Yes, I do think it depends on the owner of the blog. I’ve never categorised my blog as commercial but I suppose it is considering I have ads on the blog. Loosing revenue isn’t a problem for me because I don’t get paid out on the traffic I get (at the moment) paid up front.

Even so, I don’t want people ‘stealing’ my content that I have worked hard at writing, so I would never provide full-version on my RSS feed. I also find extract feed means more people click through to the blog.

I’ve no need to visit TIPs at the moment because all of the content is on my RSS reader.

In my opinion I think TIPs would be a better more useful resource if people wrote unique content, exclusively for TIPs that you could also feature in a future book. This would make it more of an authority and be a group effort. Maybe share ad sense revenue as compensation for writing content for the blog.

Regarding your comment about publishing full versus extracts; for the most part whether the feed is full or just partial has been left up to the author of the syndicated blog when they send their feed in. Some of the feeds are just titles, some are titles with descriptions, and some are full feeds. I suppose it really depends on the comfort level of the individual blog author and whether, like travel-rants.com, driving traffic to your blog directly affects your income from the blog. Commercial blogs (like travel-rants.com) definitely have different and legitimate concerns regarding re-use of content and sharing of traffic.

Is that a fair statement or am I off-base here?

No one knows what percentage of duplication activates this filter but let’s pretend it’s 80%.

If article 2 has 80% duplication of article 1 then Google filters one of these pages from the search engine results. How it decides which one it filters out no one knows but it’s speculated that it will be around how old the domain is, how much of an authority the site is etc.

Let’s pretend..

I have a blog of 8 months old, and Tips from the T-list is 18 months old, and is treated more of an authority, because of the number of quality links pointing to it. Google is more likely to filter out my blog post, loosing me traffic and potential revenue, than it is the Tips from the T-list blog.

For me as a blogger that would be a problem.

Rather than publishing the full content, why do you not publish an extract and link through to the full blog post.

The Associated Press recently changed it’s policy on bloggers using their content because it was finding that their content was getting freezed out of Google because authority blogs like Tech Crunch carried more weight in Google and Associated Press were loosing traffic.