Before I get into it, I don’t know about you, but when is this type of activity going to end. Here is part of what rsscache.com sent me that was in my spam folder.
“This email is to inform you that your feed “Geek News Central Podcast” at https://www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml has been added to our online service RSScache.com. Your feed has been added since one of your users requested your feed through our system.”
Funny that they say one of my Users asked for this, RSSCache can you tell me which one? I need to ask them why? I don’t buy it for a second this comes across as a ploy!
So I go over to a page they have linked in the e-mail, and sure enough they have repackaged my RSS feed in a new URL. I am pretty sick of this type of activity, and at this point companies know better than to do this, and to do this with my feed after what happened last week is asking me to open up the wrath of the blogsphere on the them.
I don’t care if they are saving me bandwidth, I did not give them permission to take my feed and re-package it in a new URL. Sheer stupidity on their part here is the letter I have sent them:
Dear RSSCache.com
You are herby requested to remove my feed from your site immediately, you are also for warned not to cache any internal feed on PodcasterNews.com, Blubrry.com, Rasbrry.com, PodcastPromos.com.
This action in my opinion is considered RSS Hijacking, and I will not tolerate it, this type of activity is not tolerated in the RSS space.
I have CC’d our corporate attorney on this, and expect a written guarantee from your company that you will comply with my request.
Todd Cochrane
CEO RawVoice
I also think the other use that they claim for this is to save bandwidth for the users. Instead of downloading the whole rss feed every time, only the deltas are sent to the client. This could be useful for people on dialup, or using the cell phone network to download the feed.
Personally, I don’t see the difference between this and an ISP or company running a http proxy like squid. In either case, the content will be cached, and the number of hit one the server will be less.