samadhisoft.com

“Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.”John Kenneth Galbraith

– Beware, Bloggers!

There is some stinky stuff going on with these folks:

The Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center

– Several days ago, a comment appeared on one of my posts on this Blog.   The commenter asked me to contact him about my Blog.   I wrote him an E-mail back asking “What’s up” and got the following reply:

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I represent the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center, an asbestos health resource site dedicated to spreading knowledge about mesothelioma and the hazards of asbestos exposure. We have recently begun reaching out to environmental advocacy groups in the interest of spreading awareness of our important topic.

The processing of fossil fuels and our reliance on outdated energy sources is harming our environment and harming the workers of our country. In recent months we have seen a surge of asbestos health complications among those who worked in oil refineries and other energy processing centers, mainly due to the amount of asbestos used in these industries.

Few people realize that our environmental attitudes and behaviors are harming not only the earth for our children but also the workers who toil in these hazardous environments. To this end, I was wondering if you would consider posting an informative article or mesothelioma resource link on your site. It is our hope that through building awareness of the harmful effects (both now and in the future) of our current attitudes towards energy we can save both our planet and lives.

I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kindly,

Dave

– I wrote him back saying:

I’d consider posting an informative article.   No promises.   If you send me the article or a link to it on-line, I’ll have a look.

– And he replied:

Hi Dennis,

Take a look at an article and interview of ours that is posted here:

http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/2008/09/04/reliance-on-fossil-fuel-%E2%80%93-an-environmental-and-health-issue/

Let me know what you think.  Give me suggestions of particular questions you’d like answered in an article for your site.

Thanks!

-Dave

– On the surface, this all looked reasonable.  Good people working for a good cause, right?   Why shouldn’t I chip in and help them spread the message?

– But, something didn’t feel right about all of this.   I’ve gotten E-mails in the past from Spammers trying to drum up business for ambulance chasers of one type and another.  Just the other day, I’d gotten one entitled, “Do you or a loved one suffer from Asbestos poisoning?“

-So I started digging.   I didn’t have to dig far.  At the bottom of the  Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center website is text that asserts, “Thank you for visiting this website which is sponsored by the Law Firm of EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC.“

– EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC, is a law firm that describes itself on its web site as follows:

“Since April 1980, Early, Ludwick, Sweeney & Strauss has been a leading asbestos law firm in the United States representing plaintiffs in lawsuits against the asbestos industry.“

This was a disappointment.  David hadn’t mentioned that he was associated with a Law firm.

– So, was he really trying to do a public service and increase public awareness of  issues surrounding Mesothelioma & Asbestos – or was he trying to find a cheap way to drive web traffic to the law firm’s web site and hoping to use naive and idealistic Bloggers like myself to help implement an advertising campaign for him on the cheap?

– I decided to dig further by Googling “EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC”.   Pages and pages of uninteresting stuff passed until I came across the following:

“Law Firm Caught with Hand in Asbestos Cookie Jar” ➡

– It makes for interesting reading.

– To my idealistic Blogger friends and readers:

– The moral of this story is that there are folks out there who may think us naive.  And they may be snaky enough to try to use our naivety to get free advertising for themselves.  The Internet is a snake pit – so what’s new?  

– These folks may pretend to be idealistically motivated just like us – but it’ll be a ruse to get us to promote their interests – which are focused primarily on putting money in their own pocket by driving web traffic to their sites by using us as cheap advertisers for them.

– Don’t let them sucker you!

19 September 08 – Follow up: 

– I’m frequently annoyed by automated Blogs whose creators setup software to search the web for any content related to a specific subject and then create auto-posts on their own ‘pretend’ Blogs linking to that original content and generate automatically posted comments on the original post referring to their own site. 

-These mind-less automated sites are just attempts to drive traffic by ads so their creators can make a few bucks and they don’t care a whit that they’re clogging the Internet up with their shit and causing folks like me extra work to clear their trash comments off my Blog daily. 

– But I simply had to laugh today when two different auto Blogger websites focused on Mesothelioma and Asbestos picked up links to this article and automatically generated posts and made auto comments on my site referring to their posts.   As if my original post was in support of what they are doing – rather than trashing it.

– I deleted the auto generated comments on my site as I do daily but somewhere out there are two bogus Mesothelioma and Asbestos Blogs with pointers to my article.  And I think that’s hoot!

02 November 2008 Follow up:

– I’ve had some more adventures with regard to this page which you might want to read about here: ➡