Hmmpost

How would you feel about someone coming to your house and littering on your porch under the guise of it being ‘temporary’ when you are the one who has to pick it up? Would that still be littering? Sure it would. These temporary blog posts for style detection are bogus. They might be temporary to the blog and blogger but some of them still show up in reader’s feeds like this:

Just say no! Like this provides any sort of reader value? There are less intrusive and more intelligent ways to detect the style of a blog post if that’s the aim of the software/service. Yeah, I’m looking at your Windows Live Writer even though this post is being written using that system. I just say no whenever asked this question because I don’t want any readers to see this trash. And for the systems out there who think it’s cool to do a temporary blog post to detect blog ownership, that’s even more stupid. If you’re the blog owner you can put some sort of image or file on the server that isn’t in a blog post to show you own the blog. Heck you could sandwich in a verification code at the end of a legitimate post and that wouldn’t be temporary trash. I purposefully blurred out the offending blog above because I don’t want this to be about the offending blogger, but the system which is stupid. There were actually two of these in my RSS reader this morning. Two bloggers who didn’t realize that there is no such thing as temporary in the RSS world. Once you hit publish and it changes the RSS feed it is released and somebody could see it somewhere else. One of your readers, your mother, the pope, the President, a terrorist, anybody. Do you want everybody to see your temporary trash? As a reader and blogger I sure don’t. Just say no! Oh, and got to love the 13 FeedFlares attached to the signature. Yeah, I’ll digg this, stumble it, add to mixx, share in Facebook, yadda, yadda. Argh.