Monday, June 11, 2007

Google Blog authors should subscribe to their own RSS feed

Google Blog Out of WhackAttention anyone who happens to write or knows someone who writes on the Official Google Blog: your company purchased Feedburner to get a handle on RSS (or Atom, in this case). Please drink your own kool-aid and subscribe to your own blog. If you did, you'd notice the same thing I'm pointing out in the picture above -- I get dozens of false updates from you each day. Someone is tweaking your RSS code and doing a terrible job.

Listen, you and I both know you didn't update your blog 25 times between 2:44 and 3:35 PM today. No one posts that much. Not even Scoble. I noticed this over a week ago and reported the problem. Your website says "We Love Feedback", but I'm not sure I believe your story. I never received a reply and the problem is happening again.

So please, for the love of Dave Winer, please have someone on your team subscribe to your feed so you can see what is happening. And subscribe in something other than Google Reader. Nice tool, but the error isn't happening there. Probably because your toolset is ignoring changes to your Atom tag. Here's how it looks:


<published7>2006-07-25T06:03:00.000-07:00</published>
<updated>2007-06-11T15:38:04.493-07:00</updated>


As you can clearly see, you published the file back in 2006. But you, for some strange reason, updated the file today. This is a problem with the automation that kicks out your feed. And it needs to be fixed. Now that you own Feedburner, maybe you could run it through those guys? At any rate, we'd like a fix as soon as you can get to it. Or tomorrow. Whichever comes first.

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