Pains of Being Prominent On the Internet.
Posted: Monday, July 06, 2009
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
Of course I make my living on the World Wide Web. Between writing clients, the paper and other miscellany, I am doing just fine but there are drawbacks.
One is that whether you like it or not, if you live with the web you will get plastered all over in places you don't care to be.
I look at a Google of "mike fak" from time to time just to see who is plagiarizing me or where my name has inappropriately landed.
With chagrin I notice a Mike Fak in Greece has a Facebook account and there is nothing I can do about that. At least there are only a couple people with my name in the world and I'm sure that is less of a problem than all of you out there named John Jones or Mary Smith. I don't belong to Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or Glitter or Crapper or any of those chat rooms but I guess my Grecian counterpart enjoys the blogging so I will have to live with that.
I see there are a bunch of new sites that are like a who's who or a business directory. The three I looked at have parse and incorrect info about me but I sure as heck am not going to become a member of their website to correct anything.
I see some of the more aggressive pirates of info have grabbed my work or stories from my paper without any concern for ownership. I could get in a snit but they will disappear in time like all the other sites that are too lazy to create their own original content. There are a lot of people out there trying to build a content site without much work on their part. I frequently get e-mails asking to use a batch of my stuff or for me to go ahead and post 500 of my articles so that they might get some Google Advertising money off of me. Since they at least were fair enough to ask and not just steal my stuff I reply kindly telling them no.
I still have my name in the Gatehouse Media list of national opinion columnists although I never wrote a thing for them. It seems they have no trouble putting names up but with their cutbacks they must have laid off the person who removes postings. At least that search engine is falling way down the list of 29,100 Mike Fak's that are in Google.
I see an old, old article about the Illinois Tollway made a splash on a chat room. Thank goodness after an initial comment to read the Searchwarp article, the idiots started going off on each other with name-calling and distasteful language but left me out of the fray.
There are a few Mike Fak's in either Chinese or Arabic or something like that. I have no idea what those hits are about but I will trust they are just copying something I wrote and did a fairly competent job of translation when they stole my work. I would hate to find out I created an international incident from something I wrote that was incorrectly translated. I don't need to get a letter mailed to me saying "Death to the infidel".
This Article has been viewed 1,920 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)Hi Mike what you write here is well deserving of the five star rating. I enjoyed and learned alot from this article. I am just a slight wary that I am commenting on an article that may have been written by another Mike Fak. Is this the true Mike Fak - looks like I am going to have to google you.Keep safeKacyThnaks Kacy. Please do check since I'm not sure if I'm me or not either.Mike
Mike, as usual, you got some laughter from me. I've noticed this before about my name, too. So much truth here. What Bruce and Jean have done with SearchWarp is amazing. I see my articles in places I'd never submit them or in places that say my article is there but it's something else and not where I'd want to be found!
Hoping all is well with you. Thank you for a good read.Thanks Avis. I'm alright I guess. I hope you are well also.Yep, we can end up in the darndest places and Bruce and Jean and the gang do a great job.Mike
Great article. Well done.As you know I write a lot and I too suffer the pains. Just a month ago someone posted 100's of quotes from me on every quote site you can imagine. I also get these emails you talk about from people offering this and that to write for their site/blog. I was once offered $100 per article from one site - though I doubt it's authenticity.P.S. some of the quotes added were incorrect -Hi Connor. The one thing that frosts me the most is when someone steals something and then changes it to make it incorrect or factually misleading.Mike
Hi Mike, Excellent and so true. I found a few things, but I am not that big, so no biggy. But wow - there are the cons that go along with writing on the net. I learn a lot from you. Thanks! Teresa
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.