Hey there Folks. John here with a couple of itmes to draw your attention to:
1) RSS Feed
As some of you may have noticed, the RSS feed of The Movie Blog has gone from carrying the full posts to just the title and an excerpt. I didn’t like doing this at all, but I really had no choice. Here is the form letter I sent out to people who emailed me about it:
If you’re getting this you wrote asking about the RSS feeds. As was explained in the November 2nd episode of The Audio Edition (At time index 39:45), far too many sites are using the RSS feed of The Movie Blog to steal it’s content and publish it without citing on their own sites. At last count over 30 sites were doing this. I don’t mind people using my excerpts for their posts and crediting me, but they were just republishing my entire articles and passing it off as their own.
This is not only an unfair practice, but it also harms The Movie Blog’s rankings on search engines like Yahoo and Google. This could eventually cost us thousands of new readers every single day. People were now searching for something on Google, and google would point them to one of my articles, but the article was on another site. Not to over enphasise things, but this could ultimatly ruin The Movie Blog. We tired to request these sites stop their actions, but not one of them stopped. We had no choice but to pull down the full feeds and only include excerpts.
We are sorry for any inconvenience to you the reader, we like reading our feeds too… but we honestly had no choice. Any further suggestions are welcome.
2) Podcast Feed
Just a reminded that there is a new podcast feed for The Audio Edition. Much better feed. Make sure to update your iTunes (or other podcasting service) with the new feed. The new feed is here. (right click the link and select “copy link location”)
3) John Campea’s New Podcast
After several technical problems over the weekend, things are FINALLY ready to go for my new podcast over on my personal blog. This new podcast doesn’t talk about movies, but rather world, political and tech news. The show WAS going to be called “The Gospel According to John”, but has been changed to “Point of View”. The new show launches later today over at my personal blog.
And don’t forget, Point of View isn’t the first podcast birthed from The Audio Edtion. Doug Nagy has his “Nagical Radio” podcast weekly over at his blog.
That’s it for now, have a great day guys
Hey John. I’m one of those RSS readers that used to pick up the info simply off of the RSS feeds every mornin, but hey, I think it’s an understandable move to have the RSS abbreviated- you make a good point about hard earned traffic to your site being stolen from other sites. As a guy trying to re-start his own site, its understandable that traffic means a lot, especially the amounts you describe.
I picked up the podcast right after the open letter to Paramount, and got hooked after listening to one episode of the podcast. Keep up the good work, John. I love it. I’ll try to comment a little more now that i check out the entire site.
One recommendation, though- change your iTunes RSS feed. That’s what I used to get the podcast through, and the new episode wasn’t picked up on it earlier this week.
Hey there “Me”
The part that you don’t understand is that 30 websites stealing my content and screwing up my page ranking with the search engines will DESTROY this site. Like, I could lose literally 1000’s of new readers every day as they go to the wrong sites with my articles on them.
So yes, if making the 2 or 3000 RSS readers actaully click on a story they want to read means saving my site in the long run… then yes… that’s what I have to do.
THanks for the input and for giving me the chance to clarify.
Thanks for the reminder. Have now updated feeds.
So rather than going after the 30 or so websites that STEAL from you, you screw your readers – Yeah that makes sense.
LOL. is that technical problems as in the way Conley & Nagy explained them in Audio Edition 129,John? :-)