A nasty way to get more readers- rather more eye balls...I mean, I had been into Bloglines for quite some time now and I subcribe to my daily reads in that...I have the setting that, updated posts be shown as "New"- ie, even if I had already read a post and if it is updated after I had read it, bloglines will show it as "New" when I log in again...this way, I thought I will be able to keep track of not just the daily reads, but also the updates of the older reads...

But, to my astonishement, I am seeing some strange development. I had put up Slate Magazine too in the feeds. When I logged into the bloglines account today, I was surprised to find that there were some 32 new items in the Slate feed. Wondering whether I had wrongly named the Slashdot feed as Slate, I open the feed to find this:


This is not the first time that I am seeing this. Take a look at the first picture and then, come to the second one.. Do you notice the interesting point here? An article that had been posted two days back, is still being updated...I wonder what is the added/updated content?..I checked the two articles...I don't remember readingy anything new..may be there was some grammatical error- an omission of some "a"s or "an"s or "the"s in the article- I wonder!

Why is this practice?- with some 14,297 subcribers(including me, just in Bloglines alone), there is a huge potential to make your post appear as fresh as ever. I had already seen this sort of empty, "bot"ted updating happen every few hours(even, every half hour- if I am right!)!...I know...This can come only from Micros**t.

A nice article from Ramachandra Guha- [Via India Uncut]