Steve Rubel posted earlier today about the problem with blog plagiarism and the role full-text RSS feeds can play in this annoyance. Rubel posits that full-text feeds may eventually die off due to the ease of republishing them to plagiarist's sites.

First, what are full text feeds? RSS feeds allow you to syndicate many site's content into a news reader of your choice. This allows you to keep up to date on many sites without having to visit each site every day just to see if something new has been published. Instead, the content comes to you. Personally, I use Bloglines to track the latest content on around 100 blogs and news sites each day, and also use it to track new classifieds on Craigslist categories that interest me, and the Dilbert's daily cartoon.

Content publishers choose between publishing the full text of their content in their feeds, or limiting it to something less than 100%, such as just headlines or a headline together with a snippet or summary of the story's content. Subscribing to Technology Evangelist will show you exactly what full-text feeds look like. :-) The biggest advantage of using full-text feeds is the time it saves regular readers of your site. Do you really want to force them to click through to your site to read every article? Clearly, they'll need to click through to read or post comments related to an article, but forcing them to click through just to read a post or article is an annoyance.

The full-text feed problem Rubel refers to is caused by spammers plagiarizing bloggers and other content creator's wholesale RSS feeds as "content" for their sites. One way to address this problem - as Rubel describes - is to switch to publishing partial feeds. However, does this really solve the problem?

In my experience, spammers will steal RSS content from full or partial feeds. Either way, it's an easy way for them to gain daily access to a fresh supply of free content for their spam sites. The most blatant example of this comes from spammer's scraping of Google News search results where only a headline and, at most, a sentence of an article's content is available. I've written before about Google News and AdSense's Role in Blog Spam, and haven't seen any improvements since February.

Personally, I think full-text feeds continue to be the way to go. To address the plagiarism issue, Technology Evangelist publishes ads within our RSS feed which then end up on spammer's site when they steal our content. If they're going to steal our content, steal our ads too, right? Additionally, we cross link to other content our on site using absolute URLs leading to multiple links back to our site from sites where our content ends up. Sure, spammers could scrape out the ads and back links, but that doesn't seem to be a priority for today's spammers.

But most importantly, we do this out or respect for our readers. We know that we prefer reading RSS feeds from sites publishing full-text feeds and assume you do too. If for some reason you don't like full text feeds, you'll generally have the option to crop our feeds using the RSS reader of your choice.

How do you think plagiarism and splogs effect RSS feeds? Have you done anything to address this issue? Will spammers simply switch to scraping content if RSS feeds were restricted? Is there a way to authenticate RSS feeds so only legitimate users have access to them without causing logistical pain for users?