blubrry‘s Todd Cochrane announced today that his company was removing more than a hundred podcasts from its service and banning sites because of problems with “podspam”:

This morning I instructed our CIO to have all shows that were using a RSS Feed generation service hosted by trafficgeyser.net and mypodfeeds.com to be terminated here at Blubrry.com

From this point forward we will no longer allow accounts from those two services. Content creators must choose wisely on the service that they align themselves with. I felt that service hurt the Blubrry brand and service we are trying to provide here.

This decision was made after several weeks of evaluation, what we found was that the very high majority of shows using those services had content that we felt in large part was not appropriate for the listeners visiting this website.

The majority of the shows were non compliant with our terms of service and the content was for the most part marketing pitches for their websites our services. Additionally the high majority of the shows did not have complete profiles and by their show profiles it was obvious that their sole purpose of being here was to build page rank and drive traffic to their content.

While we will work with any show that feels their content should not have been removed please recognize that we have done this to protect Blubrry Listeners and the other content creators that are part of this community.

We have never taken this action at Blubrry.com and hopefully never will have to again in the future. We have implemented a new strict review policy in order to protect the content creators on this website.

Unfortunately, as the marketability of podcasting rises, interest from spammers appears to be rising, too, and spamcasts may become more of a problem.

See our recent interview with Todd Cochrane for his take on problems with the current state of podcast feeds.