Saturday, October 10, 2009

Hey @thetechnologeek - don't rip off someone who is well-known

Louis Gray, who has over 14,000 followers, just tweeted this a few minutes ago:

Who is this mysterious Kate who scrapes my content on http://thetechnologeek.com/ ? The site even has fake "about" and "jobs" pages...

So I checked out one of Kate's posts, which began as follows:

With friend and fellow blogger Jesse Stay in the Bay Area for the day, I played the part of chauffeur and sidekick, hitting a number of key Silicon Valley landmarks this afternoon. After he finished a lunch at eBay/Paypal, the two of us drove up Highway 101 to meet with the API team at Twitter. Then we headed south and caught up with our mutual friend, Robert Scoble, who true to form, turned on the video camera and engaged with us in a discussion around social networking applications, product development, and our thoughts on Twitter, Foursquare, Google Wave, etc. The video is about an hour long, so buckle your seatbelts.

After reading the beginning of that post, I have some questions for Jesse Stay. You see, Jesse did the same types of things with Louis Gray, so why would he do the same thing again with Kate? And why did Robert Scoble make a second video of Jesse, but with a new person in tow? (As it turns out, Robert is apparently suppressing this whole thing - the video is Jesse and Kate is nowhere to be found on the tubes.)

Seriously, if you're going to rip someone off, don't rip someone off who is well-known. In the first place, many people who stumbled upon that post would immediately realize that this was a story about Louis Gray, not Kate. In the second place, when the famous person discovers that he or she is ripped off, it's easy to let people know.

And then lesser-known people like me assign some creative tinyurl's to her "content." To get to the post I referenced above, just go to http://tinyurl.com/stolenfromlg.

But you can't contact "Kate" directly. It's no surprise that the domain for thetechnologeek.com is registered to Domains By Proxy.

But you can learn about Kate from her blog - her friends like Jesse and Robert, maybe even her twins and her wife. Or you can check her Twitter account and see who she's following (Kevin Spacey, Penn Jillette, but not Louis Gray).

Now I have no idea how Gray is pursuing this, or even if he is pursuing this. Perhaps the public exposure is all he wants to do.

P.S. If someone named "Norma" suddenly starts talking her many positions with NEC, Microsoft, Fast Company, and Building43, let me know.
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