RSS to iPhone / iPod touch

DoYouFeed, a site that takes an RSS feed and formats it for pretty viewing on an iPhone or iPod touch. Once you give it an RSS feed to process, it returns an iPhone- iPod touch-friendly web page with the headlines and brief descriptions from the feed. Clicking on an article link pulls up the full text of the item but without the blog’s trappings — very handy if you’re using your gadget on a slow data network (as opposed to wireless).

While the reader itself works as advertised, I have two criticisms. The first is that the iPhone’s version of Safari already knows how to read RSS feeds — it does so by routing them through a service that Apple provides.

The second, and more serious one, is that DoYouFeed puts advertisements at the bottom of the full text article, thereby making money from the blogger’s words without returning any of it to the author. In the case of the DoYouFeed version of RSS4Lib’s feed, this is in direct violation of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license I placed in the RSS feed. This license only allows, as it says, non-commercial use of the feed. DoYouFeed should parse the RSS feed and either not display non-commercial-use only feeds or not display advertisements on them.

Update (4:00 PM 11/20/08) — fixed URL to DoYouFeed; left off a pesky “www.”

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