Free RSS feeds (Commercial use)

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leenoble_uk
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Free RSS feeds (Commercial use)

Post by leenoble_uk »

I'm just polishing up a recruitment website I've been developing and I left this till last because I hadn't done any XML parsing before.
I took a shortcut anyway and I'm using an aggregator script I downloaded off hotscripts. Time is money.
Anyway the client wanted a couple of news feeds from external sites on their news page to supplement it. They specifically requested BBC news and Financial Times.
So I took a look at their RSS feeds and the BBC have copyright restrictions in place for commercial use (FT don't seem to have any feeds?!) so I can't include them on the site.
I did a search for other sources of news and can only find ZDnet UK which offers feeds freely for commercial use.
Does anyone know of any others. The client specifically wants Business/Employment/Economics news rather than main headlines.
<rant>
I don't know what these sites problems is/are. I thought the point of one of the Ss in RSS was SYNDICATION. As long as the link points back to the originating source and the full story isn't stolen and reformatted to be passed off as original work without credit to the source then what harm is done? If anything we'd be driving more traffic TO their sites.
</rant>
Thanks for any help/links
Lee
kettle_drum
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Post by kettle_drum »

Try emailing FT and see what they say - their news ticker must connect to somewhere. Then i would recomend downloading a news feed program and seeing what sites they get news from and you will then know that you can get the rss feeds for those.
ezest
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Post by ezest »

Try same thing on http://www.prweb.com/. they also provide the free News feed with the chunk of code to integrate it.

Indeed its a syndication and its just that you can open-up those News/ pages in New window.
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patrikG
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Post by patrikG »

http://www.syndic8.com is another source for RSS feeds. Do think about what copyright for commercial use means: if you're not selling the news provided by the BBC, or make the news part of a service you're selling, but display them on your website generally accessible by the public, I wouldn't see to much of a legal problem there at all.
leenoble_uk
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Post by leenoble_uk »

It's the way they state in their T&C's that the RSS feeds are for personal use and they cite the example of posting them on a web log. They seem to specifically exclude their use on commercial websites.
I don't undertand why though as I said because all the links would direct people back to the BBC anyway so it's only driving traffic towards their site and it's not purporting to be anything more than an overview of the BBC headlines. Seems to me to be defeating the purpose of a syndicated feed. Ho hum.
Anyway, thanks for the links provided, I'll check them out.
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