A week ago I thought Sys-con was a somewhat seedy, maybe even just a sloppy publisher. “Oops! We just forget to get permission to use that photo / article. Sorry about that. Won’t happen again … til next time.”
Then they launched Ulitzer, set up 6000 unaware authors with profile pages, skim articles from their blogs and past magazine issues, Oh, yes, offered 200% adsense payments, but it kind of depended on you actually knowing that you were one of these 6000 authors and editing your profile to submit your adsense account number. Unfortunately, every “Ulitzer Author” I talked to or heard from had no idea that they were a “Ulitzer Author” and one for one wanted to be removed. I guess the old saying, “easier to ask forgiveness than permission” applies here, especially when you’re ripping off 6000 authors. Then again, that’s a lot of forgiveness to ask.
Anyway, now they seem to have totally lost it, going after the people who are pointing this stuff out. Surprisingly, I have not been a target yet, even though if you search for the term “Ulitzer” on Google, this blog comes up as #2, right after the link to Ulitzer itself. But mostly they are going after Aral Balkan, who initially discovered a lot of what’s going on. Right on the front page of their main site, Sys-con has called Aral a fag, a bitch, and now is accusing him of being an assassin. No lie. You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s links to Aral’s stories, very good reading:
Well, like I said yesterday, their shady practices are a suicide note, and it now seems they are in their death throes.
SAP, Microsoft, IBM, listen up: you are advertising on this site. Do you know what you are connecting yourselves with?
Keith, have you considered contacting the tech news site “The Register” about this? It would be right up their street and get this issue a lot of publicity from across the IT industry.
It seems so bizarre that it should be an early April Fools joke…
It sounds like the ripped-off authors should band together and file a class action lawsuit. I’m sure once this news hits mainstream they’ll go down in a ball of flames.
I was a technical editor for a print journal that went out of business around 2001, about the time SYS-CON bought out its parent company, so I poked around looking at author names and found a couple just by typing “authorname.ulitzer.com”, but didn’t see my own, even though I’d written a number of articles. Then I found my name in the alphabetical listings, but the address it linked to is darrelflant.ulitzer.com, which did give me a bit of a laugh.
It’s now on The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/01/ulitzer_farce/
Nice. Thanks. Just twittered it.
Now posted on WOT as a bad site.
8]
–Glenn
Thanks for the heads up! Will avoid anything sys con related from now on.