After looking at my blog stats since the beginning of the month, I got this feed hunters list:

All major news portal need the last posts from the most popular blogs, and as long as your webserver is fit enough to receive all this free load, nobody will care. The only problem is these 6 bots are doing the same job many times a day, we’re looking for a refactoring master to solve this problem.

More info about each of these bots:

• Msnbot, they have 2 bots, one with fewer requests is called ‘msnbot-media‘: http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm
• Google Feedfetcher: http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html
• FeedTools, which can be considered more as a rss-reader, and not just a bot: http://www.sporkmonger.com/projects/feedtools
• Bloglines, the agent signature also gives you the number of subscribers: http://www.bloglines.com
• rFeedReader, I discovered it was called as rFeedFinder, it’ll be corrected soon: http://rfeedreader.rubyforge.org
• Soup.io: http://soup.io

After a new EU directive, this kind of behavior will be forbidden at the end of the year.

It’s the last happy year for companies using this technique, and I wonder if it would be possible to counter-attack them at their own game: creating fake-fake-blog, praising a product so much that it obviously appears as a marketing campaign.

• What would be the needs for this kind of attack?
• How would it be efficient, and how to mesure its effectiveness?
• Would it be possible to create a win-win situation using this strategy?