Slammed by Scoble
Earlier today Robert Scoble wrote a post slamming for being a spammer:
Hey, Google AdSense team: Elliott Back is breaking your rules. He is reprinting my content (and, I’ve come to learn, other people’s content) without permission. He is spamming everyone’s trackbacks (to have my content show up in people’s blogs I link to, which drives traffic over to his Web site). He is causing damage to the Internet. Please remove Google’s ads from his page and remove the incentive to do this kind of stuff. I have NOT given him permission to reprint my stuff in whole. You’ll notice that this is a splog written by Elliott Back and you’re just helping him profit off of this kind of behavior.
You’re causing your advertisers brand damage by including your advertisements on this guy’s page. Thanks for listening!
Please let me know how you are going to handle this guy. A reputable company that says “do no evil” should immediately stop doing business with a slimeball like this. Thanks!
Unfortunately, the blog in question is using a syndication plugin I wrote for Wordpress, which as a side-effect includes attribution to my blog under the heading “software by Elliott Back.” It’s unreasonable to believe that someone would be confused as to the authorship by that, or that an internet-guru like Scoble would forget to do a WHOIS lookup. As a result of Scoble’s post, Adsense disabled my ads for part of the day, resulting in lost revenue and who knows what else. You would think they had measures in place to prevent this, but it appears not.
If anything, the lesson to be learned here is twofold: think and do your research before making severe moral or criminal accusations, and that the blogosphere A-list is too powerful. One person shouldn’t be able to bring down someone else’s revenue streams with a wave of their finger.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 2:52 pm and is tagged with internet guru, revenue streams, splog, robert scoble, slimeball, whois lookup, reputable company, google, page thanks, authorship, spammer, blogosphere, accusations, doing business, wordpress, advertisements, advertisers, measures, syndication, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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8/28/2006 at 11:18 am
[...] But as Elliott clarifies here…. [...]
9/15/2006 at 4:38 pm
Lots of links... Lots of links: Looking for weekend reading material? Here's some interesting stuff I've kept open in my browser ...
1/13/2008 at 7:12 pm
[...] Elliott was more pissed that Scoble since he was loosing his blog revenue and earning a bad name for ...