I have noticed that, beside Planet (and Universe) Gentoo and Linux-Planet — both of which I asked for my blog to be syndacated on, there are a number of other websites that seem to fetch and use my own posts, fetched from the atom feeds.
Some of these are community websites, other are “hubs” that supposedly focus content for users; quite a few though seem to be scams and websites that simply take others’ posts and snap a bunch of AdSense units over them. While I could go as far as pushing for DMCA violation for those – as often CC-BY-NC-ND is not respected – I’d rather not, and especially I’d rather go with technical solutions of some kind.
What I would like to do is to have different feeds depending on who’s requesting them; so have a “pure” feed, with the original unmangled content from Typo for the syndications I allow explicitly (with host-based detection is even better), one Flattr-enabled feed to provide to feed readers and Google, and one, eventually, with AdSense units to shove down the abusive websites.
Now, for the moment I set up the two most-subscribed feeds on Google’s FeedBurner; I’d still ask you to keep using my blog’s host URLs though, as that might not be a definitive solution; if I can find some software to deal with this, or even write a Typo plugin to handle this for me, I’ll drop FeedBurner again; I’m just not happy to have to outsource feeds handling for my own blog. I’ll call this an experiment. If you happen to subscribe to the FeedBurner feeds, don’t worry, I’ll make sure to keep them updated, and hopefully without mangling content if I do handle that on my side.
Now, the important information on this post relates to the “rules” for syndicating my content, so that it is clear whether you’ll get the Ad-encumbered feed or not. Obviously if I asked to be syndicated, as is the case for Planet Gentoo and Linux Planet, then you’ll get the absolutely clear feed: no ads, no flattr buttons, nothing else. If the website has no content, a lot of ads, and even worse no indication of where the content truly comes from, I’m going to consider technical means to hinder the syndication, such as pushing ads on the feed myself, or removing the content, or adding a footer making the author and the terms of the content’s license explicit.
For the rest of the websites, I’m generally not going to bother; if you’re a decent news aggregator, and don’t have advertisement as main content on your site, and you abide to the content’s license giving proper attribution rather than showing off my content as your own, I’ve got no problem. I’ll be happy if you were to flattr me and I might decide to push a Flattr button on the content pushed on.. if you wish to avoid that, you’re free to contact me and we can work out the details.. in general I have no objection to that as long as your aggregation software is decent enough to cache responses using If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since, and to use deflated (compressed) content transfer.
