On Getting Scraped for a Feed
One of my mentors suggested I take a look at the article Wake Up to the Blogosphere in September’s Information Today. It talks about using aggregators, or newsreaders as the author prefers, to receive feeds. It’s a nice introduction to the practice and even mentions Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society fellow David Weinberger, who sometimes joins the Thursday blog group. It does not appear to be available on Information Today’s Web site.
On my way to that article, I noticed Feed(ing) Frenzy, Information Today’s chief technical officer Bill Spence’s thoughts on what it’s like to be a content provider who gets scraped by a third-party to make a feed of the content. It sounds like he’s more upset that no one approached Information Today to ask them about doing their own feed than being scraped. He does raise some legal issues about the situation and mentions a cease-and-desist letter Google sent a programmer who was making feeds of the Google News site to post on another Web site.
Content providers should be aware of these services. I think what Bill observes is definitely worth noting. There’s a lot of value in content providers offering their own feeds, as opposed to waiting for someone else to create a feed for them.
Addendum 9/22: Case in point, read what Steven Cohen of Library Stuff wrote after reading this post, especially the last few lines: "As an ironic aside, I would have totally missed this article if Jessica hadn’t point it out. But if Information Today had an RSS feed for their magazines…."
