The Good, The Bad and The Unbelievable of RSS

Syndication is probably the best way to distribute content, and it is widely used by authors who are aiming to gain exposure or publish original content that otherwise might not be immediately available to the masses if following a traditional publishing way. Although RSS is not exclusive to writers, anyone who publishes content on the net is responsible for it when it reflects an original idea, thoughts, or simply express a personal opinion.

It is also certain that not all the content on the web is original and that all of us have to cite or quote other's words from time to time but if content is your main concern, understanding what RSS can do for you and against is a must.

Like said above, syndicating your work is the best way to get your readers involved in your work, whether you are publishing a fictional story or your last findings developing software or a marketing strategy. This is the good side of RSS feeds, but turning your head to the dark you will find that anyone cannot only retrieve your content for reading purposes, but also to reproduce it on other websites.

RSS format may be easily integrated into any web page with a minimum effort using a programming language such as PHP or even in simple HTML pages with the aid of JavaScript. There are many online tools to achieve this purpose. This is good when it comes to get acknowledgement, exposure or publicize a work, but bad if you want to keep exclusivity over syndicated content.

Many websites add terms of use to prevent people copy, reproduce or distribute the content, but not all people abide by those rules and the only way to learn who is breaking the TOS is monitoring continuously the web. Google has an alert system which is useful for this purpose, which sends an email whenever a given keyword or keyword chain occurs, delivered immediately, or on a pre-defined time basis.

The Unbelievable of all this is that you can do exactly the same reproducing other's content using RSS, and that those who reproduce RSS content when it is void may end being penalized by search engines for posting duplicate content. So whenever you want to include external feeds on your site, first make sure there is not restriction to grab the feed, and then be cautious with the amount of content reproduced to avoid penalizations.