Two days ago, I fired off an email to Jason Calacanis about the new KBCafe profiles project I'm working on. Jason noticed that I was linking to an Engadget feed hosted on FeedBurner. Jason was righfully concerned that he no longer had control of his RSS feed.
I CCed the good folks at FeedBurner into the conversation and next thing you know we're joined by a couple more a-listers. Long story short, it would seem that somebody unrelated to Weblogsinc.com set up a feed for Engadget on FeedBurner and set the feed loose on the world. I think the feed had 5 figures of subscribers. FeedBurner has since redirected that feed back to Engadget's true feed. I sourced the feed URL from Feedster's top 500 OPML file.
I then decided that getting the correct feed URL had to be a priority for KBCafe profiles, so I rewrote the engine only to source blog homepages and to auto-discover the RSS feed. I then deleted the entire database and repopulated from scratch. As a result, I've introduced some new bugs, which John Roberts has helped uncover.
Notes:
- Is control of your RSS feed an illusion?
- news.google.com is not a blog.