Should I burn my feeds?

There was a great session on Wednesday at the IMA Public Media 2007 conference on RSS, which included Rick Klau from FeedBurner.

I’ve been checking them out for a while now, and trying to decide whether I should “burn” my feeds.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s holding me back, but I find myself reluctant to do so.

Is it just my “I want control” mentality, which says that handing my feeds over to a third party means I will somehow have less control?

(Not that I’ve ever done anything unusual with my feed that FeedBurner would stand in the way of).

Arguably, a service like FeedBurner would actually give me more control, since they enable a bunch of other functions that I can’t easily do in WordPress.

Is it the terms of service? They do say, in point four:

You hereby grant to FeedBurner a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to publicly display and distribute your content (the “Content”) in connection with the Service and the Advertising Program (provided you have opted into the Advertising Program as described in section 9 below), and you represent and warrant that you own or have rights to provide such Content for use with the Service.

But that seems fairly innocent – they get the right to display and distribute my content, which I want them to do, and my Creative Commons license would allow them to do anyway.

Point 13 in the TOS seems a bit odd: “You agree that FeedBurner may use your name and logo in presentations, marketing materials, customer lists, financial reports and Web site listings of customers.” But are they really going to want to use my name? I suspect this is for the really A-List bloggers.

Are any of you using FeedBurner? Have positive or negative experiences? Do Share . . .

1 Comment

  1. Hey John,

    Rick is pretty convincing isn’t he? ;) He’s one of the best here at FeedBurner at explaining what we do and why publishers should use us. (and…I’m not just saying that because he’s my boss!)

    Well…we’d sure be happy to have you utilize our tools. We have hundreds of thousands of happy customers. As for the promotional ability, we promote feeds a few different ways: through our website and blog, as well as “publisher buzz” – where we try to highlight some folks who are doing interesting or creative things with feeds. Only good stuff for you!

    Give us a shout if you have any questions!

    Jake Parrillo
    Publisher Services Team
    FeedBurner

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