Share Your OPML already being gamed on the first day |
Loading ...Just like most every other toplist the share your OPML list is already being gamed — on the first day. Are these supposed to be lists by individuals or by companies/websites? Or are both ok? Take a look at #1 and #2 in the most prolific subscribers list:
Nice work whomever submitted podfeed and the MSDN blogs — not. Listen, one could write a script in a few minutes that would spider and find tens of thousands of RSS feeds, generate an OPML file, and then link them up as theirwebsite.com directory OPML subscription list and be #1 on this list. Lists like these aren’t individual subscriber lists. They aren’t real. These are going to eat the similar feed algo for breakfast.
Fake. Phony. BS.
But then maybe I’m missing the point of groups/websites masquerading as sharing individual reading lists (in OPML)?
And while I’m at this, anybody who claims to be regurlarly reading much over 300 RSS feeds — and still has some kind of life — is full of crap. Scoble said he used to do 1,000+, and gave speeches about it and then later cut that down because it was too much work. I recall him saying it took something like five hours to get through that every day(?) Wisely he axed that in favor of getting outside.
Basically, readers should see these lists of “individuals” with over 300 RSS feeds as people who don’t actually read much, they just like to subscribe to stuff and let the river flow past them. Look, I’m cool, I am subscribed to 2,000+ RSS feeds and want to tell the world about it. I guess this is another form of marketing, which makes sense why Danny Ayers has 2,549 feeds, just don’t believe for a second he actually follows and pays attention to that many.
Doesn’t add up
Do you realize if the average feed has 3 posts per day, that would create a daily flow of 7,647 posts times an average of say 150 words equals 1,147,050 words per day pounding across Danny’s aggregator. A neverending ticker of words assaulting his aggregator. Or anybody who claims to actually keep up/read that many feeds every day. That’s roughly 300,000 more words than this blog has had over the course of the nearly three years it’s been in existence.
Now before anybody says dude, people like this are just skimming. Well, of course they are, we all skim RSS feeds and there’s nothing wrong with doing that on a realistic number of feeds/sources. But let’s say the average headline and sentence teaser is 25 words. Do the math there, that’s still:
7,647 x 25 = 191,175 words per day
More words than an average Stephen King novel. If this is legitimate, then these guys must be on some kind of steroids-induced speed reading sessions. Are these guys juicing up or what? Needle check, please.
I don’t see the point in subscribing to feeds you don’t actually read and if you don’t actually read them, it’s just like downloading podcasts that never get listened to which is just eating bandwidth needlessly.
I spend some 1-2 hours every day pouring (happily, BTW, I like reading) through the content of 170 or so feeds. I used to be subscribed to well over 300 but it took too long to sift through that many feeds every day for the time I had available. I would like to settle in at some magic number but after years of doing this I still haven’t found that magic number. If that number was say 150 that would still would take over an hour every day to skim and read the better parts.
150 feeds x 3 posts per day = 450 feeds x 25 words per feed = 11,250 words. That’s a long, long short story, folks. Or a short novella. Every day. If I’m realistically reading that, or even mostly speed skimming, and still finding time to do anything else, I’m one busy guy.
I want to get to know those who I subscribe to (so I can trust what they are writing about), not make some top 100 list by just clicking every feed I might someday be interested in reading. I’d like to be able to find the Feeds Like Mine useful, but it won’t be if too many phony lists get into the system. Since it seems like there is no moderation (?), this is a well-proven recipe for disaster on the web.
Dave, unless some type of clarification is made and action taken I’ll give this about one week before it is spammed up and ruined. Sad too because I like the concept of sharing individual reading lists, but not when bogus “individual” reading lists are poisoning the well.
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Another way to game this is to create multiple accounts to load OPML where each one references your site. I did this quite by accident myself. My browser froze up trying to create the first account. After I restarted, it wouldn’t take that e-mail address, so I created an account using a different address I have. Then, after I uploaded and shared, I got e-mail notification of both accounts being created (with password in plain text, TYVM). So I went back to the first account and uploaded there. Sure enough, it doubled the stats. Then I deleted the first upload (cause I’m a nice guy). But if you wanted to increase the significance of your site, you could hack it that way. Since there is no link in the verification e-mail, you probably don’t even need to use valid e-mail addresses. But even if that was required, you could use a catchall account on a domain and generate sequential usernames.
Comment by Sterling Camden — May 8, 2006 @ 8:01 pm PST
I’m up there on the list with almost 700 feeds, though that includes newspapers and things like that. Amazingly most of those feeds don’t change that much, and I go through them at least once every day. That said, I am now winnowing them down because a lot of those blogs just aren’t that interesting anymore. Heck sometimes mine isn’t that interesting to me either.
Comment by Larry Borsato — May 8, 2006 @ 8:13 pm PST
Of course if you factor in delicious popular, boing boing, digg, slashdot, techmeme, etc into the numbers — do you subscribe to those, Larry? I didn’t check your list — then that skews the numbers quickly for dozens of other feeds with zero updates.
Comment by TDavid — May 8, 2006 @ 8:20 pm PST
I’m currenty number 38 on the list with 534 feeds. And I can tell you that I don’t “read” them all but I do “track” them. I’m a very fast reader and I mainly scan the headlines. That’s all I need to keep track of what’s going on. I’ll maybe read a full article or three a day. And I spend about an hour total a day.
I’m not sure about your math because many feeds don’t publish daily and I have feeds like del.icio.us popular set to refresh only once a day and other such time saving features.
But to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t crazy with having my name on the list. It makes me look like I have no life as you said. At first, there was a little ego stroking to be on any kind of a list but the more I thought about it the more I didn’t really care. That list doesn’t have much use to me.
I do like the “subscriptions like mine” feature. That has good use. I certainly hope that Dave puts some spam protection on there. Otherwise this commons will fall.
Comment by Graham English — May 8, 2006 @ 8:46 pm PST
Thanks for weighing in, Graham.
Of the roughly 170 feeds I subscribe to I’m getting a minimum of 750 posts per day to sift through, and quite often more than 1,000. Probably will hit 2,000 before the day is out. That’s where the math is coming from, Graham.
Math will obviously vary based on feeds so feel free to track your own feeds and do the math and report back. I’m guessing if you have updates set to once per day you are missing stuff on the busier feeds (some feeds update several times per hour). I’m getting hourly updates and that usually brings 25+ posts per hour, every hour.
Comment by TDavid — May 8, 2006 @ 9:12 pm PST
BTW, lol at the steroid analogy
You make great points. In general, more than 200 or so feeds realy “doesn’t add up.” I’d like to think that I have an exceptionally fast mind and can handle all my feeds, but I’m probably suffering from delusions of grandeur
And as much as I love, say, Engadget or Gizmodo, I can mark them all read when I’m not in the mood or don’t have the time. My livelihood doesn’t depend on those feeds. Same with del.icio.us popular or digg. Do I really need to be updated every hour? Or will I catch the good stuff anyway?
I find that if something’s really important, I see it in more than one place. I’m meme-tracking and I’m doing a lot of ‘photoreading.’ I’m amazed at what I retain but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone necessarily. And I’m probably at the top of my limit. 645 feeds. I didn’t submit all of my feeds like my pubub or technorati tag feeds, etc. I would pare down before I would add more - which I do once in a while.
Which brings me to my point - and your point - 4,000 feeds? Give me a break. What use is this? Seems like it’s more about promotion than sharing.
PS - Of course I read every single word of your blog
Comment by Graham English — May 8, 2006 @ 10:19 pm PST
You make good points, but as someone who is subscribed to too many feeds, (n=811) I’ll share how I use Bloglines. There ear days when I do not look at any of the feeds, preferring instead to visit a few key sites directly.
At times I rappel down the rocky, steep cliff of my RSS mountain. I read one feed, skip a few, read another, maybe two in a row, then drop down 10 or 20 more feeds. Sometimes I start in reverse order.
It’s a perverse way to randomize what I drink from the fire hose.
I do not claim this is healthy or normal or that it’s a cure for avian flu.
But it’s fun.
Comment by ron k jeffries — May 9, 2006 @ 12:15 am PST
“300 RSS feeds — and still has some kind of life — is full of crap.”
I must be full of crap. twice over.
Comment by Alex Barnett — May 9, 2006 @ 1:23 am PST
Yes I do check Boing Boing, del.icio.us, and digg at least once a day, and they can be slow, but they are easy to skim. As with a newspaper I may only read the headline or the first paragraph, and there is a tremendous amount of duplication as well.
I prefer to read Techmeme on the site, but I find that I’ve already seen the same stuff several times over.
Comment by Larry Borsato — May 9, 2006 @ 7:12 am PST
Speaking as someone who has “too many” feeds (I was 10th in the list until the big hitters arrived and knocked me down) you are right, I can’t possibly read all of the words - there wouldnt be enough time in the day. I’m just lookin at the piccies. If anything takes my eye, I stop and have a look, maybe read the first paragraph or so. If not - I move on, fast. Most of the text is duplicated anyway. After a while you develop a “feel” for whats going on. If its a slow news day you mark everything as read and go outside.
Comment by Pete Gilbert — May 9, 2006 @ 8:25 am PST
I must confess that sometimes, after a long sunny day outside, I sometimes turn to my feedreader and click “mark all as read”. But generally I can go through all of those feeds in a couple of hours while watching tv in the evening. And sometimes I just read them over coffee in the morning.
But I still leave some time for a life.
Comment by Larry Borsato — May 9, 2006 @ 10:08 am PST
[…] Hmm posted on Monday about how the site was being “gamed” by artificially long subscription lists in order to get a mention as “top subscriber”. As I said in the comments, another possible exploit would be to create multiple accounts in order to inflate the subscriber numbers for a particular site. All that’s required is a unique e-mail address, which a bot could easily manufacture. When I signed on, the verification e-mail required no response. I would suggest adding that requirement, as well as perhaps CAPTCHA or some other manual step that would make such an exploit difficult for a script, and temporally prohibitive for a human. […]
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