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Pheedo hijacking TheServerSide's feed?

Something odd just happened in my aggregator and I'm not sure how to explain it. I was reading through my Java related subscriptions and I noticed that The Server Side feed had just one entry, an "AD" for a service called Pheedo. It looked like this:

screenshot

So I went to theserverside.com and checked their newsfeed. It looked just fine and did not contain even one reference to Pheedo. Hmmm. What happened? So, I went back to NetNewsWire and choose "View XML Source" for The Server Side feed. I saw a feed with a The Server Side header and an atom:link element pointing to Pheedo with rel="start". See the screenshot below:

screenshot

So, what happened here? Just a glitch when The Server Side installed the Pheedo stuff or something more sinister. One thing's for sure, we're gonna need Adblock for feed-readers real soon now.

Dave Johnson in Blogging Comments [4]
Tags: Blogging

Comments:

I saw it too - weird huh!

Posted by Simon Brown on June 22, 2005 at 06:32 PM EDT #

It was a temporary glitch when The Server Site started using our services. Although the blank item has been removed from all their feeds, anyone who has already retreived this feed into their reader will still have the item -- removing it from the source won't remove it from the feed readers. Adam Kalsey CTO Pheedo

Posted by Adam Kalsey on June 23, 2005 at 02:25 PM EDT #

I am the Vice President and Group Publisher of the Application Development Media Group at TechTarget, of which TheServerSide.com. Over the last month we have been working with Pheedo to test their application and services. The only ad you should be seeing in your reader is one for TheServerSide.com Java In Action (JIA) Conference. We apologize for any inconvenience due to the temporary glitch and are working closely with Pheedo to eliminate the problem. Thanks, Mike Wallace

Posted by Mike Wallace on June 23, 2005 at 03:51 PM EDT #

Adding ads or ad banners inside RSS items that contain actual content is annoying but I can live with it (as long as you don't <a href= "http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/05/rss_ads_done_th.html#more">break the feeds!), but when you start serving RSS items that contain nothing but ads is when I start unsubscribing from your feeds.

Posted by Dave Johnson on June 23, 2005 at 05:25 PM EDT #

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