About values and technology, and how Odeo won't republish feeds anymore
At vloggercon last year I talked about values and technology, and how we need to tell companies what the values are and how to stay in line, and how technology evolves together with values and how that makes it even more important.
Anyways :)
In the past few days we had a nice example. I stumbled accross an audio feed that was being republished by Odeo, which is not a good thing. Replublishing feeds without permission means stealing subscribers.
So Jay contacted Odeo, and after some emails back and forth clarifying the issue, they said they would fix the problem, no longer republish feeds and basically be good net citizens.
Yey!
So speaking up works. And this stuff is important - we're still setting examples here.
For reference, below is my email to Odeo. After some confusion at first they got the point and promised that in the next rollout things will be fixed.
I don't know, this is good stuff. I know how it is to develop, sometimes you don't even realize that what you're doing is wrong, or sometimes you're focussed a little bit more on your company and a little bit less on the user, and what you're doing doesn't seem so evil. So it's good when users speak up.
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Hi Crystal,
thanks for the clarifications. Unfortunately, Odeo *does* republish
feeds, let me explain.
http://odeo.com/channel/4442/view is the channel page.
It has indeed a link to the original RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/diaryofafauxjournalist
*However*, and this is what I am complaining about, that page *also*
republishes the rss feed here:
http://odeo.com/channel/rss/4442
The channel page also points to the republished feed in its
feed-discovery html, which means that anyone who uses Bloglines or
mostly any other reader on that page will subscribe to the Odeo feed,
*not* to the original feed.
At this point the original producer looses out on stats and subscribers.
What's worse, in that republished feed, Odeo uses all links to their
own channel pages and audio pages. It's ok for Odeo to have pages for
the channel and the audio, after all, you do provide links back. But
it's not kosher to republish RSS feeds with those links in it.
As a good net citizen, Odeo should send traffic *to* the podcasters,
not take it away.
So yes, Odeo is republishing feeds without the author's permission.
And through the feed-discovery mechanism, Odeo is spreading those
feeds wide and far.
You might be familiar with the podshow debacle and others. This is not
acceptable.
Please let me know if you have questions about this, and please let us
know what you plan to do about this.
Cheers,
Peter Van Dijck