Tuesday - June 21, 2011

Huh?

Dear Drew,

I am the director for MesotheliomaSymptoms.com and recently I discovered an article on your site that has a lot of links to our site (http://www.barking-moonbat.com/index.php/weblog/gop_vs_epa/).  While I appreciate the mention, I would much rather our links be on sites that are directly related to our audience of people suffering from a terminal cancer. 

Because of this, I would like to ask you to either remove the Mesothelioma links from the article, or remove the article all together.  Please feel free to call me directly if you have any questions about this at xxx-xxx-xxxx or email me.

Best Regards,

Timothy E
Director

------ Reply -----
From: Drew458
To: Tim E
Subject: RE: Request for a removal of a link

Dear Tim,

Let me get this straight. Your website, which is all about distributing information about mesothelioma symptoms, finds it objectionable that you’ve been linked to as a source of mesothelioma symptom information, because someone who might not already have the disease might be interested in it, might wonder about it, and click the link to your website?

So you feel your website is some kind of exclusive insider’s country club? Yet you don’t run the site as a subscription service, nor do you pigeonhole your pages within a relatively closed network like WebMD. No, you are a public site, open to all and sundry. Oh, your subject matter is about a terminal illness. That’s sad, but that doesn’t make you any different than anyone else’s web site.

Your own About Us page states

The web resource MesotheliomaSymptoms.com is sponsored by Seeger Weiss LLP. The site has pulled together as a single resource everything related to asbestos in order to promote education and awareness for victims, their families, and the general public.(emphasis mine)

Well, my blog is about as general public seeking education as it gets.  Yet you find it bothersome that a single hyperlink helps the general public find your pages, while at the very same time your pages encourage readers to follow and befriend you on Facebook and Twitter, which is as open a form of linking as exists. It’s hard for me to follow that chain of logic.

Hang on, it actually turns out that you aren’t really a medical information organization at all, you’re a law firm. Good golly. Not much different than that one on the afternoon TV ad with the gravelly voiced announcer pushing mesothelioma patients to sue.

Let me ask you, since your home page mentions how “as many as 3,000 Americans a year are diagnosed with mesothelioma” and considering that there are likely thousands of websites (Google returns almost 20 million hits on “mesothelioma” - your site does not show up in the first 4 pages; however Google only returns 1.47 million hits on “mesothelioma symptoms” and your site does get the 1st and 2nd non-paid slots) ... how many hits have you received from my blog? How many are you receiving daily? Especially since this particular post is from more than two months ago, and at an average of 4 posts a day, is now utterly buried in the archives at this point.

The whole concept of the internet is the free and open dissemination of information across a massively multiconnected network; getting links from other places is what makes it tick. If you find this kind of open networking distasteful, why are you even online?

You can’t make the argument that our post was at all unsympathetic or derisive to the malady at all. If anything, it was making the point that mesothelioma was deserving of more funding.

So you have left me rather confused. Everyone else on the internet is only too happy to get linked to; there is no bad publicity. But you object to it, even when such a linking is sympathetic to your cause. That makes no sense to me ... unless your whole site really isn’t really about promoting education and awareness, but about promoting more business for your law office.

Oh, and it wasn’t “a lot of links”, it was one. And what makes you think that a vast number of my thousands of readers don’t already have this disease? I’ve never asked them about it.

Drew

Posted by Drew458     on 06/21/2011 at 07:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff • Judges-Courts-Lawyers • Medical •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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