Erik Markus , host of the Erik’s Diner Podcast, the was victim of a podjacking and tells his story.

Podjack: (verb) – To create an alternate RSS feed to a podcast without the permission of the podcast’s owner.

This problem has been going on since the beginning of podcasting. I first became aware of it when I wrote the Podcast Value Chain report. I was scouting around to see who was writing about the report when I came across Brad Gibson’s blog and podcast, The BradCast.

Sadly, this is what I found:

According to digitalpodcast, my site feed is http://Bradcast.podkeyword.com. That is incorrect. My site feed is http://www.bradfordgibson.net/rss.xml.

I immediately changed Brad’s feed back to the correct feed and I thank Brad for recognizing that I made the change.

This behaviour by PodKeyword has been going on for a long time ( in podcasting time that is ) and podcasting risks it becoming the equivalent of podcast spam.

We need to find a way to add some sort of feed verification into the RSS that enables directories and users to know that this is the real deal feed. This seems like a great project for someone.