Alden Bates' Weblog

When it's a usenet post.

I have a search feed set up on BlogLines because I like to keep track of what people are saying about a certain celebrity I like. Mostly this works, except for a while last month when a Smallville news site added her name to an item in their news feed, which was updated daily with the content of the entire news page (therefore giving me the same info over and over for a couple of weeks). Some people really need to read up on how rss is supposed to work, but I digress.

On Usenet, which is also accessable via Google Groups, there's a certain newsgroup which shall go unnamed (though no doubt some of the people reading this will know which one) which I unsubscribed from a while back for two reasons: 1) it was largely full of trolls, and 2) a moderated, more-friendly alternative newsgroup was set up to cover the same basic subject.

This is where BlogLines comes in. Apparently BlogLines also carries feeds of Usenet groups, including the one I mentioned above. This means I also get subjected to the aforementioned trolls whenever one of them mentions the search terms for my search feed. Unfortunately there isn't any way around this, as BlogLines have no way to exclude certain feeds from being included in the search results (I suggested this could be handy a while back, when I was having the problem with the Smallville site).

This is more my problem than anything, but this is my weblog, so I thought I'd whine about it here a bit. :)