I met David Gammel a couple of weeks or so ago at the ASAE show in Nashville TN. Nice guy… SMART!
I was reading his blog this morning, and his call to action directed at Microsoft via Robert Scoble, really illustrated the paradigm shift in our communication dynamic now thanks to RSS, Blogs, and Aggregation Tools.
I’m posting this note with Robert Scoble’s name in it in order to get some attention from Microsoft about the behavior of their RSS bot, msnbot.
Over the past week, the bot has hit my site over 27k times for about 38mb of bandwidth. The bot is almost exclusively hitting RSS feeds. However, most of the feeds it is getting on my site are for individual entries, which allow people to track comments. Each feed is getting hit about 100x a week. I would think that is a big waste of effort for older entries that get few comments. Once a day should be plenty.
So, Robert, when you see this in one of your ego notifications, please pass the word to whoever manages msnbot to chill out a bit on the hits. I love to be indexed but not at such a heavy load which is wasting my bandwidth and MS’s. If the load goes much higher I might ban the bot for poor manners.
David is leveraging what he suspects Robert uses on a regular basis in his aggregator: “Keyword Monitoring” or “Smart Search” technology. Probably a good guess, as there are not too many of us involved in the RSS world who do not leverage an aggregator in our daily management of information. In this particular case David is counting on Robert “Monitoring the Conversation” and seeing a proper issue that should be of concern to who Robert works for, and sending the issue “up the ladder.”
I have had people employ this same method in their posts to see if I was paying attention. And wouldn’t you know it… the egotist I am… you’re damn right I have a “Keyword Monitoring Feed” for my name. You’d be surprised how many others out there share my name!
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