Full RSS Feeds As A Publisher
RSS feeds are the lifeline of info junkies, and they are the friend of developers needing to pull simple published info from here to there. Case in point on the latter: The Charlotte Observer is part of the Newspaper Consortium, which includes sending articles to Yahoo! News for local news presentation (until we move to NewsML, but that’s another topic).
The issue with presenting full articles (aka “full feeds”) vs. sumarries is, well, they are full feeds. Our content is copyrighted, and if a content provider like our company puts out full information for “free” someone will take it and misuse it (even if it’s an honest mistake, which we’ve had and been happy to work with folks who simply didn’t know).
How do you protect against this?
You simply can’t with a full feed (similar blog post here). It’s like DRM, you either put restrictions on the content — only to see it circumvented — or you add a footer to each piece of content asking your terms be respected, which is what sites like Engadget and 43folders do. (Here’s 43f’s explanation for a footer.)
You could truncate your feeds, but then are you really serving your honest users? Would you really punish the people who love your work by making them take extra steps?
In either case, your content is out there. Get comfortable following up with folks in case, but let your content breathe for the honest people. They’re your true concern.
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Marc Matteo