I have to say that I haven't been watching this too closely, though I have
read a story or two. The part missing that I never read was that it was
George and his podkey service.

From my own experience, I have to say, my dealings with George have always
been on the up and up. I too had created a podkeyword for my podcast WAY
back in late 2004. Interestingly, I had actually forgotten about podkey
until iTunes hit with their podcast directory, which ended up including 2
different listings for my feed. The Podkey one, and my actual.

When I had discovered this, I went to George and he and I discussed the
impact of deleting the keyword all together. My plan was to have George
redirect what was listed under the podkey feed to another special feed that
contained only a single "Special" podcast providing listeners information on
what was happening. This way, listeners would receive notice in my voice as
to what was going on and redirect them to my actual feed, the one which I
preferred to use. Additionally, it would be simple to include in that
special feed the <block> tags to tell iTunes NOT to list that feed.

Yes, it would likely create an interruption of service, but that's what
happens when a service like iTunes collects data from numerous different
directories RATHER THAN pulling from just one to initially populate it's own
directory and then simply build upon it. That act by Apple is what has
caused most of this problem ALONG WITH our own willingness to list ourselves
with services like Podkey.

I have no doubt that had Erik asked George to do the same thing for him, for
all of his keywords, the results here would have been far different than
what is happening now.

Just thought I'd add that to the story as MY experience working with
George. I agree with David Lawrence, I think George is getting some unfair
press on this issue.

-KHD


On 12/4/05, marchon_ca <gman@...> wrote:
>
> There has been much talk on the net recently about podkeyword and
> hijacking and ransom....
>
> The story is one sided... Please read this.... a response to eweek
> below, (not written by me)
>
> the email exchange between myself and vegan.com is on my site
>
> http://www.podkey.com/blog
>
> Get the facts before the lieing continues.
>
> over 30 articles on the web now, and more daily are spreading half
> truths - I have been a contributor to this group since Oct 2004 and
> how podkeys work have been in this and the ipodderdev forum since the
> beginning.
>
>
> Please take a moment to read it.
>
> I am getting tons of email calling me all kinds of evil, and
> hararssing me.
>
> Please look at the details and help.
>
> When you have reviewed the facts, you can see I neither hijacked or
> held anyone for ransom. I simply did what was asked of me.
>
>
>
>
>
> posted by David Lawrence on eWeek Talkback (December 4th, 2005)
> http://www.eweek.com/talkback_details/0,1932,s=25998&a=166472,00.asp?
> m=13689
>
> Article : Podcast Hijacked, Held for Ransom
> From : onlinetonight
> Date : 12/3/2005 5:28:34 PM
> Subject : You got the story completely wrong
>
>
>
> Message 1 of 1
>
>
> Previous Message Next Message • Report Abuse
>
> You should check your facts and not use inflammatory language. And
> you should fix your Talkback system so that it doesn't tell me that
> my Talkback contains words longer than 50 characters when it doesn't.
> Doesn't it like cuts and pastes?
>
> You should check out the comment I just left on Erik's attorney's
> blog on the subject:
>
> http://cyberlaw + .stanford.edu + /blogs/vogele/
>
> Stupid that I had to do that.
>
> Here they are:
>
> Regarding this "podjacking" controversy…
> I just spoke with George Lambert, the owner of podkey.com. He's going
> to be on my radio show tonight at midnight ET, 9p PT:
>
> http://onlinetonight.com
> and my Personal Netcast podcast directly after.
>
> http://feeds.feedburner + .com/pn
>
> Since you're both in the Bay area, Collette, you and your client will
> be able to listen on KNEW AM 910 at 9:06 pm. If you have XM, we're on
> Channel 152; if you have Sirius, you can listen on Stream 117, Ask
> Sirius. The show will be repeated tomorrow evening at the same time
> on both systems.
>
> My take on this: he's being unfairly blamed, and you and your client,
> Erik, don't understand the very simple technological constraints
> here. There's no difference here between George's free service,
> podkey.com, and Feedburner podshow.com's proposed redirection
> service, or any other redirector/aggregator.
>
> After speaking with a clearly shaken George Lambert, who have been
> getting phone calls in the middle of the night from people who don't
> know the full story, I believe that Erik Marcus, the vegan podcaster,
> who had registered vegan.podkey.com and a series of keywords
> associated with vegetarianism about a year ago, noticed that the
> podkey URL that he had registered with George was getting more play
> on the search engines than his original vegan.com feed was, and in
> fact, via OPML, had been picked up by iTunes and Yahoo in addition to
> his direct feed.
> Wanting to aggregate his traffic, he asked George to remove the feed,
> which George did. Erik's traffic then, predictably, dropped a lot
> (75% it appears), since people had been subscribed via the podkey.com
> feed. He panicked, called George and told him to reinstate the feed,
> which George agreed to do, and did.
>
> Erik also demanded that George remove those vegan-oriented keywords
> and their association with the podkey feed from any existing OPML
> feeds (impossible) and prevent anyone from registering those podkey
> keywords (unreasonable but doable with special coding), and that's
> when George then became annoyed.
>
> To be clear: George is NOT preventing the podcast from being fed at
> either feed point, and he's done every thing that Erik's asked other
> than do custom programming to filter out keyword based individual vs.
> OPML requests.
>
> I think this needs to be made clear, and I will on tonight's show and
> podcast. And I think we should reserve the word "podjacking" for real
> fradulent activity.
>
> And, I am more than happy to give you equal time on the air to
> discuss anything I've missed. You may want to save your words for
> court, but it appears that you also may want to tell your client that
> this case has no merit.
>
>
> David Lawrence
> Host,
> Online Tonight
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Kevin H. Devin
In the Trenches podcast
http://kevindevin.com

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