This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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14 Oct 2004
If you have a product you want to market towards bloggers, perhaps spamming them won’t get you the type of attention you’re looking for. I got the same email that Chris did. The address it was sent to is only in my feed. They’re scraping email addresses out of feeds and spamming them. Nice.
In addition to using spam, they’re also using deceptive marketing practices to promote their tool. In the
example of the feeds that use their system they list feeds from Slashdot, Penny Arcade, and Blogger. As far as I can tell, none of these sites are actually using RSSCache. The RSS feeds they serve up seem to come from their own servers, not those belonging to RSSCache. So the folks behind RSSCache are trying to make it seem as if these sites are clients of theirs. The point behind RSSCache is to save the site owner bandwidth. I’m sure that Slashdot and Google need help with that.
Excerpt: Eben gerade wurde ich per Spam auf den neuen Dienst RSSCache hingewiesen. Dabei bin ich allerdings nicht alleine, Adam Kalsey
Got the same e-mail as well. Rather sneaky I must say. I almost believed it was a genuine e-mail.
Slashdot could certainly use better RSS handling methods. Right now you get banned for 72 hours if you grab their RSS (RDF, actually) more than once every 30 minutes. Their feed is a couple of kBs large, and doesn't appear to be generated dynamically. You can hammer their front page every five seconds without repercussions, though, and that page is a couple of magnitudes larger. I guess that goes well together with their "nested tables like it's 1996" web design. I've received spam to an address that only existed in my feeds too, but that was probably the result of random scraping of every linked file rather than targeted spam.
Hello, I’m Benjamin Berube from D2Soft Technologies. True, we might have made a mistake, and we do apology. Our solution, RSScache.com, is really something we think will help RSS and all Web sites that gains popularity and for whom bandwidth is a problem. For that reason, we might have gone too fast in wanting RSS webmasters to know about our solution and sent emails to those, while we forgot the fact that our message wasn’t personalised for each webmaster, causing potential “madness” because of this. For that, yes, we feel sorry. However, we never intended to be spammers, and we’re not. Spammers don’t take time to answer to comments, they just spam. Also, we are not using deceptive marketing practice. Maybe our text with our example is not clear enough, and we will correct it. However, it’s true that Slashdot, Penny Arcade and Blogger don’t use our system, and we never intended to say they do. We’re simply giving examples on how our service can be used with real feeds example. Thanks for your time.
Thanks Adam for this info. When I wrote a post on Comment Spammers a while ago, I recall someone, maybe you, saying spammers are attacking RSS feeds, trackbacks, "email this post to a friend", guestbooks, pings, any interactive functionality of a blog. Can you refresh my memory where I might have come across this?
This discussion has been closed.
Trackback from Neil's World
October 15, 2004 12:22 AM
Not the best way to launch a product
Excerpt: As Adam and Chris have noted, a company called D2Soft technologies decided to launch its potentially interesting new site rsscache.com by scraping email addresses from feeds and spamming them.