Google blocking Yahoo Pipes - again

Did you know that Google has a bot which ignores robots.txt and does so defiantly? It's true. Google's RSS grabber, Feedfetcher, ignores robots.txt as Google reasons a human decided to publish the feed and a human has decided to request the feed. It's all explained over at the webmaster help center. I actually think Google's made the right call here, although it means you can't slam the brakes on an RSS by slapping up a robots.txt block and I'm beginning with this just to set the precedent.

I like to think one of my real scoops this year was when I noticed that Google seemed to be blocking Yahoo Pipes. Only yesterday I noted that I was disappointed that Sphinn didn't like the story but pleased that Wired writer Betsy Schiffman had.

I do believe that this blockage was temporary and accidental. Google have said complementary things about Yahoo Pipes before and you can use Yahoo Pipes to take data from Google Base. In fact, Yahoo Pipes and Google Base have been a featured project on Google Code.

In a quirk of timing, bigmouthmedia colleague and Wonga World blogger, Chris Cathcart pointed out that Google's Feedburner is also blocking Yahoo Pipes.


This time the blockage is certainly not an accident but is a human controlled decision. Why would Feedburners want to keep their RSS out of Yahoo Pipes? One possible answer is that although the publisher is happy to distribute content (or teasers) in a feed they don't want that content to be sliced, diced and mixed up with other content. One of the ways I use Yahoo Pipes is to monitor dozens of feeds but only alert me when a story is gaining a critical mass, this means I don't need to manually review all those feeds nor even look at any adverts inside them.

Here's the plug for Wonga World! Chris is our Senior Strategist in the Finance vertical. He's years of experience working in banks and digital marketing. In fact, he spoke at SMX London this year. Wonga World is written with that savvy financial sector bias which is why he gave me this 'search only' lead. What a nice man.

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I'm now a Feedburner

I've avoided Feedburner until now.

Why?

I'm old school. Heck. In Search terms I'm ancient. I first came to RSS as means to build links and the Feedburner got in the way of that. Even when RSS and subscribers became a more important/more likely Quality Signal than the likely links generated I wanted to remain in control of my RSS source.

Today Feedburner and Blogger joined up. It's now possible to integrate Feedburner and BlogSpot so that Blogger automatically redirects to Feedburner.

In addition, Feedburner's MyBrand is free.

As a result I can automatically publish Feedburner RSS to an arhg.net domain. Indeed; you'll find this blog's RSS at http://feeds.arhg.net/AndrewRHGirdwood - but you shouldn't need to update a thing. Just subscribe, m'kay?

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Feedburner and Google's Mobile RSS Reader

I was at Netimperative's search roundtable this afternoon where the topic was; "Do you believe the buzz about bid optimization - can it really get you bigger returns? How can you tell if you have the best?"

It was good to meet up with Jon Beeston from Efficient Frontier. He's one of those people who firmly believe the future is in portfolio management rather than bid management. As that's what Efficient Frontier offers, I'm not surprised!

It was a wide ranging discussion and we went badly off topic at times (Nabaztag's and World of Warcraft) but I must admit I did like the look of interest on some of the participants faces when I speculated about Feedburner and Google's Mobile RSS Reader.

We were talking about the future of mobile. Will it really take off this year?

After email, the function of my (beloved) BlackBerry (I'm with Vanessa on this one!) is Google's RSS Reader on mobile friendly. I'll skim through the RSS headlines, star, read or mark as read. It's the best way to keep up with the fast moving world of search.

I speculated that since Google knows all about the RSS I subscribe to and so many of them are powered by Feedburner they'd be easily able to insert mobile targeted RSS ads. They'd know I was on a mobile and could even point the ads to a BlackBerry friendly page. The ad itself would be short - but so's an AdWord creative.

I suppose if we want to get clever (and if BlackBerry get GPS) then we could even splice in local ads - but I'd rather have topic targeted ads.

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