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. :)