Fairly recently, in a talk with an older colleague, also an IT journalist, I’ve discovered that the guy thinks that RSS is a horrible idea. It’s like letting anyone out there steal your content. His stance on portals that syndicate content from various sources in one place via RSS, was even more severe. Popurls? Netvibes? Thieves, he said.
I was outraged at his outragedness. I could not believe that anyone can have something against RSS; after all, no one is forcing anyone to have an RSS feed. Hell, no one is forcing anyone to even be online.
The same sentiment strikes me at Prince’s lawsuit against YouTube. Dude, you should be happy that people want to see your videos. It’s as simple as that.
Read a longer analysis of the whole affair over at muhammadsaleem.com.
actually i’m one of the top referrers to reddit, digg, boingboing whatever. and i’d say they’re pretty happy about the traffic
@Thomas: heh, yeah, thanks for stopping by. I love Popurls, it’s one of those simple but great ideas. Keep up the great work (;
Truthfully, as an artist, I despise the freeloader mentality that’s oh so common on the ‘net. You want free stuff? Fine, go get stuff that’s free. But don’t steal.
RSS (i.e. news feeds) I find useful - free ones as well as a handful of pay ones. Aggregation is ok AS LONG AS it’s only a referral to the original source page.