I have been asked by a number of people to list what I consider are good and bad RSS syndication practices. I reserve the right to modify this list as thoughts and ideas come in that I think are worthy of adding to the list.
- Good things Media Sites do with Syndicated Content
- Attribution with Hyper link back to Content Origin Point
- Original RSS Feed clearly seen and linked to.
- No other confusing RSS links are associated media listing
- Audio and Video Media is not altered or trans-coded
- Audio and Video Media is not cached direct link only
- Publishing Author Name on Media Listing
- Make Listing Opt In
- Claim a Feed
- Pay content producers a revenue share on site advertising.
- Bad things Media Sites do with Syndicated Content
- Auto adding content versus asking to become listed!
- Replace RSS feed with sites own.
- Pre-Roll or Post Roll ads in the syndicated sites media player!
- Not allowing one to claim there own feed.
- Not allowing one to opt out.
- Not linking directly to the media file.
- Not honoring Creative Commons License.
- Add to Digg etc links that drive people away from original content point.
- Trans-coding media into a new format without permission.
Very good points. And more feeds/sites are specifying in their HTML meta tags Creative Commons or other licensing. However, there isn’t currently a standard mechanism for recognizing this in feeds. There is a ‘license’ element, but the contents of it are free-form.
It would be useful if there was some straight-forward, machine-readable mechanism for specifying simple criteria of a feed, and even of individual items in a feed (for aggregation of multiple feeds into a single feed).
For example, being able to specify via the license element, attributes for: attribution, commercial, derivatives, norestriction, and even the over-arching, dontaggregate. :)
I think you need to explain “Opt-in” further. I never opted into Technorati, Google or Bloglines yet my feed is in each.
Wouldn’t an opt-out (partly via robots.txt) be a better system? Opt-in makes network effect very difficult to take advantage of.
I think the winner there is “Opt-in” unless you are a pure search play (which I think many services would try to spin).
If I want to be in a network directory service thing, I’ll add myself, thanks.
The devil’s advocate in this is, what’s the difference between a podcast network vs a google.com and such. We don’t opt-in to Google, should we? And yes I realize that google leaves the links as is.. it’s more a conceptual issue.
Ultimately, opt-in. (Side note: I haven’t updated many many podcast feeds for months and yet they are listed in various directories. That’s a neat trick, eh?)
Great list Todd!
Re: opt-in and claim:
We will be adding a claim feed feature to podcast.com, after we open the doors up to users, once we iron out a few bugs here and there.
This will enable the feed publisher to access more info about the traffic garnered from their feed – and also open up other opportunities. And also opt out of the ‘feedpool’ if they so wish.
However, we want people to find feeds through us, rather like I find a website via google (once our search is fixed up) – but I can’t imagine many feed publishers wanting to avoid being in the ‘feedpool’, in the same way that I doubt many people want to stop Google from indexing their public content for people to find.
It depends on the content though, of course. ;)
Hopefully, by Gnomedex I’ll have a lot more to say about all this, is also the importance and power of OPML, given the right tools, in relation to all of the above.
Cheers!
K