I’m not big on desktop rss readers, Eric. They use too many cpu resources when you probably already have your browser open anyway, and could just be using it, and too much bandwidth (you might be pulling down huge files just to get a few tidbits of info)…. Back in the day, I was a beta tester for Carmen’s Headline Viewer, which was magnificent for its time (this was 1999 or 2000 I think) and probably greatly improved now, but I always just wanted to just get that information easier yet….

You’re right, LiveJournal looks very interesting… I’m going off to explore it further now…. Thanks

Bob: just a clarification: I did almost nothing to make that “falsch freiheit – Friends” thing work; that’s all handled fairly automatically by the “LiveJournal” software. I pretty much just fed the software some RSS feeds URLs and clicked a few buttons and that got created. Brad Fitz and the other LiveJournal folks deserve the credit for making the software.

There’s also desktop software that does pretty much the same thing, but with a UI designed specifically for news, such as Straw, NetNewsWire, and FeedReader.

Eric–just saw your “falsch freiheit – Friends” Nice work…. Sweet site. So I guess Derek has a reason to keek the whole content in the rss after all, since some are pulling it…

Instead of having a second feed, why include the whole article content in the description tags of the rss file at all? Are you using it to build the site pages? Why not just have the single feed with titles and links, and make the license attribution only? (Although I agree that the CC license may be irrelevant with regard to titles and links….)

Sounds to me like you want a more open (CC attribution) license for the URL, title, etc. while keeping your current license for the main content.

But you’ve just got one RSS feed, and it’s all in there.

I can easily set up a re-feed of your blog that includes content, title and link. This is non-commercial, automatically provides attribution and makes no attempt to license anything. Bandwidth usage on your server from this is roughly similar to one mildly-obsessive human reader (IIRC, a hit to the rss file every hour or 4…) OTOH, if I charged people to access that content, I think you’d have good reason to be upset.

But, as you said, using the title and links for commercial purposes doesn’t bother you.

IIRC, generally the title, author name and unique id (isbn, issn, page#) and other “meta” information is either covered by “fair use” or possibly even outright non-copyrightable.

“Article content on this site is under a [creative commons license / cc:by-nc-sa]. Article titles are under a different [creative commons license / cc:by-sa]. URLs to articles may be considered public domain.”?

(Note on the livejournal example: I had to go through some extra effort for that view, the normal view for somebody who’s not “subscribed” to that specific rss feed is disclaimered and less convenient)

IMO, there is de-facto permission (of some sort; assumable from having an RSS feed. Much like one can generally assume permission to copy a web-page to a single computer and render (modify!) the HTML into a viewable format based on the simple fact that the material in question is provided via a public HTTP server with no access controls. Part of the problem (in both cases) is when something goes up without the knowledge of the human. Many “blogs” will create an RSS feed automatically, and there’s been cases of web-servers serving information when companies didn’t even know the software in question had a web server.