Steve Rubel's feed is being reproduced in full on other sites that are running adsense....& I'm sure that he's not the one seeing the income. What's the way forward? Micro Persuasion:

"Beyond going to partial text RSS feeds - which I am loathe to do - I have really no other course of action right now other to email the site operators, which I have done.

This problem is only going to grow over time. Perhaps some digital watermarking technology needs to come into play here. Or, once again, Google needs to step in and shut down all Adsense sites that are deliberately spamming the blogosphere and bloggers."

One thing to subscribe to a feed so that you can read it, or even to put that feed's headlines in your sidebar. Another thing entirely to publish the whole thing & claim that it is yours. I guess this is one good argument for partial feeds, or for feeds that can only be read by readers & can't be converted back into post-able text?

I clearly don't understand the economics of the adsense... but how many people would you have to do this to, & how many crappy low-traffic slum-blogs would you have to have, to make this worth the effort?

Plenty of talk in the comments at Micropersuasion about whether the republication of a whole feed is legitimate, with some commenters suggesting that "whining" about this somehow equates to MSM "whining" about the threat from the blogosphere. To those commenters I would suggest that there has to be a difference between excerpting a feed (with attribution) for an occasional "best of the web" post, & republishing that feed wholesale while pretending that you're somehow responsible for it. Are there RSS ethics that have yet to emerge as the new technology catches on?

Filed in: splogs, spam, blogtech, feeds, rss