Web 2.0 and RSS = Content Theft?

The Net is Dead? On RSS and the coming wave of content theft

It is a pretty new perspective on the issue. When we crossover Google PageRank, as is recognized as an important benchmark of website popularity, with the way news aggregators syndicating RSS feeds; before long we will ponder: so they can fetch all the grestest contents from the web and get the highest page rank?

Most people understand the concept of running a site with meaningful content and earning some cash with advertisement embedded into this content. So what if you don't want to write the content yourself? You'll just STEAL it! Since the rise of RSS, stealing has never been easier. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication but to some it means Really Simple Stealing.

If we are taking the view that Web 2.0 is becoming the trend, we should also embrace the idea that the web architecture is transforming, from client/server model to more like P2P network. Taking Bittorrent, eDoney and Kazaa aside, but the World Wide Web itself is becoming symmetric, every hosts can have equal chance and ability to aggregate, view, quote and publish; making the traffic to websites less significant, or instead we should honour the contents by ranking the sources of feeds.

So we can share files, contents, and what next? Maybe the wind is blowing towards utility (or distributed) computing…