Inflammatory title I know, but there appears to be no love lost between Marshall Kirkpatrick of SplashCast and Todd “The Geek” Cochrane of Geek News Central.
This started heating up between these two after Todd started hammering SplashCast for hijacking RSS feeds.
Things became a little more bitchy yesterday after Todd wrote a post complaining that Google Buying FeedBurner is pure evil.
Have people really thought about the ramifications of this? Google will not only know what you search for, what ads you click on but they will also know EXACTLY what you are subscribed to at a very intimate level.
Anyway Todd’s post drew some comments including this simple little comment from Marshall:
Nice MyBlogLog widget over in that sidebar.
Now it’s well know that the MBL widget tracks a lot of what users do on your site. Some folks have gone as far as to say that real reason Yahoo purchased MyBlogLog was to get hold of the MBL widget and track Google AdSense click data.
Anyway Todd got more than a little defensive at that comment:
Marshall
Your just pissed because I took you to task on your RSS Hijacking and content re-purposing you folks were doing over their.
My stance on FeedBurner is not new.
What makes this comment even more defensive and bitchy is that Todd choose not to reply to or comment on the much more provocative comment posted by an anonymous coward called “test”:
Such a whiny little hypocrite with your Yahoo spyware.
I respect both Marshall and Todd. I don’t personally know either of them. I’m a SplashCast fan and have exchanged a few mails with Marshall and I’m a Geek News Central fan and listen to Todd’s podcast regularly.
I just can’t figure out why Todd is put so “on edge” by this little comment. What’s driving this?
Maybe Todd was just having a bad day?
Maybe there’s more to this than we realize?
Maybe I’m just starting rumors 
Either way, I really wouldn’t have expected a “rub your nose in it” response like that from Todd.
I just seems childish and completely ignores the point that Marshall was referring to.
While Todd is complaining about Google gathering information on users he continues to feed information on his users and their clicks to Yahoo via the MBL widget.
I’d love to be at a conference with these too. I reckon there would be plenty of cold stares and “dagger” eyes shooting across the room.
Maybe we could have an MTV Celebrity Deathmatch – Marshall Kirkpatrick VS Todd “The Geek” Cochrane.
P.S. Sorry about the photoshop guys – I couldn’t resist!
Posted by Paul to Paul O'Flaherty, 2007. | Permalink to Deathmatch Kirkpatrick VS Cochrane