Thanks to those lovely folks at Newsgator, I've been enjoying an RSS feed on topics of interest, sent to my e-mail box, for the last month.
It's useful. It gives me great stories. But here's a dirty little secret. It's also filled with spam.
Want some examples? Let's go to my inbox today and find a few:
- When a direct sales company sets up a blog, and that blog is filled with "articles" that are just links to sales, what you have there is RSS spam.
- When a Commission Junction user posts their eBay listings through RSS, that's RSS spam.
- When a domain name house sets up its ads as an RSS feed, that's RSS spam.
Hey Dana:
I don't really understand how a feed could be called SPAM. I've always thought of SPAM as "unsolicited commercial messages", however delivered. But in the case of an RSS/XML feed, I've actively asked my app to go fetch it: it's hardly unsolicited. Don't you have to subscribe to individual feeds with Newsgator? Can you not instantly "unsubscribe" by simply not fetching it?
You may get duped by unscrupulous marketer, but it's pretty easy to drop the sub if this is the case.
I've honestly never had a feed forced into my computer(s) by any means other than my positive assertion to subscribe.
Be well,
Dave H.
Dana might be a little incorrect in calling this 'RSS Spam'. However, there is no doubt that having 'just commercial' contents in places where one would expect 'news & articles' is surely something that at least 'sound' like spam.
When I click the 'live bookmarks' (the fancy name of RSS) of NY Times on my Firefox every morning, I expect to see Headline News and not 'NY Times New Promotional Offers'.
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