layout: post title: CBC now has (headline only) RSS feeds created: 1102675276 categories:

• Personal Publishing
• Canada

Welcome to the party, CBC! Although that's about all the nice things I have to say about their implementation...

Someone left me a comment with a link directly to the free headlines page that lists all the RSS feeds available. Conveniently, that let me skip past the agreement page.

The agreement (which I didn't agree to, since I have that URL that jumps straight to the feed page) has some fun stuff in it:

Website Exclusivity. You guarantee that the CBC Feed or Feed Content shall be the exclusive content on your website from a general news and information provider.

Promotion. You shall not make any promotion or advertisement of the CBC Feed or Feed Content, without the written authorization of CBC/Radio-Canada.

Hmmm...I hope this isn't promoting the feed. Actually, I'm not going to include it in my aggregator here, because I might be accused of being a commercial user. Not that I would be interested in doing that -- it's a headline-only feed, which lost its appeal about 30 seconds after people starting using RSS.

Update: the agreement has been removed, and I sent a feedback email asking for (at least) teaser feeds.

And exclusivity?! Who are they kidding?

There is a pretty good selection of content, split into General, Sports, and Regional (one per province). Do I need to mention the part about it being a headline only feed again?

They've thoughtfully provided a list of news readers at the bottom of the page...cleverly missing such popular clients as NetNewsWire. Actually, the two Mac ones they mention are ones that I've never heard of. They actually mention My Yahoo! as an option, bu then cunningly only include a link to Bloglines in the web category of their list of readers.

Well, I guess I'm done beating up CBC for the day. They have an email address listed (headlines AT cbc.ca), so I'll send them an email tomorrow, politely asking for (at least) a teaser feed.