First of all, I was want to emphasize again that I strongly believe that Yahoo! Pipes is a dream come true for marketers, finally offering us a tool to easily conduct business intelligence and create RSS Radars.

However, the more you think of it, the more obvious all the dangers become obvious.

Sure, these were here before, but never before have they been accessible on a mass scale, for free, and with such ease of use.

Just consider it ...

Yahoo! Pipes gives anyone, with some time on their hands to learn how it works, the power to remix, filter and manipulate third-party content. In essence this means that you can easily take someone elses RSS feed and repurpose their content to best suit your needs and at the same time ignoring the needs of the publisher who is investing time, money and other resources into his content creation.

1. Creating Third-Party RSS Feeds with Your Standalone RSS Ads

Let's get started with something easy. Yahoo! Pipes allows you to combine any amount of XML data sources and filter them to create an output that best matches your needs.

For example, you could take 100 RSS feeds that talk about search engine marketing, combine them, deduplicate the posts, and filter the posts by various keywords to really create a highly focused content stream, for example on optimizing your site for Google.

With the power that Yahoo! Pipes gives you, you could now add your own content, via your own RSS feed, and create an output that mixes all the above feeds on SEM with standalone ads for your SEM services.

Now just promote the RSS feed on your site and start grabbing subscribers. If the RSS feeds you're using as inputs are offering full-text content, your subscribers will be able to read third-party SEM tips from your RSS feed, directly from their RSS Readers, without even taking notice that these articles weren't written by you. But at the same time they would be exposed to your ads, offering your own SEM services.

In essence, using this approach you could leverage the content written by third-party experts, without their permission, to directly build your own brand as an expert and directly generate sales.

The other possibility would be to use the same third-party content, but instead of also publishing ads for your own services, rather publishing paid ads. Again, you would be using third-party content to fuel your own revenues, without the publishers' permissions ... actually directly stealing from them.

2. Adding Ads into Content Items / Removing Native Ads in Content Items

Now, I'm not really 100% certain this is doable (haven't played with the service enough yet), but articles floating around the internet seem to indicate so.

Again, imagine taking the same SEM feeds and creating a new remixed output using them. But this time, you also use Yahoo! Pipes to remove the ads their content items already contained, replacing them with your own.

The result would be a full-text article from an SEM expert, with your SEM services ad directly below the article, taking direct advantage of the article to sell your services ... perhaps even miss-leading the reader that you are the author of the article.

3. Creating Spam Sites

Spam sites are becoming an increasing problem, with unethical webmasters taking advantage of third-party RSS feeds to fully fuel their own sites, in the hopes of targeted content increasing their search engine rankings and serving as a vehicle to drive Google AdSense clicks and revenues.

Yahoo! Pipes now makes this even simpler, actually enabling these webmasters to build full websites of highly relevant and smartly remixed content that will actually provide their visitors with some value and thus even further increase their AdSense revenue potential.

How Can Your Protect Your Content?

Yahoo! Pipes lists 3 ways for publishers to protect their content:

• Configure your web server to block the user agent "Yahoo Pipes"
• Add a "noindex" meta to your RSS feed: <meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noindex" />
• E-mail pipes-optout@yahoo-inc.com with a list of the feed URLs you want blocked

Of course, the dillema here is that by blocking Yahoo! Pipes in fear of unethical practices you are also blocking acceptable uses of your content by legitimate users and are thus decreasing your content syndication opportunities.

Is It the Tool or the Users?

The four examples are just the tip of the iceberg. With the power of Yahoo! Pipes the "opportunities" for content theft are becoming nearly unlimited.

Of course, this isn't the fault of Yahoo! Pipes. It's just a tool ... and it's in the hands of users what they do with the tool.

Unethical webmasters have actually been doing this for quite some time now even without Yahoo! Pipes. But now they have a stronger tool in their hands, and it's only a question of time when this will hit "the black market mainstream".

What Can Yahoo! Do?

Yahoo! Pipes isn't a problem yet, but when it reaches "the black market mainstream", publishers will start taking notice, and that my create a backslash against Yahoo.

But what can they really do?

• Somewhat limit the level of manipulation you allow with third-party feeds, at least preventing the removal of inline ads
• Create a new RSS element that will allow the RSS feed publisher to request an e-mail notification of Yahoo! Pipes use of his feeds, by simply placing that element in the RSS feed
• Allow the RSS feed publishers to mark their feeds as "Yahoo! Pipes syndication available only on-request", enabling them to authorize the use through the Pipes user interface [this one might be going a little far:)]
• Implement a stringent "no unfair use" policy, immediately blocking users that exhibit such uses

On the other side, adding all of these administrative hurdles to the pipes creation process for the user would greatly dimish the service's mass appeal.

So what's the right way to do it?

Please comment below ...

[you can now post comments, but you will receive an error message after you submit them ... but they will still be published]