I’ve been using Feedburner, an online service that’s now part of Google, to offer RSS subscriptions to my blogs. Four months ago, the RSS feed associated with the Informal Learning Blog started to go haywire.
I went to Feedburner to investigate. I clicked Edit Feed Details and entered my RSS feed.
This returns an error; the message says my feed’s XML is invalid.
I went to Feed Validator to see what’s wrong. Feed Validator says everything’s okay.
Now what?
I follow Google’s advice and scour the discussions on Google Groups. Lots of other people have experienced the same problem. Some of the requests for help have gone unanswered for a year or two. The two suggestions offered by Google staff are (1) don’t paste Microsoft Word into your blog and (2) strip out the diacritical marks in Central European language posts. In fact, why not simply run everything through the filtering effects of a text editor. (Well, some of us like to provide something more sophisticated than raw text. Duh.)
I find my way to this group:
“Due to the increasing amount of spam we are receiving everyday and the declining number of “real” users seeking help through Google Problems, we have decided to stop receiving new discussions from today.”
I go to the Google Help Centers. Whoops. Feedburner doesn’t rate an entry.
So I went out on the open web and looked for help via the kindness of strangers. Maybe switch my feed to ATOM format? Doesn’t look like that works either.
Here’s the rub.
A community can make could use of volunteer contributions, even more so when the organization has a spirited community, e.g. Cisco, Zappos, Intel.) But a vendor’s disgruntled customers are a different matter. Google could score some great karma if they stopped relying on algorithms to manage relationships. I’ve wasted hours upon hours with one niggling little problem, that, so far as I can tell, was not of my own making. I feel like I’m being swept under the rug. The folks who eventually topple Google will probably have figured this out.
Related posts:
