Ironically they had Matt Cutts – Google’s webspam czar – listed as an author. Hilarity ensues.

Sam

I’ll look into it. Maybe Ulitzer can serve as a negative role model. I also will have Gartner PR look into their use of my blog post.

I think this discussion is an important discussion to have. The social Web has great promise but also a high potential for bad behavior. It is important that we recognize both.

Thanks for your response.

I think adults would be able to cut thru the poo and clear it up pretty quickly. This company isn’t garnering my respect with their continued childish response.

Solution?

1. CEO publicly declares mea culpa, orders staff to get PERMISSION prior to including them as authors.

2. Blogger Deniz is put on a short leash and told to knock it off.

3. Aral gets back to biz as usual without the daily (twice daily) bad man story.

Golly – this seems so simple to me.

It might be worth letting Sys-Con/Ulitzer know this also since their article on the subject is titled:

“Will Ulitzer Dominate News Content on The Web? -Gartner”

http://weblogic.sys-con.com/node/921954

If you read up on how horribly Sys-Con/Ulitzer has been attacking me since I called them out on stealing my content and misappropriating my identity, I believe you will understand at least some of the frustration that I and others in the community feel towards our treatment by this company.

Sys-Con/Ulitzer has called me “a social media terrorist”, “Turkish fag”, “Turkish spammer”, and compared me to the gunman who shot Pope John Paul II. And this isn’t just anyone publishing these articles into Ulitzer’s system, where they are then indexed by Google Search, Google News, etc. It’s their CEO, Fuat Kircaali writing both under his own name and, in the opinion of a great many in the community, under pseudonyms (a number of staff authors and editors at Sys-Con have stock photos or photos from Wikipedia as their profile pictures and absolutely no trace of them can be found anywhere else on the Internet.) Until recently Dolce and Gabbana supermodel David Gandy was the face of one of their editors.

Again, documentation for all this and more is available at the link I gave you earlier.

I hope this gives you some back-story and provides at least an modicum of insight into why myself and other members of the community are so frustrated with Sys-Con and Ulitzer.

First of all, Gartner didn’t publish this. Anthony Bradley (aka, me) posted this on his individual blog to generate a discussion and give people like you a forum to discuss the citizen journalism concept as a whole and Ulitzer’s approach in specific.

You should reread my post because it is not a “glowing review” of Ulitzer. In fact, I ask the question “Will Ulitzer be this vehicle?” I certainly don’t state that it is the vehicle.

We welcome an open discussion and value your input but please don’t bash someone for opening the discussion. That is bad form.

That company will never make it and I think a reputable source like Gartner shouldn’t even publish such a glowing review.

If the day you speak off is to arrive – the only way we will get there is if paratices demostrated by the site, it’s commentors and it’s business owners need to be irradicated.

They also have this entertaining tendency to call their detractors terrorists, fags, and worse, if you can believe it — in a verifiable way, to boot! The articles are on their site, and when commentors point out that it seems racist or libelous, they post follow-ups that are even more full of hateful invective.

Speaking of valueless infotainment…

The whole business model of Ulitzer seems to have been built upon some form of RSS-Robot which has gathered content unbeknown to the original authors and also frequently infringing copyright in the process.

The libelous practices which sys-con are now adopting against any who object to this (and particularly heavily in the case of Aral Balkan) should certainly make them an orgnisation which Gartner does not want to be too closely associated with – falsified names and photos on libelous and threatening “articles” on Ulitzer itself and direct threats to those within the international community, including racist remarks.

The initial shock caused to the involuntary “authors” is what lead to sys-con offering that “generous” 200% AdSense kick-back.

The concept you report on in this blog article is certainly interesting and exciting – and may well be the future. I absolutely cannot accept, however, that a platform for plagiarism such as Ulitzer could be representative of that future.

Respect for content ownership and rights has to remain. Surely?