What can we do with your feed?

No, not an agricultural question, but rather one raised by Adrian in the comments below when he said:

“Ultimately if your RSS feed is published on your website you are asking for it to be included in all kinds of services both christian and not so I am surprised by this level of concern.”

Hmmm. But is there a limit to what you are allowing? When you publish a feed* for your blog, what are you happy to happen to it?

1. Be used via an aggregator on someones computer which allows someone to privately browse your content on their computer.
2. Be used for an online aggregator like Bloglines which allows someone to browse your content via their own private account on a website.
3. Be used as content on someone elses website with your permission and attributed to you.
4. Be used as content on someone elses website without your permission but still attributed to you.
5 Be used as content on someone elses website without your permission and not attributed to you.

I think anyone who publishes a feed is happy for 1 and 2 to happen. By definition if asked they will be happy for 3 to happen. 5 is clearly theft and is unacceptable. Buit what about 4? And is there a difference between 2 and 4?

*In case you don’t know what a feed is this is a sort of an explanation from Bloglines, the aggregator I use: “Many online information sources, including web sites, weblogs and news services, now broadcast their content to the web in so-called “syndicated feeds” or “news feeds” with new technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and ATOM. News aggregator software and services collect those syndicated feeds and present them to end users in a variety of ways.”

I’ll do a post about subscribing via Bloglines for the confused and / or baffled as it really is as easy as clicking the button to the right there, but in the meantime my one about subscribing via My Yahoo or MSN is here.