Comments on: Shoemoney Banned from Yahoo’s MyBlogLog

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:39:32 +0000

The problem is SEOs overreacting to issues online and then creating a wave of reactions that they cannot later control.

The recent ‘boycotting’ of MBL by several SEOs is a perfect example.

YES, MBL did something stupid. YES, Shoemoney should have emailed them first, as he was showing an exploit in their system to the public.

In both cases, emails would have done the job quite nicely (and if the problem took so little time to fix as they say it did, then JS could have published the info afterwards).

MBL & Yahoo are not bad organisations – people make mistakes, and the same people who lapped up MBL and Yahoo a while back turn on them when they get pissed off.

Some restraint (Shoemoney’s reaction is very proper – he has refused to talk about MBL again, but hasn’t gone on to ‘lead a boycott’, which frankly is a silly thing to do) and making an allowance for people to make mistakes (assuming they own up and rectify them) should be there.

It’s not.

What does that say about our industry?

By: Evan

Evan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:55:56 +0000

if you don’t think he did it for his rep and for links then i think you are being a little short sighted. he’s too smart to NOT have.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:30:09 +0000

how is it bad? if they wanted the info to be safe..they should have encrypted it.

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:19:35 +0000

I doubt that JS did it out of personal interest – he’s famous enough not to get kicks out of something like this.

I think he did it to point out a flaw and share some knowledge, and it backfired.

By: Evan

Evan — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:07:03 +0000

This is vigilantly justice. He could have found the bugs and told them to MBL but instead he made them public for his own benefit.

I completely agree with what MBL did. Imagine someone finding a hole in SEJ or whoevers blog and posting it to thousands of people who can use it for their own benefit and not telling you. I’d bet you’d be pretty ticked too.

By: Ken Savage

Ken Savage — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:02:04 +0000

Probably because Yahoo is embarrassed about how easily these bugs surfaced and Jeremy uncovered them and blogged about it. I would have done the same.

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:14:22 +0000

the MBL excuse is weak.

Andy’s reaction is overblown.

I think the comments coming out of Yahoo (that Shoe’s quoting) are signs of factions within Yahoo as opposed to the truth about the MBL deal.

I’d be surprised if Scott Rafer was the one who decided to ban Shoe.

Shoe DID publish a way for people to abuse their system. So yes, he did do something wrong, but it was not malicious, and MBL should have the foresight to see it.

Bringing old disputes (Andy v JZ) into this is lame.

Google must be loving this :P

So…Yahoo ‘get’ social marketing but they can’t control the factions inside, nor do they always have a handle on how to deal with bloggers and online media. For a search engine / portal / media company, that’s a shame.

Of course, this event doesn’t reflect on the whole of Yahoo, but that’s how it will be seen.

By: Simon Heseltine

Simon Heseltine — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 04:19:57 +0000

Well, the MBL guys did post over on Shoemoneys site that their reason for banning him, and refunding his money, was because he posted the user IDs of several people after exposing the flaw.

Of course, you could also make the argument that anyone could easily get those IDs, and that they’d fixed it within 45 minutes of his first post, but that’s their reason…