Click here to see the full list of Sys-Con's Ulitzer authors. (1.8MB)
How you can help
Quick how-to:
- Reserve a range of IDs from the table above that no one else has (e.g., 20-30) by leaving a comment on this post.
- Try to contact the authors on Twitter or via their blogs, etc. Make sure that they are aware of being listed as Sys-Con Ulitzer authors (send them the link to their author page) and that they are aware of what Sys-Con is doing (you can refer them to my blog post at http://aralbalkan.com/2284).
- Finally, let everyone know that you've contacted your authors and heck, maybe even go for a second batch? :)
You can ask for your Ulitzer/Sys-Con author page to be removed by emailing editorial@sys-con.com.
(Thank you all so much!)
Why do this?
As I mentioned previously, Sys-Con makes money from advertising that they place on the content that they scrape off of author's RSS feeds with or without their permission. Without those authors and their content, they wouldn't have pages to put ads on. So one way to tell Sys-Con that we don't appreciate their ethics is to contact Sys-Con/Ulitzer authors and make them aware of what Sys-Con is doing.
The problem is that they claim to have "6,000 authors". To go through their interface one page at a time to try and contact these people would be very time consuming to say the least.
Instead, I've created an HTML file with a full list of Ulitzer authors that you can download. Be warned, it runs to 1.8MB and contains exactly 6,287 authors.
Along with the author's name, I've added links to do quick searches on Google to try and find the author's Twitter account (so you can contact him or her and inform them) and also a search on Twitter itself for the author's name.
Update: Based on Mathias Baert's suggestion, I've added IDs to the rows so that you can reserve a block and handle contacting those authors. If everyone takes a little piece of it and contacts a number of authors, we should make some progress towards the full list :) Please leave a comment to let us know which rows you'll be contacting.
Isn't it just amazing what you can do with a little bit of python! :)
The geeky bits
In case you're interested, you can download the two quick scripts I wrote (author-scripts.zip, 80KB).
The two scripts are authors.py, which downloads the list of authors from Sys-Con's page and saves them as a Python list and html.py, which contains a copy of that list and creates the simple HTML table I've linked to above. Since the list is in Python list format in the latter script, you can probably find some other interesting mashups to create with the data.
The Full list of Sys-Con’s Ulitzer authors article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
are you sure your script is not against the ulitzer sys-con ToS? Perhaps that ToS disallows you to scrape data from their website? ;)
Oh how terribly unethical of you to take content from their site without their permission ;-)
Nice piece of work Aral :-D
By the way: Does anybody know how to identify the Ulitzer robot(s)? This would make it very easy to stop them scraping content – simply block them in robots.txt.
If you add ids, we can volunteer to work trough them by saying: I’ll be doing 300->399
With all the people who are following this saga, we’ll get EVERYONE notified in no time.
also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk6ar7Kqu7c
Is it me or does their site look a lot like ZDNet’s?
http://www.zdnet.com/
http://www.sys-con.com/
@mathiasbaert: Ask, and you shall have :) Check out the new full list of Sys-Con’s Ulitzer authors (now with IDs and added CSS goodness courtesy of Smashing Magazine). Feel free to grab IDs and leave a comment here so we all know who’s working on which part.
Hit me for 6257 -> 6287 for now
Thanks, Pete! :)
I contacted Matt Goddard (#3889).
Added a link to http://fucksyscon.pbworks.com/ about this. I’ll have a skim over the list later.
I’ll tackle 6226 – 6256 :)
And Greg Rewis (#2176).
Beautiful – scraping their site? It seems fate is not without a sense of irony…
And contacted Owen van Dijk (#4426). (I’m just going through everyone I know here)
And contacted Stephanie Sullivan (#5545).
I take 5200 – 5300
Don’t need to tweet me :) I know about it. Sent the email already
I have an author page on that site too, who do I contact in order to get removed?
would be good if the authors list page had a checkbox next to each name so that we know who has already been notified
Aral … What’s the best course of action to remove myself? Who do I e-mail?
let Andrew Shorten know
Hey guys, to have yourselves removed from Sys-Con, you can email editorial@sys-con.com.
thanks.. sent!
did 300->315
these are the messages I’ve sent BTW:
*twitter* (via @vanjan)
@johnsmith do you know that you are a #sysCON author? johnsmith.ulitzer.com http://bit.ly/2KjJS
*mail*
SUBJECT: Ulitzer.com is using your name and content
Hi
Did you know Ulitzer uses your name and your content?
http://johnsmith.ulitzer.com/
We’ve started this noticifation campaign
because they’ve been behaving pretty badly towards their authors recently:
http://aralbalkan.com/2284
If you would wish yourself removed from their site,
you can email editorial@sys-con.com.
Just a heads up.
Friendly greetings
[My Name]
Got my self removed :) yay :) and notified a few others
I’ll start out with 800 – 810.
Is anyone working on a better interface for the list? I might try to throw something together if not.
so, done the 30 I indicated above, although a lot turned out to be non-contactable…
will take another look at the weekend and note down here which group I’m tackling :)
[...] Matt Cutts, as many of you know, heads Google’s webspam team. Not only that but he was also one of a large number of author/victims of Sys-Con who has had his identity misappropriated by Sys-Con. (Sys-Con removed his author’s page this [...]
Hey Aral, keep up the fight. I’ve read each post and am right there with you.
Thanks for the details here. I emailed the Con and requested to be removed from Ulitzer.
My page was removed but I’m still listed in several places. I’ve requested my name removed from the posts where they have a ton of authors listed (which makes no sense) as well.
Ok, I’m completely removed from the pages but search still finds the old articles. I assume once their search engine propagates any reference will be nixed.
Nancy Valentine was very helpful and was very cordial.