To whom it may concern:

Please remove me, my blogs posts, and everything that concerns me, from Wellsphere. I will otherwise be forced to resort to tactics I’d rather not employ.

Once I realized that being a “health maven” meant that I was going to be ENCOURAGED to answer medical questions that I’m not trained or educated to respond to, and that there was no medically responsible oversight of what people were being “advised” to do … it really scared me. You put “Expert” and “Top Health Blogger” next to the names of practically every non-medical person in there, giving your readers a false impression of security and trust. That’s conscienceless … and if people were actually harmed, criminal. When seen alongside the sale of Wellsphere … it’s also a misrepresentation to both your bloggers, and to those who are buying Wellsphere, not to mention that it was a very dishonest way to make a buck on other people’s work and trust.

It’s sad to realize that Wellsphere turned out to be just another glorified blog scraper … and particularly dangerous one, at that.

Doris “Moof” Ballard
All Blogged Up: A Moof’s Tale

A few more interesting links:

Beyond Meds … via Robin from Survive the Journey

A Different Perspective on the Sale of Wellsphere via Dr. Val from Getting Better with Dr. Val

(Thanks for the TWEETS ladies!)

Last year, I received some flattering emails from a fellow name Geoff Rutledge. I ignore the first few emails because I simply wasn’t interested, but when one of the emails mentioned getting to answer questions asked by other users, and having opportunities to ask some of our own, I imagined that it would be something like WebMD … and I joined. Dr. Rutledge was very kind and attentive until I actually bit … and then, well …

When I agreed to join, he wanted to put me in the parenting group. Sorry people, but I’m way too old to fit in that group – my kids have kids, I’m a bit old fashioned about raising children, and I simply do not approve of some of the more popular child raising ideas. I told Dr. Rutledge that I would join, but that I didn’t want to be in parenting – I wanted to be in the “Kidney Failure” group. He assured me that I would be.

When I logged on for the first time, I saw that I had, indeed, been placed in the parenting group after all. I wrote to the dear man, and asked him to please move me out of there into something more appropriate. No reply … no action. At the time, I was just coming back to blogging, and had written some pretty gnarly, dark posts. I was humiliated and disturbed when I realized that those posts had ended up in the parenting group’s collection. Dr. Rutledge had told me that each subject would appear in its own group – not so! I wrote to Dr. Rutledge again, this time expressing my desire to be removed from that parenting group a bit more forcefully. Still no reply.

In a fit of pique, I logged in and deleted my connection to the parenting group – wondering what would happen. I found that it just dumped me in the General Medicine Group instead. Poo! Again not my department … but at least better than parenting.

I did my best to answer questions when I felt confident enough with the subject, but that wasn’t very often. In fact, it began to bother me that no one seemed to be moderating the comments or the replies. I’m supposed to be a “Health Maven” in the “General Medicine” group … and I got my qualifications from …. a Cracker Jacks box? Wellsphere made it appear as if I was someone knowledgeable in General Medicine, and no one was checking in to make sure I wasn’t killing someone with bad advice! Dude! In fact, most of the questions which were sent in weren’t being answered at all, or they were being answered by numbos like me. Answers from real medical professionals were meager. Imagine if the readers took Wellsphere seriously, and actually trusted our replies!!!

Anyway, I had gotten pretty irritated with the place, and I began deleting their emails a while back. I had no idea what was going on until I saw Wellsphere come up over and over on Twitter last night, and decided I’d better take a peek. What I found out really put me off …

It seems that HealthCentral Network has acquired Wellsphere! Whoa! Wait a minute! That’s my blog content they’re selling! That’s not much different than what Bitacle was doing back in 2006.

My personal opinion of Wellsphere is not only are they thieves, they’re also dangerous … they let everyone and his brother give medical advice over the internet, with little or no moderation. They also lie about a person’s qualifications to give advice! Health Maven indeed!

I expect that as soon as this post hits Wellsphere’s site, mine will look a bit like Six Until Me’s account! ;o)

It hasn’t just been the email spammers. My comment spam went from an occasional annoyance several months ago, to being a very serious problem today. A few days ago, I got 141 in a 24 hour period on this blog alone. I’ve got a plugin that works amazingly well for that … I’ll give you an update on that in another post.

As if the reams of spam leaking in through every orifice and stealing our bandwidth isn’t bad enough, I’ve had big fancy-schmancy web sites (more than one!) in China direct linking to my music. They come off as the “good guys” over there – if someone wants to hear a song, they just do a search on their search engine, and lo and behold, there’s the song they want! They can hear it for free! They’re so happy that they pay for the service through donations and/or fees. Meanwhile, the web sites offering the music aren’t expending any bandwidth … they’re linking to the songs in other people’s blogs and web sites! My bandwidth counter for the directory the songs are in went from about 350 megs to 3.5 GIGS between August and September.

And then … of course, there are the folks over at MySpace nickel and diming me into next week by linking to graphics they found on my blog …

Thanks to TJ, I came up with a way to squelch that … which I hope to have time to share with you later today.

This post, however, is about the most egregious thief of all: Bitacle.org

This morning, when I got up, I had an email from Sarah waiting for me. This is what she said:

Something bad is going on with the blogging community. Some website is stealing blogs!

[...]

This is the article they pointed to, to read more about it:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/the-bitacle-battle-of-blogs/

I’m still not sure what’s going on. How do I find out if these people are stealing my posts too? They are just scraping stuff right off the RSS feeds apparently.

I *THINK* this is the site that is doing it: http://en.bitacle.org/

And then, another email from her … letting me know that they had, indeed, “stolen” my blog. They apparently have 204 of my posts on there! Since I only have about 221 of them – not counting this one – then it appears that they have my entire blog, including pictures, etc., minus my private posts, on their server!

The blogger at Lorelle on WordPress explained what these guys are up to better than I could have:

Bitacle has become Public Enemy #1 this weekend in some parts of the blogosphere (Search Bitacle on Technorati for more details). As I reported earlier, the Spain-based splogger scrapes your content (your Creative Commons deed be damned), monetizes it, keeps the cash — and refuses to answer email complaints. I called them “thieves” in my first post, and I am repeating the charge here. Bitacle’s boss, the magnificently misnamed Jesus Angelo “But call me Ladrón, honey” Glez, is a thief.

…Bitacle, while not replying to anyone’s mails, as far as I can see, seems to be aware they are under attack. They’ve been down much of the weekend, and they have (today) started including the URL to the content they steal. Nevertheless, they are still ripping off and re-purposing content, without permission, for their own financial gain. Worse, they still encourage comments to the stolen blog posts on their site in an attempt to dupe readers into believing they are seeing a “real” blog.

So – Bitacle steals your content, drops ads into it, and makes a killing on your work. Every word and graphic you’ve ever publicly posted. How many of you are on there? I don’t know … however, my blog is only a “Slithering Reptile in the TTLB Ecosystem” … so, chances are good that they’re got you in there too. Go take a look: Bitacle.org … I went, selected “Blogs,” and typed in “Funeral Hymns Tag” and came up with Shelly’s blog, Sarah-Jean’s blog, Ipanema’s blog, and many others I didn’t recognize.

You should see all of the familiar blogs I found when I put in “P4P”!!! – Dr. Dino, Kevin MD, MedMusings … Healthvoices … and I don’t need to tell you what typing in “Grand Rounds” brought up! To name just a few: Dr. Anonymous … Borneo Breezes … Cut to Cure … Emergiblog … Grunt Doc … I could go on and on and turn this into a real link fest! If you see your blog on here, and even if you don’t. they have probably stolen all of your posts.

There’s a blog helping out with the plagiarism problem … it’s called Stop Bitacle. They have quite a bit of information there, and are offering free buttons to include in your posts. When Bitacle steals your posts, and each one has a STOP BITACLE button on it, it might begin to make an impact.

If we don’t act … fight back … then you can scrap any idea of turning a profit from blog ads. There will be plagiarizers up the wazoo snagging your readers, using your own work as bait. Those who like what you’ve written will bookmark Bitacle to return to your work. I wasn’t able to the find the places to leave comments, so I guess they’ve removed them … but apparently, they even had open comments on your posts … where people would think they were commenting to the post’s author.

I’m going to include the buttons from Stop Bitacle at the bottom of my posts for the time being. I recommend that you at least get over there and read their information. I have a feeling that, like the spam buildup of the last number of years, this sort of thing is going to worsen too. We need to find a way to defend ourselves … and I, for one, am not going to stop blogging … !

The Bush administration is threatening to sue if Maine regulators decide to investigate whether Verizon Communications illegally turned over customer information to the National Security Agency.

And it also makes me … afraid.

I’m not one for conspiracies … and i seldom give such things two consecutive seconds of thought … but this is today’s paper, our real paper, and not some tacky tabloid. Although the Portland Press Herald has a liberal slant, you don’t see this sort of thing in there very often.

Verizon … is a large company. Not just local to Maine. Is Verizon illegally selling your phone information to the government?

If they are … you’ll never find out. Apparently, the government will prevent you from trying!

I’m all for getting rid of Verizon, AND the current government! :o(

I would imagine that the baby might agree – I think I’d prefer to die of natural causes, too …