Why are you abusing RSS
When you are involved in RSS everyday you get to see the
fantastic opportunities RSS can bring to the web and how it can
contribute to bettering the browsers experience and the
webmasters bottom line. Unfortunately there is a dark side of
RSS use.
It continues to amaze me how some webmasters always see ways to
abuse new communication mediums. It is well know that email has
become synonymous with spam. Email was a great communication
tool when it arrived, but individuals soon started to abuse
email by sending unsolicited messages to everyone with an email
address. Now the same seems to be happening with RSS.
More and more webmasters are starting to use RSS to improve and
maintain a good relationship with their readers. They are using
RSS the correct way by keeping their readers informed and using
RSS to syndicate content around the web. I talk more about this
at http://www.newsniche.com/
where I help to inform and educate webmasters about RSS.
Unlike email you can't spam readers using RSS as it is a pull
technology which means as a webmaster you do not have the
contact details of your readers. Unfortunately as RSS is such a
good tool for syndicating content it looks like some webmasters
have taken that to mean all RSS content is public domain. This
has lead to RSS feed being copied verbatim and reused in new
feeds or republished on websites.
I know what your thinking, what exactly is my problem, that's
what RSS is for. Well consider this. How would you feel if you
found the contents of your feed copied word for word in another
feed and also replicated on someone else's website. No problem
you might be thinking, think of all the traffic it will bring to
your site. No, I'm afraid all the links back to your site have
been removed, in fact all reference to you has been removed.
It's as if you didn't even create the content.
I am afraid this is the new scourge of the internet and it is
going to affect you sooner or later. But all is not lost, there
are a few things you can do to protect yourself. First off I
would suggest not publishing full content feeds, that is only
publish part of a large article and link it back to your
website. Secondly put a copyright notice in your feed. Then if
someone copies it verbatim they will get the copyright notice as
well, when they republish it all of there readers will know what
they've been up to. Thirdly contact there publisher of your work
and remind them that they are stealing copyrighted material.
If you do want to republished content from other feeds then you
should contact the publisher and ask permission. When you
republish the content do not remove any links and make sure the
original publisher is properly attributed. This way you get free
content and the author get some traffic, a fair exchange and
everyone wins.