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At 11:30 this morning, an unidentified caller rang me and said that he was responsible for the blog that I discussed yesterday that principally consisted of posts copied in their entirety from this blog. The man on the other end of the line told me that he meant no harm, that he thought this was a permissible use of this blog’s RSS feed, and that he would remove my posts from his site, which he has done.
Intrigued by why a steadfastly anonymous individual would be trying to run an export compliance blog in an obvious attempt to garner export compliance business, I asked him directly who he was, and he declined to identify himself. I asked him why he didn’t want to identify himself. “I’d rather not say,” was the response. He did indicate that the purpose of his blog was “to generate email leads” and that it had been successful in doing that. And he sent me an email from a gmail account using a misspelled pseudonym (“Herbert Bloomffield”), confirming that he had deleted my posts.
All of this faux cloak-and-dagger stuff — Ukrainian pornographers, anonymous phone calls, pseudonymous emails — suggests to me that Mr. “Bloomffield” was being far from straightforward in his proclamation of naive innocence. And the next time this fellow wants to put on his Maxwell Smart cap and make a call from his shoe phone, he might remember that there are these marvelous technologies called Caller ID and reverse lookups on the Internet. Throughout my conversation with Mr. “Bloomffield,” there was the name of his (large) export compliance company on my telephone display. A telephone number was displayed too. A reverse-lookup showed that number belonged to the company shown on the telephone Caller ID display.
Now that I know who the caller was and where he was calling from, it’s perfectly clear that Mr. “Bloomffield” knew what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was questionable, both legally and ethically. He just didn’t want his company — with more than 100 employees and well-known probably to most, if not all, of the readers of this blog — connected with Ukrainian pornography sites, RSS feed scraping, and the use of someone else’s work to generate business for his own company.
Oh, and just so Mr. “Bloomffield” knows that I’m not bluffing about knowing who he really is, I just filled out a contact form on his website asking to be sent information on his company.
UPDATE: The culpable employee has now identified himself in an email to me, indicating that his company was in no way involved in this purloined blog affair. He appears to have been an overzealous sales person looking for leads.
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Copyright © 2009 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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