There was one problem with MyPunchBowl, you were unable to add multiple hosts to an event. Alex emailed support@mypunchbowl.com asking for a solution. That’s the last I heard about it till now.

I happen to use Bloglines, and I have a search in Bloglines for any posts on “Well.ca”. I was a bit surprised tonight when I came across a RSS entry that contained Alex’s email to support@mypunchbowl.com and the subsequent responses. It appears that MyPunchBowl uses Sproutit Mailroom for their support emails, which has an RSS feed of support emails. Someone has subscribed to this RSS feed in Bloglines and was found by my search for “Well.ca”.

When you add a feed to Bloglines, you can mark the feed as “Private” or “Public”. The interesting thing is that marking a feed as “Private” means (from Bloglines): “Private subscriptions don’t show up in blogrolls and you will not be listed as a public subscriber. However, the feed and all its posts will remain available to the public via Bloglines and Ask.com Blog & Feed Search”.

I don’t like putting stuff I want to keep private into RSS feeds and this confirms my feelings.

As a side note, the RSS feed in question can be accessed directly if you have the URL. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I don’t think this information should be so open.

I did a quick search on the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and found 6 trademarks JUST for the word Platinum. There might be more, the search tools at CIPO are not the greatest. The trademarks were such things as vodka, electric lamps, portable walls, and pet shampoo. I had no idea trademarks worked this way, I have to do some reading tonight.

It is interesting how Google has a very all or nothing approach to the trademarks. This isn’t the first one we’ve had problems with, but all the others are what I thought as valid trademarks (brand name, product name). Now you know why you’ll never see Platinum in a Google Adword.