I was pretty chuffed when Derek Powazek actually posted a comment on my whinge about him not providing full RSS feeds… so chuffed, in fact that I’ll reprint it here:
“I prefer to only include excerpts in RSS, because I don’t want my content to appear elsewhere in totality. If someone wants to excerpt it in a rss reader or on a website, that’s fine, so long at there’s a link to the rest. But if I had full content in the feed, then what’s the point of the website?
I make a website, first and foremost. The RSS is icing.” – Derek Powazek
Which made me think, and comment that, for me the RSS feed is more the flour than the icing, going along more with Scoble’s unsubscribe / subscribe policy of favouring full feeds.
But then in pops another Darren piece on copyright infringement by blogstars:
“BlogStars is one of those blogs that is really not a blog. It is a public News Aggregator, disguised as a blog really that publishes other people’s RSS feeds – in full.”
Which made me think… well… I guess that my CC license prohibits reproduction for commercial purposes… but I’ve got no trouble (actually I rather like it) if, say, Judith cites me (and Weblogs Inc are ads ahoy!) so wouldn’t me objecting, on a license front to, say, blogstars citing me (like they ever would :o) be hypocritical.
Am I, by publishing a full RSS feed in essence agreeing for my work to be syndicated somewhere else?
Part of me thinks that I am… and makes me wonder if I should do summaries instead (more palatable for the reader too?)
Whaddya reckon?