But as hot as the debate is among bloggers, it is even more heated in the mainstream media. With millions of dollars invested in content creation and a root that is still firmly in the print and broadcast world, the traditional purveyors of news have far more to weigh when creating their RSS strategies.

So what decisions have they made? How have they decided to use RSS to distribute their content across the Web? In this article I’m going to evaluate twelve of the biggest names in the mainstream media and how they use this new technology.

Preface

Before delving into the analysis, a few caveats.

First, the RSS feed count is NOT a total count of all the feeds available on a site, but rather, the approximate number of feeds the company actively promotes. Many sites offer feeds not actively promoted and some offer custom RSS services akin to Technorati. Those are not counted.

Second, there is a difference between a synopsis feed and a partial feed. A partial feed pulls its content from the article itself where a synopsis feed is a specially-written summary for the feed itself.

Keep that information in mind as you read the details below.

Wire Services

Number of Feeds: 13
Style: Partial
Length: Less than fifty words.
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: No
Notes: The AP doesn’t seem very interested in RSS. It promotes 12 feeds actively plus another “Featured Feed” on their RSS page. The RSS page also contains some very basic subscription help and a very strict TOS that blocks almost all reuse of content. To make matters worse, there is no feed connected with the home page of their site and you have to look closely to find the link to the other feeds. Though they offer feeds for every section of the site, it is clear that they are not a featured product.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 3

Number of Feeds: 43
Style: Partial
Length: One Paragraph
Using FeedBurner: Yes
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: RSS clearly plays a much larger role on the Reuters site. Not only do they offer 43 feeds, but their “Top News” feed is available via autodiscovery on their home page. Also, their RSS page is clearly marked in the sidebar with both text and an the RSS icon. They also offer very clear subscription instructions, which are further supported via the FeedBurner pages, and a clear terms of service.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 6

Number of Feeds: 1 (English)
Style: Partial
Length: One Paragraph
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: RSS clearly isn’t a big deal to the world’s oldest news agency. It offers only one feed, which can be autodiscovered on their home page, and a concise terms of service for it on their RSS page. All in all, their RSS strategy seems to be a complete void.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 2

Number of Feeds: 18
Style: Partial
Length: One Paragraph
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: UPI’s RSS page is clean, concise and has a decent number of feeds. Unfortunately, their link link to a request form to use their feeds on your site seems to be broken, linking back to their home page.The page itself works fine though, even if it is devoid of any effective RSS information and only contains a handful of chicklets for guidance.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 4

Television

Number of Feeds: 28
Style: Headline/Partial
Length: One Paragraph
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: Finding CNN’s RSS page is no small feat. However, it is not worth the effort. Though it contains, a good number of feeds, some decent explanation of RSS and a robust, if perhaps overly thorough, terms of service, the feeds are a disappointment. They alternate between headline-only and partial feeds, making them very difficult to use, even in a vanilla RSS reader.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 4

Number of Feeds: 26
Style: Synopsis
Length: One Sentence
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: No
Notes: The BBC’s home page does not have an autodiscovery feed and the link to their RSS page is fairly buried. However, the content on the page is very good, including a decent number of feeds, a clear terms of service and instructions of making custom feeds. They also have prominent links to other services including mobile alerts, email newsletters and podcasts. Though I am not sure how I feel about the synopsis feeds, my biggest issue is that they do not promote their feeds more.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 6

Number of Feeds: 15
Style: Synopsis/Partial
Length: One Sentence
Using FeedBurner: Yes
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: Fox News readers must not use RSS heavily. The Fox News RSS page seems to be hastily thrown together with a very heavy-handed license that, while allowing reuse of their feed, places a lengthy set of restrictions. The feeds themselves are strange. Some stories seem to use the first paragraph from the story itself, others seem to be a synopsis.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 4

Number of Feeds: 147
Style: Synopsis
Length: One Sentence
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: Visiting the MSNBC RSS page can be very overwhelming. The page is actually spread across four sub-pages and contains a whopping 147 feeds. Though the page has some very good information about how to use RSS, it is strangely devoid of any terms of use. The feeds themselves are unique in that they include images embedded in them. The text is, generally, a short one-sentence synopsis of the article though some seemed to pull from the opening paragraph.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 6

Newspapers

Number of Feeds: 68 (Plus 15 Podcasts)
Style: Synopsis/Partial
Length: One Sentence/Approx. 50 Words
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: The New York Times RSS page is a robust collection of RSS feeds framed by good information about RSS and a solid terms of service. The site even offers a tool to embed their headlines into your site. Their feeds alternate between providing a one-sentence synopsis for news articles and a 50-word partial feed for blog entries.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 7

Number of Feeds: 184
Style: Synopsis/Partial
Length: One Sentence/One Paragraph/Several Paragraphs
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: No
Notes: The Washington Post claims to have over 150 RSS feeds on their RSS page. but a quick count locates a total of at least 184. The page itself includes some great information about subscribing to RSS feeds but no information regarding a terms of use. The main feeds themselves are synopsis feeds and, on rare occasion, include images. Some of the smaller feeds are partial encompassing the first paragraph and some of the opinion feeds seem to encompass several paragraphs of the entry, though never the whole item.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 7

Number of Feeds: 123
Style: Partial
Length: One Paragraph
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: The London Times RSS page is a lengthy list of well over 100 feeds in a variety of categories. The page includes some basic information on how to subscribe to RSS feeds though a terms of use is strangely missing. The feeds themselves are pretty cut and dry partial feeds using the first paragraph of the original article, this is true in all cases. The system could stand some improvement, but is overall pretty solid for MSM.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 6

Number of Feeds: 25
Style: Synopsis
Length: One Sentence
Using FeedBurner: No
Autodiscovery on Home Page: Yes
Notes: It is hard to tell exactly how many RSS feeds The Guardian has. It doesn’t display all of its feeds on its RSS page and, instead, sprinkles most of them throughout the site. The number above only represents the number promoted on the above page. Their RSS page, however, does provide some very basic information on subscribing to a feed though there is no information about a terms of use. The feeds themselves are straightforward one-sentence synopsis feeds.
RSS-Friendly Rating: 6

Trends

When looking at the evidence above, several trends become evident.

Conclusions

There weren’t many surprises for me as I sought to compile this list. The fact that the mainstream media is being very stingy with what it puts into its RSS feeds should shock no one reading this.

However, it is clear on closer examination that at least most of these companies are actively courting RSS subscribers and some are doing it somewhat well. It is clear that these companies do have an RSS feed strategy and are executing it.

Though we often think of the mainstream media as being dinosaurs in the digital age, they do seem to be making very real, if imperfect, efforts to catch up. Even though I didn’t feel comfortable giving any of the sites above a “7″ for their RSS friendliness, the quality of effort was still higher than I expected.

Now, if we could just overcome this pesky use of partial feeds, we might have something that even the staunches RSS reader can enjoy.

FeedBurner took the complicated black art of feed management/tracking and whittled down into an easy “set and forget” service.

The case for FeedBurner was further bolstered in March of last year when it released its “Uncommon Uses” feature. With that upgrade, FeedBurner also become the most powerful tool available for fighting scraping.

However, since then, plugins such as AntiLeech and CopyFeed have become popular and widely used, giving new powers to those who host their own feed. Meanwhile, FeedBurner was acquired by Google and the entire service seems to have shifted its focus.

Now, with those developments in mind, it is time to take another look at FeedBurner and decide if the trade off is worth it or not.

The Case For FreedBurner

Those who support FeedBurner note that the service has a set of powerful features for bloggers. They offer statistic tracking, customization and feed monitoring. It also offloads the feed to their servers, great for sites with a lot of feed subscribers, and ensures that the feed remains active even if the original site goes down.

Because of the appeal of those services, they have been picked to manage well over 1.1 million feeds and tens of millions of subscriptions. This has given them an almost God-like understanding of how feeds are used and where they are used.

That knowledge is put to use in their uncommon uses feature, which tracks uses of your feed that don’t fit the typical pattern. You can check your uncommon uses dialog on a regular basis and discover at least some cases of feed scraping.

FeedBurner also has the ability to perform many plugin-like functions from within their system. You can add copyright notices to your feed, affix a Creative Commons License or create a summary feed if you wish, all without modifying your original feed.

All of this is from a service that, since the purchase by Google, is completely free and is filled with other great features such as chicklets, feed counters and a robust API.

To fans of FeedBurner, there is no question, FeedBurner is a powerful service that provides important features at a price you can not beat.

The Case Against FeedBurner

When you offload your RSS feed to a third party, as with FeedBurner, it comes with drawbacks. The biggest is that you lose all ability to block any scraping of your feed.

WordPress users who have their own server and host their own feed can take advantage of plugins such as AntiLeech and CopyFeed, both of which make it possible to block abuse of the feed before it happens. Meanwhile, FeedBurner has gone on the record saying that they “cannot remove your feed from sites which have resyndicated the content.”

This means that, by in large, FeedBurner users have to focus on detecting scraping and stopping it, rather than blocking it at the source.

However, those detection tools seem to be somewhat flawed as well. Though their uncommon uses tool is powerful, mine seems to report my site as being the number one uncommon use.

As scraping has moved away from traditional RSS republishing and into scraping search results and summaries from third parties, the power of the uncommon uses tool wanes. Simply put, scrapers just aren’t grabbing the original feed at the rate they used to.

Since most of FeedBurner’s features can be mimicked using other tools that don’t require you to offload your feed, many feel that it is time to abandon the service and take direct control of our RSS content.

Conclusions

There are no easy answers here. The only universal truth that I see is that FeedBurner is a must-have for anyone using a Blogspost, WordPress.com, or other free blogging service. Since you don’t have direct control over your feed to begin with, you sacrifice nothing by using FeedBurner and gain a wealth of information and tools.

But for those of us with our own servers, the choice is more difficult. FeedBurner might make sense on sites where the feed traffic is very high and could cause a drain on the service. It also makes sense if there are reliability issues that could negatively impact the user experience.

However, for most users, it would seem that you can get more features and better protection by learning the tools available to you and taking control of your own feed. That being said, those without a lot of computer experience may benefit from FeedBurner, but would still likely be better served by hitting the books.

Personally, I’ve had a growing case of “buyers remorse” in the past year since I wrote about this issue. I’ve been reading closely the FeedBurner exit strategy and considering the move.

I haven’t done it yet, largely because I fear losing subscribers and do enjoy many of the features of FeedBurner, including the reliability, but there is little doubt in my mind, and in the mind of others that I’ve talked with, that FeedBurner has stepped away from this issue for the most part and that has sped up greatly since the acquisition.

Still, I want to leave the question with you, is FeedBurner a service to use or a service to avoid? If you were starting a site today, what choice would you make?

Leave a comment below or drop me a line with your thoughts.

First, it became clear that the owners of FeedBurner were going to receive a $100 million payday. Second, it was clear that Google would receive access to a berth of statistics about RSS feeds not previously available to them. Finally, it was clear that Google was making yet another foray into the advertising market, buying up the the budding FeedBurner Advertising Network. 

However, many questions have gone unanswered. Though FeedBurner attempted to head off some of the questions with their FAQ on the subject, many of the more difficult questions remain. Will Google integrate FeedBurner into its analytics program? Will the FeedBurner ad network be integrated into Adsense? What new features will Google bring to FeedBurner?

However, possibly the toughest question is what impact, if any, will this merger have on feed scraping and spam blogging? With the largest search engine, largest ad network and most popular spam blog host merging with a company managing nearly 750,000 feeds, it seems only logical to expect at least some changes in how Google fights scraping and spam.

A Wealth of Knowledge

With millions of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of feeds and nearly half a million publishers, FeedBurner knows more about RSS feeds, who is subscribed to them and how they are being used than just about anyone else.

They already offer an uncommon uses feature that tracks non-conventional feed subscribers and offers a feed flare service that can help track feed use.

Google, by purchasing FeedBurner, will be gaining access to all of this knowledge. More than just an RSS platform, FeedBurner provides an bird’s eye view of RSS and, though Google is no stranger to hosting RSS feeds through its Blogspot service, FeedBurner analytics and broad range of users, almost all of which are non-spammers, brings a depth and breadth that Google has not had in this area.

If done correctly, this merger could be more than a strategic buyout, but also a marriage of the minds, combining Google’s dominance in search and advertising with FeedBurner’s knowledge of RSS. That marriage could, at least theoretically, prove very formidable when dealing with scraping and spamming.

A Tag Team

With the purchase of FeedBurner, Google will not only be indexing but hosting the feeds for hundreds of thousands of blogs, including many of the most popular. It will have the ability to know what sites and servers are accessing the feed, which of those are suspicious and where to find sites using feeds questionably.

At the simplest end, this can be used to bolster duplicate content detection. If a site scrapes a feed and republishes it, even if the use is permitted and the scraper is not a spam site, it is still duplicate content and needs to be indexed below the original work.

More advanced than that would be checking to see which sites and networks scrape a large number of feeds. By detecting hidden elements in the feed itself, something FeedBurner already does, Google can see which sites are scraping large amounts of content. From there, they can deindex the worst infringers or even cut the applicable Adsense account if appropriate.

Finally, if feed licensing terms can be better expressed, it might be possible for Google to use this information to automatically mark scrapers as spammers. Not only could they deny access to the feed, but also take action on eliminating the spam from their search engine as well as cut the hosting or advertising for the site if applicable.

The end result of all of this would be that FeedBurner would become more than just a way to track and monitor your feed, but also a means to claim your content and ensure that Google knows you are the original creator of the work, not the scraper that came along immediately after.

It’s a nice dream, but unfortunately it is most likely just a fantasy.

Puncturing the Dreams

The problem with this vision is that Google, already, has proved incapable of coordinating its spam fighting efforts across its different arms. Filing a DMCA notice to Blogspot will not result in any action being taken against the owner’s Adsense account, even if the site was clearly spam. Likewise, a notice to the search engine will have no effect on a Blogspot account and a notice against Adsense will have no effect on either the site or how it is indexed.

Google, it seems, is a true case of the right hand not knowing what the left one is doing.

This is frustrating as it requires legitimate Webmasters to double or triple efforts to ensure that a spam blog and the gains from it are entirely wiped out. It slows down the pace of spam fighting and makes stopping the practice of spam blogging, not just the splogs themselves, a more daunting task.

Since Google has thus far been unable to coordinate its efforts across three areas and there has been no clear push to remedy that, it seems unlikely that the addition of a fourth front will help this matter. Though I am hopeful that will be the case and can certainly see the potential, it doesn’t seem likely.

Still, this could be the opportunity that Google has been looking for to not just battle spam blogs, but to potentially get ahead of them.

Conclusions

Google has an incredible opportunity with the purchase of FeedBurner. More than just a potentially savvy business move, it’s the chance to do some real good and make some tremendous progress in the war on spam.

To do this would take a great deal of effort, likely cost a good sum of money and probably cost Google a significant portion of their revenue stream, however, it would make the Web much better place for all of us.

There is little doubt that Google’s purchase of FeedBurner will imbue them with a lot of new knowledge and lead to some interesting possibilities. What remains to be seen is how they use that knowledge.

Though all of this article is just conjecture and guesswork, it shows that the possibilities for this marriage are great. However, it will be up to Google to determine how this alignment is used and if the potential is squandered or not.

Let us hope that this will be a fruitful marriage, producing more than just extra lining for Google’s pockets…