I made a site for a health related org and I pulled in some feeds to it from other sites that had information, mainly on skin disorders, more exactly one particular skin disorder. But there really weren't that many where to pull feeds from. Mostly the sites I found were those of full of quacks and humbug.

I don't really know if it's successful or not, atleast not yet. I've still to make a reference to the feeds somewhere and make them usable in some sort of way. After all the site is not that much about feeds as it is about giving information about a certain skin disorder. Also, many of the RSS feeds I found were in english or some other foreign language to us finns, so it'd be a bit stupid to incorporate them eg. to the front page as the rest of the pages are in finnish.

Using RSS to aggregate content is like content syndication for most publications. With syndicated content one usually ask for permission (and pay a fee if syndicating through the likes of Reuters).

Now, a lot of sites offers RSS feeds that are mostly targeted to users that are using a news reader. Content providers might not like see their content syndicated.

RSS feeds are free to use, of course, but a site owner might prefer original content.

I am not against Aggregator and I try to convice clients to aggregate some contents. But for them the concept is sometimes hard to grasps.

Also, sometimes they would like more granularity. But is the RSS feed is too generic, they feùr having wrong contents published in their sites.

So I guess it's a case by case decision for site owners.

Actually I use FeedAPI to pull news that I read from my google reader shared items.

It could be the possibly of duplicate content and maybe they don't want to get ranked down through google. I'm not really sure, but I thought it was kind of the whole purpose of RSS was to share data back and forth, not just pull it. Maybe the semantic web will help change that.

Duplicate content may be a good reason not to aggregate content of other sites on your own site. Some webmasters, even though they offer rss feeds, don't want their content to be aggregated on other sites, etc.

What do you think are good reasons to aggregate feeds on your site?

Hey, Bert

I am currently in the process of starting to run it on a production site, one of the major pitfalls I see at the moment is the lack of control over the feeds. As Jaro, mentiond allot of RSS feeds offer news that isnt directly appropiate for your site, and somehow you would like to select what links, what content (i.e rss feeds also send information as, we released a new site function) you would like to leave out. I know that if you have around 20/30 RSS feeds on one subject, its very hard to make sure that beside offering quality links (good content) that you dont have any duplicate or site specific stuff in it.

If you run anywere above those ammounts of RSS feeds, categorizations becomes more of a problem then any control.

I dont see, webmasters opposing you placing links on your site to their content though, even if you have a small summery on your site.

I dont understand how you can call it "afriad" of uncontrolled content, arnt you as webmaster at core of making sure you provide quality content to your users, no matter trough what technology?

Built entire sites around it, actually.

But part of the problem in convincing clients to go with aggregating, especially around tags, is this: even once we convince them that they don't need absolute control over everything on their site, they still have the challenge of staying one step ahead of the spammers. If you're just curating a few posts a day or week, fine; but once you start getting serious volume, tag spam and splogging can become a real issue.

I use Aggregator on my own blog, or did for a while for a specific project. I actually get requests to share and syndicate content between sites all the time; the trick is that the user generally wants the content to be "real nodes", or different types shown in different ways, or otherwise non-transient. Aggregator-pulled data is inherently transient and not "on" my site, and is therefore not good enough for what they want.