Gene Smith of Writing for the Web lists some good advice on things to consider about your RSS feeds when writing blog posts. However, I don't completely agree with the "Include the full article or a summary" tip. I think there's an upper word limit on how much should be included in an RSS feed. Some of the posts I get in my Drupal news aggregator are 500 words plus. This *is* good if I want to read the post, but I'm guessing that most people are like me. They scan the news items for things that interest them, and a long post that I'm not interested in interferes with my skimming process. Anybody else feel the same way?
Note: Check out the Writing for the Web topics page. Nice collection of resources. Some lead to pieces that represent more current-traditional views of writing, although that is to be expected considering the resources include many links to tips from individuals in the corporate world outside of composition studies.
RSS
I do feel the same way to a certain extent. I don't want to have the whole articles there. That's why I abandoned an .rss aggregator on my old forums; I just didn't want to clog up KNews' arteries with some big hunking mass of silly, full-text forum posts. What's the point of that?
I don't like just having titles either. Half the time, I can't tell diddly squat about an article just by reading the title.
What I'd like to see (but I guess this would be difficult to achieve) is simply the first 5 or 6 lines of a post and some .... Perhaps the aggregator could be configured, so that the end-user would decide how many lines of each post (perhaps from a particular source) he/she wanted to view.