I got an email recently from someone trying to suggest we were inserting adds into a feed displayed with Feed2JS falsely suggested on pappamashkin blog.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Heck we do not even insert a credit back link in the free service we provide. But curious, I dug deeper. The culprit is Feedster, which is the source of the feed.
It looks like pappamashkin is trying to create a feed based on content from his/her site that includes the keyword “PHP”.
The Feedster web view of the feed displays this below two links for “Sponsored Links”, yet when you look in the RSS version of this same feed, you find an extra top level inserted item for some ad “Live AMD Online Event 3 — Dual-Core Solutions (ADV)”, the curious item “pappamashkin” may have thought we were shoving in there. It’s not us, old pappamashkin, it is Feedster.
So while it is not new news that Feedster is putting ads into RSS, I am dismayed that there is no statement of this anywhere I could locate on the main Feedster site, not in the terms of service, not in the Help/FAQ, not even in the Advertise link.
It’s fine if Feedster wants this as a model for their service (as it is fine for me not to partake of it), but inserting ad content into RSS is fishy enough, not even stating it smells worse. Poop on that practice.
Morten from Pappmaskin here. Jup, you are right, I just though feed2js was the source because I had been fiddling with feedster for some time while trying to make my category script for blogger, and had never noticed the ads before. No harm done I hope, I’ve updated my blog.
I’ve also completed my project, in a fashion, and it now uses feed2js pluss the excellent and fast blogger search. I’ve written a short howto on my code, which can all be seen in action on http://pappmaskin.blogspot.com/2005/10/blogger-categories.html?tag=flash
or
http://pappmaskin.blogspot.com/2005/10/blogger-categories.html?tag=PHP
or
http://pappmaskin.blogspot.com/2005/10/blogger-categories.html?tag=Greasemonkey
etc,
and I hope this will drive some traffic to your site (though not to much I hope, that will make my site slower 🙂 I’ve also mailed my solution around a few places, to freshblog among others, it will be interesting to see what people think of it, and to see adaptations and improvements on it.
I haven’t seen anything like it before, it seems to solve a few of the major drawbacks of being a blogger user, that is, no categories.
There is also some talk about asking Technorati to add rss for tag searches limited to a site, if that flies I’ve got a near perfect setup going.