UPDATE: As noted in the comments, Sam Sethi indicates he is restoring the post about Marc. Thank you, Sam!

——–

Dear Sam,

I don’t know you. Odds are you don’t know me. I’ve been a huge fan of your blognation network and am personal friends with several of the authors who write for you. Today it is pretty clear you are having some challenges. It is probably not one of your better days. Understandably, you seem to be removing all traces of Oliver Starr from your us.blognation.com site. Personally, I think that’s rather short-sighted because Oliver and Marc and everyone who wrote for you there were talented writers and many of us linked to those pages and valued their writing. If you do want to salvage blognation.com, many of us have given you lots of “link love” which will now wind up getting errors. From an SEO point-of-view, it does not seem to be the smartest move. But it’s your site and you can do with it what you will. Oliver has personally attacked you in a very public manner. You are no doubt angry and that is understandable.

But why? Why? Why? Why did you have to pull down the post about Marc Orchant’s massive heart attack? (and along with it all the comments left by well-wishers?)

All around the blogosphere, hundreds upon hundreds of bloggers have linked to that post (as did I). When last I saw, there were something like close to 200 comments left to that post. It is very clear from Oliver’s update page that this was great solace to Marc’s family.

Why did you pull the post down? Sure, it was written by Oliver, but so what? It is about one of your employees who suffered a massive heart attack and even now lies in a coma! Through the blogosphere people have heard about Marc and will be continuing to check in on that page to get the status of Marc’s recovery.

Can you please bring that post back?

Obviously, if Oliver is no longer part of blognation, he can’t update the page and it sounds like he is more directly connected to Marc than you are. Okay, so why can’t you go into that (restored) page and simply put at the very top something like this:

UPDATE: As Oliver Starr is no longer associated with Blognation, future updates on Marc’s condition and recovery can be found on Oliver’s update page about Marc. Our thoughts are with Marc and his family in this terrible time.

Or some words like that. Let people come back to the page about Marc’s condition and then find out where to go to get updates.

Please.

You and Oliver can have your public disagreement and flame each other all you want… but let’s leave Marc out of the picture. He’s in a coma and he and his family need the thoughts, prayers, good wishes, resources, etc. of all the rest of us.

Please do the right thing and bring that page back. Please bring back those comments which were obviously appreciated by Marc’s family.

At the very least, can you please put a redirect in your web server that maps the URL for the original post about Marc to Oliver’s update page? Yes, I know you don’t like Oliver right now and probably would sooner stick a knife in your body than link to Oliver’s new site… but please…

do it for Marc.

Thank you for your consideration,

Dan York

Technorati Tags: blognation, marc orchant, marcorchant, sam sethi, samsethi

If you blog and care about the theft of your content, you should really read this post from the “Lorelle on WordPress” blog: “Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content“.

Like most bloggers, my text has been lifted/scraped/stolen… whatever terms you want to use. In a couple of particularly egregious cases, I did actually make the effort to contact the thief and in one case got it taken down. (A marketing company that seemed to be setting up bogus blogs for SEO purposes and populating them with content from various RSS feeds. The CEO was a bit surprised/embarrassed when I called her up on the phone and basically said “Why are you stealing my content?”) But I don’t have the time to do that with any regularity. I could probably spend all day doing that and have about as much effectiveness as banging my head against a wall. I’d rather write new content and do all those other things that I need to do each day.

So I was a bit saddened to read of this newest development in the constant war between the spammers/sploggers/thieves and the content producers. Now we have people who will take the content of our RSS feeds, mash it up/remix it with synonyms, and put it out in a probably unreadable form… for SEO or whatever purpose they may be paid for.

I do wonder if these people can honestly look at themselves in the mirror in the morning… but yes, they probably can… as far as they are concerned they are finding new and innovative ways to service their clients. There’s just this minor little matter that they are stealing our content to do so….

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog spam