Is Edelman Spamming My RSS Reader?
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 23, 2006 | Share This
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At least once a day, a mysterious feed will spontaneously prompt my FeedDemon account to ‘Import OPML’. At first I ignored them, but when they kept coming back uninvited, I took an actual look at where they were coming from. Check out the screen shot below:
Yes, yes it does say “www.edelman.com/rss”. But, […]
At least once a day, a mysterious feed will spontaneously prompt my FeedDemon account to ‘Import OPML’. At first I ignored them, but when they kept coming back uninvited, I took an actual look at where they were coming from. Check out the screen shot below:
Yes, yes it does say “www.edelman.com/rss”. But, upon clicking ‘Next’, it returns an error message, “This file is either not a valid OPML file, or it is an OPML file that doesn’t contain a list of feeds.” Even more intriguing, the URL goes to a Grazr-supported OPML list of all blogs by Edelman employees, including Steve Rubel and Mr. Edelman himself. I tried to track down the root page that was sending the feeds, but ran into a ‘Listing Denied’ error.
So, unless this is some freakish glitch in FeedDemon (I checked, no one reports a similar error in their forums, though the FeedDemon customer support is yet to get back to me), it appears that Edelman has set up a spam opml feed to automatically subscribe people to their employees’ blogs from a hidden page on their site. Sheesh - last week they were Flogging for Walmart, now they’ve got OMPL spam (SPO-PML)… what is this, Black Hat 2.0? I mean, I know they have a reputation for being blogging savvy, but from one spam technique to the next, it’s like they’re compiling the next big whitepaper on the subject. Social Media PR: Who Not To Hire.
UPDATE:
Since this was posted, Steve Rubel alerted me that his Grazr OPML file is unintentionally interfering with FeedDemon. The bug was brought to the attention of FeedDemon, who identified it as an error with Grazr that will be fixed in the next FeedDemon update.
Topics: RSS |
Thank you for your note. We are looking into this right away. It feels like a glitch to me, nothing intentional. We will get back to you later today US East Coast time.
Kate, it looks like the Grazr OPML script from my site is somehow getting into my feed. I have removed the script off the site and reset my feed. Hopefully that should do the trick. Let me know if it does. Either way, contact me and we’ll track down this unintended bug. Thank you for calling this to our attention. - steve
There’s more info here on the Newsgator board from Nick Bradbury.