The Case of the Mistaken Feedsharks

In the world of blogs there is feedshark and feedshark. Say them out loud and they are as different as Catherine and Katherine.

Look them up on Google and the giggles begin.

Before last week I had never heard of either shark. Now it seems I have gotten the two terribly confused.

Is this a case of one feedshark trying to, in the words of Harvey Mackay,p>

Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition?

Or is the situation more dolphonic. (I know dolphonic is not really a word but I like the way it sounds. I think its a good word to describe someone or something that exudes dolphin like behavior.

The dolphin is most often thought of as a friendly animal and treated with love and respect. They are curious and playful, and highly intelligent. They live together in groups, and look after each other.

So here's how the case of The Mistaken Feedshark occurred. You be the judge if this is just a case of two services in the same industry with the same name, or is it something a bit more fishy?

Last week I shared a post from DIVA marketing  about a new service that allows you to submit your RSS feed to multiple feed search engines.

Thinking that some of my readers might not know what an RSS feed is, I thought it might be a community service to link to Feedshark's website which does provide an explanation of all things RSS.

May I digress for a moment? Just to emphasize the need for this education I received an email from my friend Harold yesterday.

"Been reading it on and off…caught up on this week's articles…overall they are funny and good…but I got to tell you the RSS ones have me stumped. What IS an RSS? For those of us that do not have blogs…haven't the faintest idea"

So here is an explanation  from feedshark.com for those of you who are not up to speed on RSS.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

Now back to The Case of the Mistaken Feedshark.

When I decided to provide this background information I went to Google to find the URL for Feedshark. Thinking that feedshark.com and feedshark were one in the same, I linked to feedshark.com

Had Tomas not posted a comment on my blog alerting me to the fact that my feedshark link was not the same as the DIVA's, I would have been none the wiser.

Evidently I'm not the only one who is a bit amused by the shark similiarity.

Tim Yang also found the situation a bit ironic.See his post for Sunday April 24th.

Once I realized that it was a bit unusual for two services/organizations/companies in the same field to have the same name, it dawned on my that there might be more to this story..

I've sent emails to the two feedsharks asking for an explanation. I'm patiently awaiting their response.