media companies and RSS

So while I was looking at the Economist website for information on the Big Mac Index (a piece of genius if ever there was one), I noted there were CNN headlines in a little promo box (provided by Moreover). So CNN headlines are being snarfed by Moreover and appearing on the Economist, and CNN is OK with that. I guess as long as they link back — and they do — it’s no skin off their nose, but isn’t owning their content what they’re all about?

And coincidentally, it was Moreover’s spider crawling willy-nilly over CNN.com years ago that introduced me to RSS and syndication, though there was a gap between my exposure to it and any daily application of what I learned. I built an rss file generator that updated every hour when we fed new URLs to the search engines: useful while it lasted, but I had no idea where rss and rdf were headed.