17 dots plus 3 dots is too many dots

I love that people at eMusic are posting at 17 dots; as I mentioned previously, it’s integrating eMusic itself into the eMusic user community. But… I do almost all my blog reading using a feed reader (NetNewsWire in my case), and it’s driving me up a wall that 17 dots doesn’t have a full text feed. Given the rate that they’re posting at, there are a lots of posts to read, and it really interrupts my flow when I see something I find interesting only to be stopped by the inevitable (more…).

This practice is not unique to 17 dots, of course. Bob Lefsetz does this too, and the excerpts in his feed are often even more abbreviated. I can sort of see why Lefsetz is doing this; presumably among other things he wants people to come to his web site and subscribe to his email newsletter. But what’s the reasoning behind 17 dots not offering a full feed? There’s no pitch on the web site itself; the post pages don’t have ads for eMusic or even a link to eMusic. So why deny us our God-given right never to leave our feed reader?

P.S. I noticed that James Governor (of Redmonk fame) also complained about this.