The big news today is about RSS ripoffs. People who republish your content, put ads around them and make money. The company leading this practice seems to be SuperFeedSystem.
- Richard MacManus
- Marketing Studies
- Jason Calacanis - no I'm still unsub'ed from Jason, but his blog came up in the search results.
I'd just like to add a few things to the conversations.
- Really Simple Syndication.
- We need well defined RSS extensions that indicate the author's intent and we need to start respecting those intents.
- Google syndicates partial content of my Website all-the-time and put ads around my content. What's the difference? Attribution? Service?
If you are complaining about feeds being republished with ads around them, you had better start crying to all the search engines too. They don't just use your feeds but they "steal" your content right off your pages, post it to their so called "results" pages and then plaster ads all around them. They make a hell of a lot more money off your content than any webmasters who happen to reuse your feeds.
So it's OK for them to do it... but not web publishers right?
Puh-lease, get real already!