PodShow.com's behaviour is unnacceptable!
PodShow.com is continuing to "pull a Veoh" as we say.
Update: I emailed adam curry about linking to feeds. He wrote: "Yes, those show [the ones that link to xxx.podshow.com instead of their own url] are now on our network and also have a xxxx.podshow.com url" I will have to eat my words, that's actually acceptable. It's not great behavior, but it's not sneaky either.
Update: it seems many of the podcasters are also very angry with this. The story is being investigated by a number of people, and I'll post updates later.
Update: on Michael Verdi's page, they do link to Verdi's site. So what's going on?
They list rss feeds and entries surrounded by ads, with very little or no attribution - I can't for the life of me find links to the original show.
I'm having a hard time finding links on the site, but for example on this page, I see a link "Check out the show's site", but it goes to another PODSHOW page! Jeeses!
Now I happen to know that Dummycast can be found at http://dummycast.com/, and Podshow knows that too (the information is in the feed).
I looked at both Dummycast pages on Podshow, I even searched the sourcecode, and there is NO reference to dummycast.com anywhere.
As the nanny would say: this behaviour is unnacceptable!
And I'm not kidding. I'm getting tired of this. And so are a lot of the videobloggers and podcasters.
Why is this unacceptable? A directory should link back to the original site. Bloggers, Podcasters and Videobloggers put a lot of work in their shows and posts, and don't want them stolen.
Do I have to spell it out?
There are a lot of "splogs" these days, sites that just take RSS feeds, copy the text and surround it with ads with little or no attribution to the source.
Splogs are scum. They are websites with no purpose except stealing content and making a quick buck of it.
I am sure podshow doesn't want to be associated with those practices.
But at the same time, I'm sure podshow knows what they're doing. Don't tell me this highly funded startup doesn't know that they're trying to keep users on their site, looking at their ads, instead of sending traffic to the vloggers and podcasters.
I've tried to find contact info on the podshow site, but no such luck.
Disclaimer: I run Mefeedia.com, a videoblog directory.