Doc Searls: Meet two upstanding enemies of all that is splogging.
The head lemur has taken on John Bransford, maintainer of a network of sites that republish RSS feeds in local communities for profit. One of those sites operates in the Philadelphia region.
It sounds an awful lot like Philly Future in some respects, but in many ways we're different:
1. We don't aggregate your feed without your permission. If we have, let us know. By and large, our blogroll has been driven by you asking to be included. In addition we've aggregated feeds from mainstream news sources, Flickr, Technorati and even Craigslist. We don't claim ownership of anything aggregated here and our site is driven to drive traffic OFF of it. Kinda like Technorati. See the disclaimers all over this site. The way links are worded. Compare that to an average splogger that conceals where content is contributed from.
2. We don't earn a profit. No where close. We barely pay for hosting costs.
3. We still don't know what our business model is. We've avoided splashing advertisements all over the pages of your service because, lacking a shared business model, it is morally indefensible. It's flat out wrong. People have waved thousands of dollars our way, and we've resisted. We just won't do it. The moment we do, without your involvement, is the moment we are no longer Philly Future and deserve your scorn.
4. If we go the route of a for-profit business - participants here will earn a percentage of whatever is earned.
5. Maybe what we do is ultimately best left in the hands of a non-profit. We don't know. But you are part of that conversation.
I've talked here, previously, about services that are making money from your participation. From your enthusiasm. From your passion.
Don't let splogs exploit you.
preventing splogging
There are probably many different ways to prevent splogging... blocking iPs etc... One way that I do it, is to modify my RSS feed so that it merely shows a headline plus a slug not the ENTIRE article. I would like to be helpful and show how the different software has that option (if they do) in their feed.
HammRadio.com is built upon a homegrown blogging software that is ASP based. My RSS feed: http://www.hammradio.com/rss.asp or http://feeds.feedburner.com/HammRadio you will notice only has the slug attached. Blogger has an option to show SHORT (first 255 characters) or FULL. Example: http://hammradio.blogspot.com/atom.xml
WordPress also has an option for a summary.
This can beat the SPLOGGERS as they are only stealing (partial content). (I'm sure with screen-scraping or some other hack they will be able to beat that). But that is one way to beat the system.
I always believe that RSS should be a way to DRIVE traffic to your site, not another way to view your content. Unless you are putting Ads in your RSS you are not benefiting from someone reading your content through a RSS aggregator/reader.
Showing partial content draws the user back into the site.
not everyone
uses RSS feeds as a way to drive traffic to sites. i know tons of blog/news readers who rely solely on feeds to read all of the sites they do each day. clicking on 100+ different sites all throughout the day isn't an attractive thing.
me, i'm not worried that people aren't clicking through to my site after reading a full feed in their rss viewer. they can do so if they would like to view the comments or comment themselves. what i am concerned about is sploggers making a buck, or tenth of a cent or whatever, by simply subscribing to my feed and republishing it.
i find partial feeds annoying, but i do understand the reasons [unless it is by accident they're putting out a partial feed] behind not publishing the full feed, but those who do are likely losing some percentage of readers and possible readers.
depends on your goal
"Unless you are putting Ads in your RSS you are not benefiting from someone reading your content through a RSS aggregator/reader."
I think this is only true if your goal is to make money via hits to your site. If your goal is for people to read/view your content, then you are certainly benefitting from publishing a full RSS feed.
And if it's the latter, I would argue that you can only lose by publishing partial feeds. I regularly read blogs via an aggregator and for the blogs that only publish partial feeds, unless those three lines really grab my attention and seem to warrant a visit to the blog, I usually just breeze on past.
I don't want people to make money off of my content either, but I am not willing to limit my exposure at the expense of myself. :)