Saw this interesting post over at the The Trademark Blog where he explains why he has asked Bloglines to remove his RSS feed from its service.
‘It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing the Trademark Blog, surrounding it with its own frame, stripping the page of my contact info. It identifies itself as a news aggregator. It is not authorized to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does. In response to my inquiry to Blogline’s CEO as to whether they sell advertising, he indicated that they ‘are not currently running advertising.’ Nevertheless, the Blogline’s home page currently is soliciting ‘targeted advertisements.’ I would also assume that Blogline is accumulating commercially-useful mailing lists (its privacy policy appears to allow it to sell information). The privacy policy also has a provision entitled ‘mergers and acquisitions’ clearly allowing it to sell its lists.
Thus, in my view, Bloglines’ reproduction of my site is a commercial derivative work. Bloglines has agreed to remove my site from its service and I thank it in advance for its cooperation….’
I wrote last week that Bloglines would be walking a fine line if they put ads on there service – I suspect we might see more of this type of thing – although at this point I suspect that its a mistake to ask to be removed as Bloglines is a major player when it comes to RSS which is increasingly being used by readers to read blogs.
I would agree with Scobleizer who writes ‘if you don’t want your full posts reprinted somewhere else, don’t put them into RSS. That’s one reason most commercial sites don’t include full content in their feeds.’
Bloglines is just one system that uses RSS – Scobleizer is write in suggesting that the only real way to get around other sites publishing your full posts is to either disable RSS altogether on your site or only allow it to publish excerpts. I find excerpts is a good way forward because it exposes your content to potential readers but also gives them reason to visit your site.
This is a great example of someone that, “Doesn’t get it.” By reading the complaint you’d think the author had no idea he published an RSS feed (he makes it sound like Bloglines was scraping his site and taking just his content).
I put in my RSS feed what I want RSS readers (either in a desktop, mobile or web based environment) to see. For me this is a full text feed with targeted Overture ads. In the past it was a summary post.
I am assuming the blog in question had quite a few subscribers in Bloglines since it was the 2,290th site scanned by BL (ProBlogger is # 534,497). He just lost those readers.
agreed Jon,
lets just hope some of those readers come to our sites!
I use Bloglines exclusively as my RSS aggregator. Using a web-based tool lets me use any of the four computers in my house, my office computer, or any computer I come across in my travels, to check on the blogs I follow.
When I want to see something in its native format, I just click on the link for that site. I tend not to do that with Problogger much because the text is so small .