Zmarties

I read a number of feeds from blogs by WebLogs Inc.

This morning I find that they have engaged in a massive spamming operation of their own feeds. It appears that they have some new blogs to publicise, and instead of simply adding a new entry to their existing blogs (which I'd consider poor judgement since the new blogs have nothing to do with the subjects of the old ones), what they have done is orders of magnitude worse. They have actually added a new line to every existing blog entry - this means that suddenly my feed reader shows lots of apparently new blog entries for each of the blogs. In addition to the huge inconvenience this causes, wading through new entries that aren't, this also destroys valuable metadata in each of the posts, namely the last updated time. Previous to this spamming, I could see when a blog entry had been updated after it was published (perhaps to correct a fact that was wrong in the original post), whereas now all entries have an updated time of when the spamming was added.

This is certainly a very poorly judged action by WebLogs Inc - I wouldn't be surprised if it drives readers away from their blogs.