Feeds2Be: Either you create an RSS feed, or you will be “scraped”

If your site doesn’t do RSS, well, prepare for it to be “scraped.” The barbarians are breaking down your gates. This is not entirely new, but the sheer number of operators who are doing this is eye-opening.

We heard about the latest operation, Feeds2Bee, via Steve Rubel, who writes a great blog called MicroPersuasion, about the impact of social media on pubic relations, and who seems to find everything first (his name, btw, is pronounced like Rub-elle, with accent on the end), including spotting SiliconBeat when we first launched in late 2004. Here’s what Steve says about Feeds2Be:

An emerging category of tools has popped up that create RSS feeds for those sites that don’t have any. Feeds2Be is powered by humans. They offer a directory of feeds. If it’s not in the directory you can alert them and they will build a feed for the site you submit. Feed43 takes a different approach by creating them through HTML scraping.

There are a handful of other folks who are doing this, because the demand is so great. The majority of sites don’t offer any sort of RSS syndicaton, but normal users are now wanting it.

Feeds2Be is different because it does it by hand. Not that there’s much you can do about Feeds2Be and Feed43. If they were wrapping adsense around your content, sure, that would be actionable. Or if they were offering full-text feeds, that may also be challengeable. But if they’re offering your content in excerpts and creating links to the full content, that’s fair use. So you may want to get up to speed yourself.

We talked with Dor Shemer, who runs Feeds2Be. He doesn’t plan to run this as a company, merely as a service, for free. He currently doesn’t plan to make any money from it, though that could change if the right opportunity comes along. He does it on his spare time, and is feeling a little overwhelmed keeping up with all the requests he’s getting. He’s looking for people to help.