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Content Scraping
When RSS arrived it made content scraping much easier. Instead of having to do things manually programmers and even almost clueless users, can now subscribe and get the latest updates on websites that have RSS feeds. Now instead of needing to look at the HTML code line per line all you need to do is copy the RSS file and paste it in your website. Better yet you can just click on the subscribe button, choose the application (RSS reader) you want to use, and be done with it.
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Content scraping has been around for quite some time. Although content scraping has a very negative connotation nowadays the truth is that there are really some valid reasons for its existence. For example if you have a website that provides snippets of news from different news sites such as CNN, BBC, MSNBC, etc. then you need a way to get parts of their content as teaser for the readers so they will head on the actual new site that has the full story. Before there was RSS getting this sort of content had to be done pretty much manually. To get the latest news programmers had to resort to looking at the code itself and finding out the exact part of the code they are interested in so they can get the content they need. Programmers had to “scrape” the content from each website since there was no other way of doing it. Scraping started out as benign enough and like in most things it is how you use it that makes it good or bad. If you think about it content scraping in this context is actually valid since most news sites don’t really mind if you display their headlines as long as you link to them because in the end it actually send more traffic to their site.