Hi Jeff,

great to see you here.

So this is the first post in your new forum. And be sure this won't be the last one

Checked your your daily review link-up.

I read, liked and left a comment : Fantasy Cafe: The Healthy Dead by Steven Erikson

Need to find time to read and comment Dragons, Heroes and Wizards: Beyond the Shadows by Brent Weeks

thanks michael! I am wondering if you are the only one who finds the daily link-up usefull, since no one else has commented when I asked about it. But, I will still continue to do it for awhile and see how it goes. I am guessing that those who stop by my blog probably subscribe to all the blogs I do, hence I dont have anything new for them.

one thing that would make your posts better:

allow for full publication of the post through RSS. I get really annoyed at RSS feeds that only publish part of the post - it has to be real interesting to get me to make that extra step (and I know that others feel the same).

When I switched over to the full RSS feed a year or so ago, I didn't notice a too much of dip in traffic and reach numbers.

Neth....interesting..i was afraid my numbers would drop if I posted the entire post to newsreaders.

I do wonder if it matters..its hard to determine numbers for me..as i see subscriber numbers in google and feedburner and hits on my counter. I can't tell how much is overlap to know how many people actually stop by the blog.

Nice to see you on board, Jeff!

Full publication through RSS feeds is something I need to work on, also.

The end result of opening up your posts is that more people will read the entire content of your posts. And while counting the numbers becomes more difficult, I think it's worth it for that reason alone.

Jeff,

to be honest I use your daily link mostly when I don't find time to check my google reader. Of course I have most of the blogs you mention in my reader.
I don't know how many people visit your blog per day. I think most of them will never post. So finally you don't know how many visitors find your daily linkuseful or not.
And even if you would start a poll you wouldn't get an answer from most of your visitors.
That's sad but that is reality.

So be happy: you got one comment.

Of course the linkback looks absolutely wonderful at the end of my post

Before I started to use google reader, I visited every day around 10 blogs. Visiting means, Go there, scroll through the messages, read the ones I'm interested in and leave a comment from time to time.

Now with google reader I check more than 30 blogs. I don't miss a posting and like before when there is an interesting post I go directly to the blog. Postings I'm not interested in I mark as read.
In case I write a comment I leave the post unread because then I can return the next day diretly to this post.

With people like me you don't loose hits on your blog. But I don't know how other people manage their google reader.

I'm in the same camp as Neth, I much prefer a full RSS feed. With the amount of blogs I'm subscribed to I tend to ignore the posts if they haven't got the full feed and they don't grab me with the post title, there are just too many to go through as it is Re: site hits, I've just recently moved over to full RSS and have noticed a decrease in numbers, but the days I post I get more than I used to, so it's a double edged sword. I use Thunderbird for my subscriptions and that will show up on stat counters as a page hit when you read the post, something that I do consider important for the blog owner

I would go so far as to say that I don't keep subscriptions to blogs that don't post a full feed or at least most of the feed. My sff portion of the feed has about 25 blogs in it, so I usually don't feel the need to add more blogs. Often I see a blog that looks promising, but when it doesn't have a full feed, I unsubscribe immediately and then feel disappointed

I suppose it can hurt your traffic, but you can add ads to your feed if you want to with feedburner. However, at some point it's just too much work to click on extra links. I think I would also tend to skim partial feeds a lot more...

This turned into an interesting conversation...I am finding this forum helpful already

I'm not worried at all about making money from ads..I dont even know if I have ads set up for my site..i don't believe that I do (i tend to not notice things i see all the time, and forget they are there..drives my wife crazy!). I primarily shortened the feed so that i could get a better idea of the number of folks who stop by. But if it annoys people to have to click on the link, its not worth it. So, I just changed my feeds to display full content going forward. Hopefully that makes it easier for the majority to follow along.