband connections. In terms of interest, the argument seems to be that something of interest to me may not be included in the partial-text pushed to the RSS feed. Important information may not be picked up.

As far as advertising there's not quite as much debate as to whether it's OK but more on what form it should take. Of course Weblogs, Inc (which runs this site and has given blowhards like myself a microphone for our opinions) was the first to include Google's AdSense ads in the RSS feeds for its sites. Feedburner, among the most popular RSS creation tools, allows AdSense as well as ads from Amazon through its affiliate program.

One of the major arguments for not posting full-text to RSS feeds has been, "I depend on advertising revenue and I only get that when people actually visit my site." If, though, a publisher is able to include advertising in an RSS feed is that tactic deflated? If they can insert ads then is there any harm in not forcing people to click-through to the main site to read the post? I would think not since there's equal opportunity for advertising revenue from both avenues.

The one true casualty of RSS aggregation will be visitor traffic numbers to a blog or website. But, with the statistics tools available from Feedburner and other RSS creation sites, this is the least effective of the arguments available for those pushing partial-text feeds. All they need to do is take the number of visitors to the site and, using an old-fashioned calculator, add to that the number of subscriptions to their RSS feed. It's as simple as that.

A while ago Neville Hobson wrote RSS was moving toward becoming the entire web experience for some people. All the websites they usually visited were contained within the aggregator and some web surfers were spending less and less time moving outside them. If this is true then this debate will likely on heat up further.