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Guy Kawasaki’s feed - lapsing

Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 9:24 am

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Among the feeds I read regularly is Signum sine tinnitu–by Guy Kawasaki which used to be available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/letTheGoodTimesRollByGuyKawasaki.

Am sitting on a train catching up on feeds offline, but in my reader software Guy’s feed has disappeared, and been replaced by this message:

Hello World

This is an incredibly small blog that’s intended to: redirect you to Guy’s new feed, show Guy (and others) the reason why they don’t want to just let their Feedburner feeds get deleted, and gently inform Feedburner, Bloglines and others of a little problem that needs to be fixed.

For those of you who are are seeing this message in your feed reader and wondering why I’m not sounding like Guy Kawasaki, here’s the deal. You are subscribed to an outdated Feedburner feed that Guy allowed to lapse. You should unsubscribe to this feed and subscribe to his current feed, which is located at this URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm

Message to Guy… See? This is what I’m talking about. By allowing your Feedburner feed to get deleted, you’ve opened your subscribers up to having somebody else (like me) to come along, create a feed by the same name in Feedburner, and capture the eyeballs of your subscribers.

Message to Feedburner… Ahem. Perhaps you want to think about the process by which feeds are deleted? Some kind of waiting period (a month, 6 months?) before somebody else can create a feed with the same name? Perhaps some kind of permission-granting thingy?

Message to Bloglines… Ahem. The reason I can do this is because of your tendency not to clear out the cache of “subscribable” feeds very often. I pounded Guy’s blog URL into your “Add” gizmo and got a huge list of feeds, including 2 obsolete Feedburner feeds. I found the “hijackable” feeds by going to the feed URLs in turn, and finding a couple that have been deleted from Feedburner.

If I was an unscrupulous type guy, I could put up a site that: looks just like Guy’s site but spoofs his unsuspecting subscribers into clicking on things by hijacking his credibility, or direct his subscribers to his competitors or do any of the things that people do with domain names that expire…

Yep, here’s the issue — this is just like dropping domain names. ‘Cause that’s what’s happening, a feed URL is being dropped in such a way that somebody could easily write a script to, um, snap up those domains.That’s it. Remember, Guy’s real feed has moved to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm

Onward,

Mike — www.haven.com

I’m sure there’s more to this than meets the eye, so once I’m off this train and have a more stable connection I’m going to look into this.

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Simon Wakeman

I've been on the web since 2001 and have been blogging about marketing and public relations since January 2006.

I'm currently Head of Marketing at Medway Council as well as a freelance marketing and PR consultant.

The content and opinions expressed on this website are not endorsed by nor reflect the views of any company or organisation I work with.

I have used Simon for the last three years on a number of projects. Not only is he knowledgeable and professional, but he has a full grasp of a customers needs and can deliver the right creative and business results for a customer. Ian Lockyer, BMEA

Simon is an analytic and strategic thinker who is able to communicate his ideas and insights clearly. He was able to bring unique and important perspectives on customer touchpoints to the various teams we worked within…and was always able to motivate for successful new customer programs based on robust data. Rajhev Rajkumar

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