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(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the say-what? dept

Tue, Nov 15th 2005 6:11pm — Mike Masnick
Like many others, I've used My Yahoo as a home page for a long time. Not surprisingly, since they allow open additions of RSS feeds, I have Techdirt at the top of my list. I just went to the page a few minutes ago, and noticed that the top story for Techdirt said: "This blog is moving" with a date stamp of 8 months ago. This was a bit of a surprise to me. Techdirt isn't going anywhere, and didn't go anywhere 8 months ago either. Then I looked at all the other headlines in the feed, and none of them were Techdirt stories either. Instead, they all point to a blog at completewasteoftime.blogs.com that apparently moved somewhere else 8 months ago and no longer exists. For now, you can view the non-Techdirt feed here on the My Yahoo site. Hopefully, they'll fix it soon, and people will just see the regular feed. However, if that's the case, you can see a screenshot here, and you can see in the taskbar at the bottom, that the links go to some completely different blog. Apparently, it's not just us that it's impacting. Boing Boing seems to point to a blog called ChristyCritter -- which, oddly, also doesn't appear to exist any more. I'm sure this is just a minor glitch, but it still is a bit shocking to see what's supposedly your feed displaying something totally different that has nothing to do with you. In the meantime, for the My Yahoo users (and we do have quite a few who read us via My Yahoo) who aren't seeing this... um... sorry? Update: The problem is now fixed. Haven't heard any details out of Yahoo, other than that it was a widespread problem that impacted a lot of feeds.
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15 Comments

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  1. identicon
    rss squirrel, 15 Nov 2005 @ 7:13pm

    confused

    Doesn't the RSS feed originate from the techdirt.com site and data? The thing you describe sounds like your desktop or myyahoo settings are messed up and that has nothing to do with what techdirt puts out from its RSS feed page?

    Someone got on to your yahoo account and scrambled the place the feeds point from what you describe.

    or maybe I don't understand what you are trying to describe as to what yahoo has to do with techdirt's feed.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Jim, 15 Nov 2005 @ 7:17pm

    new form of blog spam?

    I'm sure this is just a minor glitch, ...
    Is it a minor glitch, or are others creating blogs with with existing names to supply to rss aggregators in hope of hijacking user feeds in order to dole out more spam? Given the degree to which trackbacks are rapidly becoming useless, I think this may be likely.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Mike (profile), 15 Nov 2005 @ 7:18pm

    Re: confused

    No, it's a Yahoo problem. My Yahoo acts as an RSS reader. However, as of a few hours ago, it started mixing up the feeds, so that many feeds are displaying completely different feeds from what they're supposed to be.

    The original Techdirt feed is in fine condition. It's Yahoo that's showing the wrong feed.

    The word out of Yahoo is that it's a known problem that they're working on (feverishly, I imagine).

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Happy user, 15 Nov 2005 @ 8:09pm

    Re: confused

    And because of the partnership between the SBC telephone company and Yahoo.com, this problem affects everyone of their customers who is still using the SBC's default browser homepage... http://dsl.sbc.yahoo.com/

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Spike, 15 Nov 2005 @ 8:24pm

    MyYahoo?

    Use the Google personalized Homepage.
    It's great. Much better than MyYahoo.
    TechDirt feed is fine there.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  6. icon
    John Strosnider (profile), 15 Nov 2005 @ 8:28pm

    Use Bloglines

    Your RSS feed via Bloglines.com is fine, and, as far as I'm concerned, there is no better way to aggregate RSS feeds than bloglines.com. If you haven't tried it, you should. (And, no I'm not affiliated with them in any way--just a happy user.)

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    souljoy, 15 Nov 2005 @ 8:29pm

    Re: MyYahoo?

    I agree with you Spike. Since I started using Google's personalized homepage, the feeds are fine there.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Edward B., 15 Nov 2005 @ 9:07pm

    Re: confused

    IIRC, completewasteoftime.com proxied slashdot.org for my personalized Google homepage (www.google.com/ig), probably due to slashdot not liking people to refresh the RSS too often. After a while (I can't remember how many months ago) it stopped updating and I had to remove and re-add Slashdot to my Google home. It sounds like Yahoo was using the same service for techdirt and it's finally died completely.

    Ed

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  9. icon
    Mike (profile), 15 Nov 2005 @ 9:49pm

    No Subject Given

    Heh. Again, everyone, this wasn't a problem with our RSS feed. So, yes, it appeared fine in every other reader out there, including Google/ig and Bloglines (both of which I use as well).

    It was a problem with Yahoo, which they've now fixed.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    y employee, 15 Nov 2005 @ 10:17pm

    Yep, a technical glitch

    fixed now

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 15 Nov 2005 @ 11:15pm

    Re: Yep, a technical glitch

    the question is -- would this error have been fixed as "quickly" as it was, if mike had not written about it on Techdirt? Hmmm, the world may never know.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  12. identicon
    Bidera, 16 Nov 2005 @ 3:28am

    RSS misdirection

    So it turned out to be a technical glitch after all. But I wonder if less scrupulous sites than Y! can use this to their advantage in the future.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    Etchy, 16 Nov 2005 @ 7:36am

    Re: MyYahoo?

    I second that. Google's personalized home page is so much better than Yahoo. Lots more space to work with.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  14. identicon
    sydney, 17 Nov 2005 @ 9:21am

    Re: MyYahoo?

    my yahoo is the best personal start page period. it's the easiest to use and most reliable.

    just launched a new feature, reading filters (under "change layout"), that allows users to hide read items and filter the feeds by update time (show me everything that was posted int he last hour, etc.)

    and, mediarss is now supported - all flickr feeds, etc. show up as images on my yahoo...

    pretty cool

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  15. identicon
    ChristyCritter, 25 May 2006 @ 10:10am

    here's the strange thing...

    I'm christycritter. Formerly christycritter.blogdrive.com. That would explain where all those odd hits were coming from when I actually still checked that journal. I deleted the whole journal shortly before this was posted, and only found this article because of a Google search on it.

    Weird.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]


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