Just read an article by Felix Salmon in response to a decision by Gawker to stop pushing the full text in their RSS feeds. 

I've heard this argument over years, from many people, but I've never agreed with it. I prefer if publishers include thoughtfully written synopses in their feeds, with links to the full articles. 

The reason I prefer this is that I am probably one of the few people to use River of News approach to feed reading, which imho is the only rational way to read feeds. 

I skim. I don't need the full text of each article, in fact I was so annoyed by feeds that publish full text that I made my aggregator truncate the articles at 500 characters.  

My eyes are very good at scanning. I can quickly tell whether I need to read the full article. This allows me to consider orders of magnitude more stories than I would if I had to wade through feeds with full text.  

Another point of view that's rarely considered in these debates. 

BTW, everyone reads a River of News these days. It's called Twitter. "> 

Mine is better. (No 140-character limit.)