Nine Ways To Make Your RSS Feed Useless

Way back when, RSS and Atom newsfeeds made it easy for others to sweep up an author’s content. Both users and webmasters embraced the feeds with gusto.

End-users deployed personal aggregators, like RSS Bandit, to track their favorite subjects and authors. Webmasters replicated the feeds for the same reason, but for their broader audience.

Originally, everybody won. Small and/or unknown authors and organizations gained access to the greater universe of readers, through replication-by-choice. Readers found new authors via replicators. And webmasters were able to offer their audiences more content.

Correction. Almost everybody won. As more readers started creating their own newspapers, many traditional media and advertising groups found themselves out in the cold.

In addition, a few bloggers turned very Old Media as their audiences grew, while other scratchy and itchy types worried themselves sick over who might be using their timeless prose, and for what.

So what’s a paranoid blogger to do?

Don’t publish newsfeeds for anything you don’t want replicated. Publish only synopses of articles as RSS/Atom feeds, with links to your full content. (This solves 99.99% of your replication problems.)

If that doesn’t satisfy, post a nasty copyright notice, send angry emails to infringers and fire off DMCA complaints to search engines whenever you see something that makes your head spin.

Still spitting bullets? Make your RSS feed radioactive.

It’s easier than you think.

1. Make your article a replicated synopsis of someone else’s story with a link to the original work… worse yet, no link.
2. Start with an intriguing headline, then send suckers to a page full of links to articles. Would-be fans will find someone else.
3. Make your article’s Title and Description identical, like “1 Hotmail hoax.” Body copy: “1 Hotmail hoax.” Readers who sign up for Sophos daily Top 10 Hoaxes get nine more just like this one, every day.
4. Use titles that aren’t descriptive at all, like “Or…”, then team them up with equally incomprehensible copy.
5. Embed lots of pointless graphics like logos and photos. Last week, one well-known blogger, whose name (Pirillo) I will not mention (Pirillo), posted individual Flickr-shots of the geekerati attending his conference. I think I deleted his feed after the David Winer shot. Ironically, Winer’s the guy who invented RSS. (After Chris stopped, I resubscribed.)
6. Slather in the advertising. Make sure your feed includes banner ads, along with Google AdSense links, whenever possible. Blinking banners are particularly effective.
7. Sprinkle in plenty of obscenities to keep out the fuddy-duddies on a site ostensibly targeted at a general audience.
8. Regularly update posts with your whereabouts, like we should care.
9. Post just to be posting, whether you have anything to say, or not.

But it appears that more and more bloggers have mastered the technique.

That’ll teach those filthy, money-grubbing aggregators… Right?

Just don’t lose sight of your blogging goals. After Steve Rubel complained that two websites were stealing his output at Micro Persuasion, Mike Masnick of Techdirt responded:

Hmm. In both cases they link back to you as the original source.

I guess I’m confused how this is different than most aggregators, which also redisplay your content.

There are probably hundreds of sites that do that with our content, and as long as they link back to us, it’s hard to see why it’s a problem. They’re just helping to get more people to read what you have to say.

I’m with Mikey.