Bad Natured

Whinge time. News@Nature's all news feed had been broken for over a month. This despite the RSS banquet they offer and their avowed purpose to make it "easier for users to keep track of our content". Perhaps nobody uses it; perhaps nobody cared; perhaps Nature likes to offer these facilities only nominally and prefers us to visit their Yahoo!-style self-referential banner-strewn site instead. Either way, the top story on their feed was 'Mouse Testicles Reveal New Class Of RNAs' from 5-Jun-06 through to 7-Jul-06.

I sent a nice email ("Hi Nature, Did you know…?") pointing this out to a name I found on the site - her Out Of Office reply provided another contact so I sent the same message to him. This was 21-Jun. Nothing happened. So, on 6-Jul after four weeks of rodent gonads, I forwarded the message to news@nature.com to say it was my last try and wishing them luck in the future for both feed-fixing and email-replying. Next day--surely a coincidence!--the feed was fixed. Ten days on, still no email reply. Nature: prestigious, authoritative, bad-mannered.