Bill Spence and more Feed(ing) Frenzy
September 20th, 2004Jessica pointed me to an article by Bill Spence (CTO of Information Today) that appears in the September issue of Information Today (the magazine). In it, he describes his experiences being scraped by a third party feed “supplier”. Some great quotes:
“RSS feeds are the wave of the future. I’ve been hearing this from fellow information professionals and librarians, speakers at Information Today, Inc. (ITI) conferences, and many others for the last year or so. And I’m convinced that RSS is a good thing. I get it™ … I really do. (RSS aficionados will get the trademark reference here. For everyone else, there’s Google.)”
That trademark should belong to Jenny as she is the one who got me started with the “get it” phrase, although “get it” is probably not trademarkable. Yes, I am one of the librarians who hound Bill all of the time about RSS and how ITI should have their own feeds. You’ve heard it many times here so no need to peel that banana again.
“This recent brush with scraping offered us no other option than to provide our own EContentMag.com RSS feeds—ready or not…Having our content accessible via search engines drives more traffic to our Web sites, which is a good thing. Providing RSS feeds drives even more traffic to our Web sites. Also a good thing. But the decision to provide RSS feeds should be ours to make. So please, let us be the ones to make them. We get it … we really do.”
I have always had issues with third party scrapers (everytime I use that word I imagine someone hosing off my windshield after driving through the Holland Tunnel in downtown NYC), but as a content reader, I take what I can get. If a provider doesn’t supply a feed and a third party scrapes it, then I’ll grab the scraped feed. Plain and simple. Sure, it’s yucky (Bill uses more grown up words than I do, but his kids are a bit older than my Hallie, and yucky is used daily in my household), but again, I’ll take what I can get. Luckily for all of us, Bill does “get it” and I am looking forward to more feeds from ITI in the near future.
As an ironic aside, I would have totally missed this article if Jessica hadn’t point it out. But if Information Today had an RSS feed for their magazines….