by Lee Gibbons CEO

I was pleased to see that Rob Walch of podCast411 felt it important to correct his blog post and change it to reflect much more accurately where Podango stands on hijacking feeds. He first titled the post “Podango Hijacks Feeds.” Then, upon learning that what he was seeing as clear evidence of same was really a bug, he downgraded his rhetoric to “Podango’s Bad UI Hijacks Feeds.” Now, I see that the title of the post is “Podango’s Bad choices caused lots of pain to user.” I think this is a much more accurate reflection of what is so.

Upon making this change, Rob has also issued this update at the beginning of the post:

Update #2: I have crossed out references to Evil and Malicous as it does look to be an issue of “Don’t blame on Malice what can easily be explained by ….”

Let me complete the quote for Rob, who is basically calling us either incompetent or stupid, depending upon which version of the saying he is quoting.

We are neither. We have responded remarkably well and on the high road to his original admittedly mistaken and unfounded attack on our integrity and now on our competence.
It is just too bad. I have lost some respect for Rob through this situation.

For Ginger Campbell, on the other hand, I have gained greater respect. She has admitted her error and allowed us to say that we were a part of it. She helped me understand that the error I am referring to here actually was NOT part of the reason Rob asserted that we are evil. It was as she suggests, a very separate situation. Due to timing, it did turn out to have a compounding effect of masking our understanding and not reacting as quickly to the actual issue of one of our engineers leaving a temporary redirect tag in our RSS code.

She sent a very kind, supportive email message to Shalon Ironroad acknowledging that Shalon had done everything she could throughout the resolution of these issues. She also had a very open and frank conversation with Dout Smith (Podango President and Co-founder) to resolve the issue and come to a common understanding of resolution steps. She was as gracious as one could expect her to be.

So, onward and upward. I expect this to be the last anyone should need to say about a situation. My take-away from it all is that it might have been handled much more gracefully, and professionally all the way around: Quicker, more precise response on our part. Less rash, more balanced, responses on Rob’s part. As for Ginger, unfortunately caught in the middle, to you again we express our sincere regrets and also our thanks for making us better at what we do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under podCast411, Rob Walch, Feed Hijacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.