I've been beating the drum for full text RSS feeds for years, enough to have burned myself out on the subject multiple times. Years later, it's still about where it always has been and still swirls at about the same rate. Let me strip down my end of the argument to a non-moral, completely empirical set of observations.

• When I read postings in my RSS reader, it takes effectively no time to move from item to item because they have all already been downloaded before I look at them.

• When I open the webpage of an item from that feed it takes time, usually from 1 to 10 seconds per item.

• When I sit down to read my feeds, I typically have between 40 and 200 individual items in there. At an average load time of 3 seconds per item , that would add from 2 to 10 minutes to my reading time just in waiting for pages to load if everyone did this.

• Most excerpted feeds are really excerpted. Here's a real world example of something that came down a feed, the information I was given to decide whether I want to pursue reading this or not:

  While Wharton claims he may now have been "assimilated" into the culture of Action Greensboro, I seriously doubt it. While I, too, attended last night's follow-up meetin

• If you knew how often I looked at the first 18 words of your post and decided that although I care enough to subscribe to your RSS feed I don't care enough to chase this post down, it would probably hurt your feelings. Sorry kids, you have to make tough calls in this life.

• I'm actually becoming a full-text hardass again, and by the end of the week will be purging out all the excerpted feeds from my newsreader. If you don't care enough to make it easy on me trying to follow lots of information, I don't care enough to read your stuff. That's harsh, but quid pro quo often is.