RSS and Blog Hijacking

It doesn’t take long before every cool new technology on the Web is stolen and put to nefarious uses by asocial loser pinheads who can’t get dates.

The latest victim of this trend?

RSS feeds.

Until recently, I have provided a link for RSS feeds to my posts so readers could conveniently subscribe to my blog.

However, my RSS feeds have been hijacked.

What does that mean?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a technology that “syndicates” website content by providing that content to other websites and newsreaders, such as MyYahoo. The hijackers steal the content from the RSS feed, and put it on their own websites.

Check out what happens when I do a Blog Search on Google for my ongoing series, “It Will All Hit The Fan in 2007”:


(Click on the image to see it full-size.)

The search produces 24 results, all of which contain the contents of my posts, but only 1 of which actually links to my blog.

On 8/20, I published a test post (“It Will All Hit The Fan in 2007, Part 12”) with some key words and phrases to see how long it would take for RSS pirates to hijack my post. It took about a week.


(Click on the image to see it full-size.)

So, I will soon discontinue my RSS feed. You will now have to visit the blog manually to check out my new posts.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

PR

(Original link to this post: http://thephantomrepublican.blogspot.com/2006/08/rss-and-blog-hijacking.html)