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I didn't even catch this story until I read a post from George Lambert (owner of PodKey). I've read exactly what went on (http://www.unsignedpodcast.blogspot.com/): Erik Marcus signed up for a service. The service is a podcast feed keyword. Basically, you choose the keywords for your podcast, and someone can type them in and get podcasts for that keyword. Then, Erik goes apeshit: OMFG, d00d, vegan.com pwns mah rss copyright!!!1!

Little does this idiot realize at the time... he was the one that signed up for this service, which authorized PodKey to do exactly what it did, help him out: "I went to their website with the understanding that it was one of a large number of sites containing directories of podcasts. If podkeyword.com boosted my traffic, fantastic. ( http://vegan.com/issues/2005/podjacking.htm )"

But, George goes ahead an honors his request, and removes the guys podcast. Then, Erik goes apeshit again: OMMFG WTF, not k00l, I lost 75% of my peeps cause j00 delisted meh! YOU HAVE TO FIX THIS! Put it all back, but on top of that, you can't let anyone else but Yahoo and iTunes look at the feed! Then, I'll make them change to my feed, and you have to again drop your lists! YOU MUST DO THIS BECAUSE... uh... YOU OWE ME FOR ... errr... uh... BEING A MEAT EATER!

George replies simply: You can re-register yourself like you did the first time. You will get the same service. If you want terms other than what I'm willing to offer, I'll have to recode my website. I will not do that without compensation. If you aren't willing to do that, then you have the two choices of any podcaster: list with my free service and I'll ensure you are easily found by those looking for your type of podcast, or... don't.

Erik goes apeshit one last time: OMFG, d00d, I'm getting a lawyer, and a reporter, and Jesse Jackson, and a legion of bloggers and podcasters that will ignore the facts for me, and we're going to sue and slander your ass all over the net for this unjustificationation of podjacking!

So, it's all relatively simple. Erik wants his RSS feed copyrighted against, who? *!suprise!* His own actions! While at the same time, wanting the benefits and popularity of PodKey, while demanding that PodKey (a free service) bow to his personal demands... but only for as long as it takes him to ditch the PodKey service. He isn't getting his way, so he's making a big PR thing out of it.

Or, to summarize. Erik (aka the author of this article, Schlemphfer) is being a dick (an all veggie one, of course*), and a rather childish one at that. George, on the other hand, is a programmer just trying to run VOLUNTARY service to benefit podcasters. God forbid he doesn't let every disgruntled podcaster tell him how to rewrite his website code.

I've got a new word for all of you. SlashdotJacking - Passing off the jerking off of your own egotistic sob story as a legitimate Slashdot Story.

* Erik would never be a meaty dick, not being the author of Meat Market - "Meat Market: Animals, Ethics and Money is a quick read, but a valuable one. I can't remember the last time I read an animal rights book that excited me so much." -- Herbivore Magazine. Yes, rivveting!

Dude...don't you know what site you're visiting? But I have to say, it's refreshing to see a bias AGAINST cruelty on here for a change. Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc.

But this time, here's a clear-cut case of something grotesquely cruel. I mean, how could a decent person say that it's OK to artificially stock animals in small fenced areas, and then have a remotely fired gun so people can blast these creatures through the Internet? Sorry, that's just flat-out wrong, and even most hunters would say so.

I thought I'd pass along a couple hunting-related links, taken from just the past couple of days. First, be sure to read Matthew Scully's superb article "Fear Factories," in this week's American Conservative. Animal rights is often incorrectly thought of as some fringe cause, only embraced by people on the left. Here, Scully writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue.

I publish Vegan.com, and I have some commentary on Scully's article on my podcast from yesterday. You might want to listen to that as well.

And, what the heck, here's another article taken just today from Fark. One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter. Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming: Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them.

The thing about blogs is that I think it was a really obvious idea. There were loads and loads of people doing webpages, updated daily, when the blogging concept took hold. For instance, when I relaunched my website around 2000, I had my designer build a custom database so that I could easily post content from a webpage. Then blogs started getting big, and even though I didn't call my site a blog, it had a huge amount of characteristics in common with blogs.

I think the most important story about blogs is the emergence of back-end software like movabletype and wordpress. No longer were the developers of content stuck with the obvious kludge of using Frontpage or some other mediocre web site creator to post daily content. Wordpress and its ilk lets you post content, and incorporate a bunch of useful blog-related features, without reinventing the wheel.

But, as I said, I just don't find the "blog" concept that interesting. It's an obvious concept that was being practiced by thousands of websites long before somebody tacked the repulsive-sounding name "blog" on what they were doing.

In my eyes, far more interesting than blogs is the emerging iPodder concept. Here, people are adopting the very same tools used in blogs (wordpress, movabletype, etc), and using them to attach mp3 files of radio shows to the Internet. Internet radio has been around for a while, but the iPodder concept that taps into RSS sites is incredibly interesting.

To put it another way, blogs made me yawn and say, "I've already been doing this for months." Whereas podcasts made me say, "This is truly revolutionary. We finally have a way for individual content creators to break the Clear Channel hegemony."

Two months ago there were fewer than fifty podcasted radio shows. Now there are well over 200. I've been having a great time doing mine, which I post to a RSS feed for users of ipodder, and post to my website for people who visit it regularly.

One last comment on podcasting. There is a huge but limited number of people who want to surf the web or fire up their RSS feeder to read a variety of blogs. That circle of people draws from a very different population than those who want to listen to radio shows. And shows like mine can offer compelling content that there's a big demand for, but that traditional advertisers would boycott. The real news about the democratization of media isn't happening at a third annual blogging conference; it's happening right now with the emergence of ipodder radio shows.

The thing about blogs is that I think it was a really obvious idea. There were loads and loads of people doing webpages, updated daily, when the blogging concept took hold. For instance, when I relaunched my website around 2000, I had my designer build a custom database so that I could easily post content from a webpage. Then blogs started getting big, and even though I didn't call my site a blog, it had a huge amount of characteristics in common with blogs.

I think the most important story about blogs is the emergence of back-end software like movabletype and wordpress. No longer were the developers of content stuck with the obvious kludge of using Frontpage or some other mediocre web site creator to post daily content. Wordpress and its ilk lets you post content, and incorporate a bunch of useful blog-related features, without reinventing the wheel.

But, as I said, I just don't find the "blog" concept that interesting. It's an obvious concept that was being practiced by thousands of websites long before somebody tacked the repulsive-sounding name "blog" on what they were doing.

In my eyes, far more interesting than blogs is the emerging iPodder concept. Here, people are adopting the very same tools used in blogs (wordpress, movabletype, etc), and using them to attach mp3 files of radio shows to the Internet. Internet radio has been around for a while, but the iPodder concept that taps into RSS sites is incredibly interesting.

To put it another way, blogs made me yawn and say, "I've already been doing this for months." Whereas podcasts made me say, "This is truly revolutionary. We finally have a way for individual content creators to break the Clear Channel hegemony."

Two months ago there were fewer than fifty podcasted radio shows. Now there are well over 200. I've been having a great time doing mine, which I post to a RSS feed for users of ipodder, and post to my website for people who visit it regularly.

One last comment on podcasting. There is a huge but limited number of people who want to surf the web or fire up their RSS feeder to read a variety of blogs. That circle of people draws from a very different population than those who want to listen to radio shows. And shows like mine can offer compelling content that there's a big demand for, but that traditional advertisers would boycott. The real news about the democratization of media isn't happening at a third annual blogging conference; it's happening right now with the emergence of ipodder radio shows.

kmudrick wrote:
First off, it's fairly impossible to avoid coming in contact with non-vegan stuff in most people's lives.. A good 99.9% of the vegans I know realize this, and strive to to the best they can, to minimize the most amount of suffering as they possibly can.

That is a very noble cause. Although I think it naive to put that goal in front of all others, it's certainly a goal that should be a higher priority in most people's minds.

That being said, how do you get from that cause to "no products originating from animals", which is the definition of Vegan that I get from most sources. Mother's milk is certainly an animal product, and although mothers of early teethers might disagree, its extraction is generally not considered to be suffering.

Similarly, I can see how you would want to avoid the products of the big chicken and dairy farms, those animals are suffering. On the other hand, how is harvesting eggs from a free range chicken with plenty of space and food suffering? How is milking the family's pampered pet goat suffering?

Anyhow, back to the off-topic-ness at hand.. B12 - it can be from a source most vegans feel comfortable with, for instance, nutritional yeast.
Nutritional yeast does not generate B12. The best it can do is gather it from the medium it grows in. So again you're back to where the B12 comes from.

Would a Catholic not consider themselves religious anymore if, for instance, they had to miss church on Sunday because they were hurling their guts up do to illness? Would they give up completely because of something like that?
I'm not Catholic, but I would hope not. That, however is not a good parallel to the question that was in my mind initially. We're not talking about an occasional lapse or accident, we're talking about a diet/philosophy that, by some interpretations, prevents its practitioners from getting what they need to survive.

A much more extreme example, but more in line with my question, would be the Breatharians, who encourage their practioners to not eat at all. They disagree, but to my eyes, this philosophy directly endangers the lives of its practitioners. If you eat, you are insufficiently enlightened in the eyes of the Breatharians.

Yes, the Vegan/B12 issue is much much more minor, but still troubling to me in the exact same way. If, in order to be a "good Vegan", you must deprive yourself of a nutrient essential to life, then, in my opinion, being a Vegan is unhealthy. I'm not convinced that this is or isn't the case, but much of what has been discussed here and elsewhere makes me wary.

I run a marginally profitable website that makes use of banner ads. And I resented your comment, which seems to be targetted at web publishers like me:

>>>>>Be creative, and try to make information about your product visible to those who actually want it, don't cast it scattergun style in front of millions of people for whom it just represents an annoyance. Browsers such as Mozilla now have pop-up blocking because users want it, and that means that the users don't want to read your add for X-10 cameras or you've won a free prize while trying to access their bank accounts. Listen to your customers, and develop a business based upon respecting them, not on blanketing them with crap everytime they log in.

Please take a look at how I do ads on Vegan.com. I'd prefer to do fewer ads, or none at all, but this is the money I spend to keep the site hosted and updated regularly. I am not putting up banners for X-10 cameras. My ads are specifically targetted to Vegans, and many of my readers make use of them. If a good portion of my site's readers start using blocking software, I could not afford to keep my site going the way it is now. And why, exactly, would that be a good thing?

The question of whether people who use blocking software should be called thieves is stupid and irrelevant. Blocking software would undoubtedly harm my site's ability to attract the revenue I need to keep it going. I resent admonishments like yours to "be creative." Many of us small-site publishers are being as creative and unobtrusive as we can possibly be. -Erik Marcus

This past week on Vegan.com, we've run a "Don't Link to Huntington" article. Huntington prohibits linking to their site, which is reason enough in my eyes to link to them. They are one of the biggest vivisectors in the United States, and they want it both ways. They want to use a website to peddle their animal testing services to companies, while preventing animal rights groups from pointing to Huntingon.com in order to show the public what is done to animals for the sake of making a buck.

But here's where the story takes an interesting turn. As I said, we posted our link on Vegan.com a few days ago. I was expecting I might receive a nasty letter from their lawyers telling me to desist. Sheesh, in fact you could say I was hoping to get a notice from their lawyers, so I could tell them to go cram it. But nothing.

Instead, here's what they have apparently done. I just went to Vegan.com, and the links to Huntington's page now come up as refused if you click on them. Meanwhile, you can still manually type Huntington.com into your browser, and the site will come up. So I suspect they have put a block in place, refusing all links from Vegan.com. Try it and see for yourself

But of course, refusing links is not the worst thing these scumbags do, given the horrifying acts they perform every day on animals. But there's no point in starting a rant about that.

Is it just me, or are other people slightly sickened when they think about what all happens to red meat?

I am so turned off when I think of steak and hamburgers now, that I can barely order and wolf down a Big Mac or prime rib any more.

In other news, E. Coli just broke out again, this time in Old Folk's Homes. Seems that This strand is a drug-resistant strain!