RSS advertising continues to be a hot topic. A recent interview with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo via Clickz talks about some of the things they’ve observed concerning slicks out and other stats from RSS feeds.

“If RSS popularity continues to increase, and it becomes less and less a vehicle for driving site traffic but more and more its own content-viewing medium, that presents an interesting situation to publishers,” Dick said. He admitted, though, the company didn’t look at full-text versus partial-text feeds.

This got me thinking what publishers can do to make it more attractive for readers to click out of their RSS aggregators to either visit the website or advertiser. I’m not a big fan of partial RSS feeds, but switching to that could be one way. Another way is to provide more related self-reference posts. I think this has to be handled delicately though as not to end up spamming readers.

As MakeYouGoHmm grows in the number of entries I’m finding it more logical and for consistency purposes to refer to prior entries, especially if I’m correcting something or changing my opinion.

It’s like blogging your own blog’s history.

Having a really good blog search is important and I’m finding that while Wordpress has an acceptable built-in search, especially when dealing with a smaller subset of results, but when dealing with larger result sets it doesn’t always return the results I’m specifically looking for unless I know very specific keywords. Keep in mind that I’m talking about searching through nearly 2,000 entries and when I’m thinking about a specific past blog entry on something general I’ve written about before like say Google which has 225+ entries as of this writing, then it can return too many pages of results to click thru to find the right entry(ies).

I’m going to have to poke around and see if somebody has created a more comprehensive WP search, perhaps as a plugin. Anybody reading know of one?

Another thought is a function/plugin that could be triggered on a per post basis to provide automatic related story links inside the full RSS feed so that if a newer subscriber — or even a long time one — hadn’t seen the prior coverage they could go back and read through it chronologically. I don’t think having this on every post makes sense, because new topics wouldn’t have any related posts, and sometimes a new post on a specific topic isn’t necessarily a continuation of prior thoughts.

• How to add a dynamic digg vote this button, show related posts and more using Wordpress
• Feedster search results RSS and trackback to-do
• Wordpress plugin: 100 words every high school graduate should know
• How to add Sphere It function based on number of words in post
• Disabling Nofollow in Wordpress 1.5
• Feeling dirty or clean after using Feed Rinse