Over the last couple of months I’ve had a couple folks scrape all the content from my RSS feed and use it on their own “blogs.” I use quotes because they looked like they had no other purpose than taking the content produced by others and surrounding it by ads for their own commercial benefit.
I made clear to them that simply because content is syndicated in an RSS feed doesn’t give them the right to scrape it for their own.
Nevertheless, to prevent this in the future, I’m going to experiment with truncating the RSS feed. If folks find the lede interesting, they can then come to the site and read the rest. It isn’t really the way I want to blog — reading this stuff should be easy — but I also don’t like having stuff stolen.
While I’m at it I may also tinker with those little social networking buttons that I see elsewhere. Where will it lead? Beats me. But over the last year this little corner of cyberspace and turned up not only in national press, but also international (India and Great Britain).
And I’m open to suggestions and feedback from others as to whether or not the changes work well.