RSS: Full feeds or partial feeds?

At ProBlogger today, Darren is wondering the same thing I’ve been thinking about for a couple weeks now: Do full feeds increase your RSS subscriber count?

Like Darren, I would love to hear feedback on that issue from other bloggers: Why did you choose full?, or Why did you choose partial?

Even better, How would one go about studying the pros and cons correctly? I’m willing to offer up my blog as the study grounds if someone can come up with a good way to study this issue. I don’t think it’s enough, for example, for me to simply switch to full feeds for a month and compare new subscribers — there are too many other factors coming into play that would impact that count, such as the quality of my content, inbound links, and just the natural growth of the blog. How do we study the benefits of switching to full feeds while taking those things into account?

For the sake of background, some stats:

Feedburner Subscribers on December 27, 2006: 169
Feedburner Subscribers on January 22, 2007: 292

Bloglines Subscribers on December 27, 2006: 35
Bloglines Subscribers on January 22, 2007: 66

So, SBS is obviously in a period of natural growth. If I switch to full RSS feeds, how do I know if the continued growth is part of this natural trend, or directly related to the switch? Would love to hear some suggestions on how to do this if anyone else is interested in studying it….

[tags]blogging, rss[/tags]