Radian6's R6_FeedFetcher Fetching More Than Feeds

For those of you unfamiliar with Radian6 it's a "social media monitoring tool" because apparently everyone with an opinion on the internet needs someone to spy on their ass since we're disruptive.

Well bummer.

Isn't it a shame the good old days are gone where companies told you everything you needed to know about their brand and you had to be a journalist just to get your opinion heard?

Of course those so-called journalists never gave you their real opinion because of fear of losing advertisers so it was all candy coated bullshit that just bordered on the truth because advertisers couldn't handle the truth fearing nobody would buy their shit.

Tough shit and god bless the great equalizer called the Internet that leveled the playing field between consumers and companies so we can find out what's really going on without everything being filtered through the company spin doctor.

Their crawler details are:

142.166.3.122 "R6_FeedFetcher(www.radian6.com/crawler)"

The amusing thing about the R6_FeedFetcher is I never see it fetching the feed, instead it's trying to fetch pages linked from the feed, which is what we call a crawler and not a fucking feed fetcher.

Does it read robots.txt to see if it's allowed beyond my RSS feed?

Fuck no.

I looked at all accesses on my RSS feed and didn't see anything obvious so maybe they get RSS feeds from FeedBurner or something similar, who knows.

Anyway, it's blocked now on my other site so I can be as disruptive as I want there.

However, who wants to place bets that this disruptive post will be monitored?


P.S. The site R6_FeedFetcher is blocked on is not this blog for first time readers ;)

Update:

After doing some research it appears they also have the following user agent:

R6_CommentReader(www.radian6.com/crawler

Also, read this interesting post about Radian6 on Simon's blog.