Some recent discussions have brought up a volley of concerns around how new subscribers/readers coming into contact with feeds that are spliced together either via the major publicity & aggregation engines or the RSS splicing done by advertisers will know who those feeds are from & why they're reading them.

For example. Let's say that your product name is "American Association", but there's a whole slew of others with "American Associations" of some sort. Right? So, when the people that really want to keep tabs on what's going on with your assocation through, say, a Technorati feed search on "American Association", they are going to also pick up a bit of other stuff that they don't want. It's not really spam, because they're certainly asked for it, but it's not the core material that they were looking for. Let's call this extra stuff 'peripheral postings' for argument's sake.

Are you doing anything to distinguish your RSS feed from everyone else? Is your logo in your feed? Do you have your tagline in each post?

Any ideas on identifying each post as yours as the amount of feed splicing and aggregating grows with the popularity of Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster?

At PubSub, we make sure that the Feed title and feed URL are kept with each entry that we publish. We insert a "ps:source-feed" element in to every entry we republish. That element contains the feed meta-data in addition to a link to the feed itself. I've been fighting hard to get the "HeadInEntry" option built into the Atom format to make this a standard feature of aggregate feeds. My hope is that we'll soon be able to replace the PubSub specific "ps:source-feed" element with a standard "head" element and that other feed aggregators, search engines, etc. will use the same mechanism. Unless an aggregator does something like what we're doing, it seems inevitable that the linkage between an entry and its source will be lost.

bob wyman
CTO, PubSub.com