I tend to believe Rutledge when he says they didn’t make a LOT of money on the sale – if they had sold even a year ago someone might have paid millions for it- (funds probably went to cover their debts and parachute them to personal financial safety as employees of HCN) but now that the blogosphere is hip to what they did, their employee status at HCN is more of a liability than anything else. HCN’s acquisition (as per Schroeder) was primarily for repeat traffic that they could monetize with ads.

There are three kinds of bloggers who will remain in this community now that the cat’s out of the bag: 1) those who are selling something 2) those whose content quality doesn’t stand on its own – and they therefore have no other way to gain visibility/traffic and 3) those who live in a bubble and haven’t heard the news or understand the WS business model.

I agree with Moofie that part of the underbelly of this whole thing is that lay people were promoted as “health experts” on Wellsphere and encouraged to answer medical questions. That’s both misleading and dangerous – and as a physician I worry about patient safety online more than ever. One should question the value of Wellsphere content on two bases: 1) most of the best, most credible bloggers have already requested that all their content be removed 2) a collection of lay person responses to medical questions has little value.

If HCN wants to protect its reputation as a trusted source of health information, then (in my opinion) they have one of two choices at this point: 1) medically review all WS content and selectively remove harmful and misleading claims/threads/blogs/experts – this will cost them about $25/page of content – an expense that is likely to be financially untenable. Or 2) retract the deal with Wellsphere, apologize profusely to bloggers, and invite them to join their network of their own free will for either ad revenue share (as Seed Magazine does) or guaranteed traffic – no transfer of IP rights to them, bloggers can quit at any time if they don’t see a benefit. They might consider offering eDocAmerica type services for answering patient questions online, if they are interested in continuing that Q&A strategy.

I hope that the HCN will provide the health blogosphere with a formal perspective/statement soon. In this case, silence is certainly not golden.

He’s just deflecting away from the real issue by abdicating personal responsibility when he says, “whatever someone else, without his knowledge or consent, did at a later time, was out of his control.” Has anyone even expressed concern about what Dr. Rutledge might do with the material? Since when is what he may or may not do with the material an issue since he wasn’t the one claiming ownership in the first place? People are concerned about what Wellsphere or Health Central, in their present states or future incarnations might do with the material since they claimed unlimited ownership from now until the end of time. He’s complicit in the system that has condoned questionable business practices, that continues to act irresponsibly by not owning up to having managed this so poorly, and that hasn’t taken steps to ameliorate it in the form of verification to all of us that our work will not be used without our explicit consent.

On top of all that, he seems to be suggesting that Wellsphere has done all of us a favor by removing our content, like we should be thankful and appreciate how generous and honorable they are for having made that sacrifice even though they didn’t really have to? Are you kidding me? Where is the remorse for having knowingly mislead so many people? Where is the admission of obvious wrongdoing and unethical business practices? Instead, he’s fishing for sympathy by telling people he’s “hurt by charges of having been disingenuous, of having misrepresented himself and Wellsphere, and that people would actually believe the things that they were writing.” It’s another deflection tactic that under the circumstances is really unprofessional and as manipulative as any of the emails he sent.