When I was talking about the “lost” traffic, I don’t think I explained myself very well. I dont mean that people will lose traffic without knowing about it. I was trying to mention a reason that some people wont like adding their feeds to the service. PA/PH provide a great way to increase visibility of a blog, but if the blog is one which tries to generate income (eg. through google ads or whatever) then the feeds are not all that beneficial. As you rightly say, this can be mitigated by sending a partial feed.

As for the varied topics – I still prefer them! Imagine if all PZ Myers ever talked about was evolutionary biology…

Anyway, keep PH going strong!

TW: I’m not sure I agree that there’s really the risk that you mention. As with PA, PH operates on a “at your request” principle, so any traffic “lost” to a blog is going to be because they’ve asked to be featured. If people want, they’re free to adjust their feeds to offer a summary of the post, rather than the full post.

I understand and appreciate your thoughts about having non-filtered posts. I don’t plan to change this to a requirement for inclusion, but it’s an option for those that are more comfortable with it (for whatever reason, not least of which might be blogs with multiple authors). It might gratify you to know that so far there are only two blogs that filter their posts, the rest are full blog feeds. :-)

AV: I’ve obviously not been pimping it enough. ;-) Feel free to do so if you find it useful!

To a small extent there is the risk PH (and PA) are “stealing” traffic from the actual blogs, but generally if I like an article I will still go to visit the original blog (not sure if it helps but part of me hopes the blog owner will check their stats and see a post was popular!). Also, as most blogs on PA/PH are not advert supported I dont know how much of an issue this is – the only thing I can think of is the “feel good” factor of getting hits on your blog.

As to the filtering thing – it is not something I would advocate.

Personally, I like reading generic posts by people with a shared interest. If every post on PA was about atheism and every post on PH discussed “humanist” topics, for me, it would get boring fast. The benefit I get from reading PH/PA is that it makes me aware of things as diverse as books and films to social thought that might never have crossed my mind and it is promoted by people with whom I have at least one other shared interest. There is only a finite amount of new “humanist” or “atheistic” topics…

I am aware that I might be in a minority opinion though.