The upside of making your platform available as RSS is that its really easy to use. From the beginning, every search on Blogdigger has been available as both a web page and an RSS feed. As things stand today, upwards of 75% of our searches come through RSS, so the benefits of making a system accessible in this fashion are clear.

With every upside comes a downside. Being open means being easy to take advantage of. Our Terms of Service state that our search results feeds are licensed only for individual, non-commercial usage, meaning, they are meant to be used by individual people subscribing in aggregators. There are many sites that take content from Blogdigger (as well as other RSS-output services) and automatically post it to web pages in an effort to increase their search engine rankings with folks like Google. This sort of usage breaks Blogdigger's Terms of Service, and we are constantly monitoring our system for abuse, and blocking the offending third parties. This issue has taken on new significance for us recently, as we began advertising in our RSS feeds. It's important to our advertisers to have their ads seen by Blogdigger users, and not to be distributed willy-nilly around the web.

Whenever we can determine how to get in contact with a third-party site, we always extend to them the option of licensing a feed of search results from Blogdigger, without advertising. If this applies to anyone, please don't hestitate to contact us, we are happy to work out an arrangement that respects both the author's copyright and our advertisers' needs. We have a partner feed program that we are more than happy to set well-intentioned third-parties up with, as we have done with Clusty, Information.com, Webjay and others.

A final note, to aggregator developers. Most aggregators provide a unique User-Agent string that identifies their service (Bloglines, NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, SharpReader, Rojo, NewsGator, FeedOnFeeds, Juice and LiteFeeds are a few examples of services that provide nice descriptive User-Agent strings). There are some legitimate aggregators, however, that do not (we often see things like curl, MagpieRSS and Java, which are quite ambiguous). I would encourage services to uniquely identify themselves; you're providing valuable tools, and it helps everyone involved if you make it known who you are.