April 26th
Freelance Writing Jobs ~ Thursday, April 26, 2007
Yesterday’s discussion is still going strong. What’s your opinion, is it ok for your original content to be posted publicly in the name of RSS, or is an RSS feed only for individual subscriptions? The About Weblogs community has voted (23 to 2 so far) that it is not ok to publicly publish a blog’s content even if it comes from a feed. Stop by and discuss.
Leads will be here a little later.
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Posted
on
Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 4:21 am under
Hi Deb,
Thanks for having the courage to leave the discussion up and going even though some anonymous cowards have posted their bits of hate.
I have learned a lot about RSS feeds so far and will DEFINITELY be aware of how they are used in any of my web-published content.
-Alex
June 28th, 2007 at 4:22 amIn my experience, the use of Livejournal as an RSS feed reader is the same as the use of Bloglines as a feed reader, since it is possible to set up a Bloglines account that allows other people to see the blogs you’ve selected to keep track of. In my opinion, adding your feed to a Livejournal Friends List is an individual subscription, even though someone else may be able to see it there. I don’t see it as stealing content; I see it first as making it easier for me to read what I want to read, and second, as sharing information I think other folks would enjoy, if they bother to look at my Friends List or Bloglines account.
I actually discovered your blog by seeing the rss feed on someone else’s Livejournal Friends List. There was no confusion on my part — I understood that I was looking at an rss feed of your blog, and I followed the link to read the complete entries. I don’t like the display of rss on LJ, so I added your blog to my Google Reader account instead of to my Livejournal Friends List.
To answer your question, yes, I think it is OK for an rss feed to be incorporated into a site *as long as the site makes the source of the content very clear*. If I were creating The Ultimate Freelance Job Website that pulled feeds from several blogs into one site, I would ask permission of each blog author first and design the display so that authorship was obvious. However, I have the impression — I apologize if I am wrong about this — that you feel the Livejournal feed is the same thing, a giant aggregator of other people’s content for its own gain. I would disagree; to me, it’s another mechanism for individual subscribers to discover and select a set of blogs and content they want to read.
Thanks for the great content you offer here.
Heather
June 28th, 2007 at 4:23 amhttp://hhw.livejournal.com
Hi Deb,
June 28th, 2007 at 4:23 amI just landed a great gig thru your site and I’d like to say thank you! I’m based in Switzerland and it’s not always easy to convince people on the other side of the Atlantic that I can do the job from here. You and your site have been a great help!
R.
It would be interesting to see whether we could get LJ to make a public comment about how they justify their use of RSS feeds. I vaguely recall that in the past the RSS feeds for syndicated newspaper comics had a tendency to be periodically removed.
Personally, I’m okay with the way LJ uses RSS feeds–people’s friends pages are relatively rarely read by other users, and if RSS feeds weren’t okay, reading other people’s blog entries on your friends list wouldn’t be okay either, and there goes the entire community nature of LJ. But I do think it’s in a bit of a legal gray area.
June 28th, 2007 at 4:23 amI’m not okay with people publishing my content using RSS feeds. For one, it takes away from the value of my content because it is no longer unique once it is published elsewhere. Instead of seeing the content on my site and possibly hiring me or purchasing my information products, someone might see my content on another site and assume that it was written by that site’s editors/writers.
In addition, my site may be penalized in the SE rankings because my content is no longer unique.
August 15th, 2007 at 10:24 am