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Really, simple syndication

Really Simple Syndication is a two-way street. By putting your own content in RSS format, you make it easier for others on the web to access your work and stay up to date on your latest news and articles. Others, by making their content available via RSS, make it simple to include their works on your pages.

However, the mere fact that something is easily done from a technical standpoint does not mean that it is ethical or even legal. Although it can seem trivial to take someone’s RSS content and paste it into your site, doing so without permission will not only likely raise legal issues, but also public outcry.

Fortunately, there are ethical and legal ways to incorporate RSS content into your site and, if done properly, RSS feeds can be a valuable tool for growing your site and provide your readers with essential information.

One just has to be careful not to cross the line.

Why RSS can be dangerous

Syndicated content is problematic because while it is makes republication easy, most who enable RSS feeds of their work do not intend their content to be republished on other sites.

Rather, RSS is primarily intended to be used by individuals in a private RSS reader, such as Newsgator. These readers are designed to make it easier for users to sift through large amounts of content by collecting material from a wide range of sites and displaying it in an organized manner.

Most readers do not, however, make the content available to others on the web. Rather, the RSS content is only available to the subscribers of that RSS feed.

While some sites do take RSS content and republish it, an act known as scraping, these are generally considered spam blogs or spam Web sites. No laws or court rulings have come down on this topic. But it is widely believed that such republication is a violation of copyright law. Thousands of spam blogs are shut down on the grounds of copyright infringement each year.

Webmasters, especially journalists, rarely tolerate such scraping as it creates a near-perfect copy of the original content. This can hurt the original site both in terms of audience and in the search engine rankings. Users, likewise, much prefer to get their content from the original site and prefer to support the original author.

In short, republishing an RSS feed without permission is not just a means to create legal trouble, but a way to anger readers.

Headlines regularly updated

In order to use RSS safely and effectively, it is important to note that the power of RSS lies less in the content that it dstributes, but in the power of the technology to update the reader to new material.

With that in mind, the simplest way to include RSS content in your site is with a headline widget. These widgets are small boxes on a site, usually located in the navigation portion of the page, that contain a list of headlines from the target site. The list regularly updates over the course of the day as the target site puts new content up.

By using only headlines, which in most countries are not protected by copyright, these widgets avoid many of the copyright issues created by publishing some or all of the actual RSS content can create. Furthermore, by providing only links to the original source of the site, readers are directed transparently to the source of the article.

Webmasters, generally, are happy to have their RSS feeds used in this manner. It creates active links to their site and encourages users to click through to the full content. Some major news organizations, including Reuters and Associated Press, actively encourage this form of use while others, such as The New York Times even provide the HTML code to make the process easier.

This is not to say that all sites approve of or encourage this kind of use of syndicated content. It is a widely accepted practice on the web and one that is encouraged by many in the field. Some individual sites may still object to this use of ab RSS feed so it always best to get permission before using the content.

Even if many of the legal issues are resolved, there is little good that can come from a conflict with another journalist or news organization.

Taking control

Another problem with publishing headlines from an RSS feed is that the content displayed on your page is completely under the control of the site you are partnering with. This could lead to your site unconciously promoting objectionable or questionable material. For that reason, many want to take greater control over the headlines they syndicate, either by manually selecting the stories or pulling from multiple sources.

In order to select the stories that you want to push in your headline widget, you first need a feed reader, such as Google Reader, that can allow you to select favorite stories and publish those to an RSS feed.

Then, in your reader, subscribe to all of the sources you might want to potentially use and, as you go through them, select the desired ones to be shared. From there, have your site’s widget parse your shared items the same as any other RSS feed. The result is that only the stories you or another employee select make it to your site, ensuring that the articles are both appropriate and on topic.

To combine feeds from multiple sources, you need a service such as RSS Mix or Feedroll that is capable of taking multiple feeds and merging them into one. From there, you can use any RSS parser to read the “mixed” feed. Your site will automatically include the headlines from all of the sources you selected.

While both of these options raise still fewer legal and ethical issues, as with other forms of syndication, it is best to ask for or otherwise obtain permission before using another site’s content. Fortunately, very few, if any, will be likely to object.

Conclusions

Syndication, if done correctly, can be a great way to introduce related content to your site without having to write it. It works as a service to the reader, allowing them to get more information at your site, and supports the efforts of other news organizations by promoting their work to a new audience.

In short, everyone benefits.

While you probably would not want a competitor’s RSS feed appearing on your site, there is certainly room for cooperation in journalism, especially between niche publications in related fields, and RSS offers an excellent opportunity to capitalize that.

If you or your company does not offer this tool currently, now might be the time to consider introducing it. Likewise, if you aren’t taking advantage of syndicated content, now is a great time to look for partners in this field to work with.

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Photos from FlickR users “Travelin’ Librarian”, “Jrhode” and “Photopia” respectively.

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