A TRUE STORY

Once upon a time, an elderly lady decided to start a blog. Every article she wrote was an original, true depiction of an event and/or circumstance relating to her own life and devoid of any kind of malicious intent. Confined often to her house by ill health the elderly lady was pleased to have a new hobby and decided to share her new blog with the world by submitting it to various online mediums to attract more traffic and make online friends.

Everything went well and having successfully submitted her happy little blog to various established and excellent blog directories the elderly lady decided to entrust it once more to a relatively new up and coming venue, of apparent good reputation. The venue was pleased to accept the elderly lady’s blog – they said so in a welcoming email - and both parties were happy. Unfortunately for the elderly lady, not long after she had installed the venue’s widget to her blog, she accidentally deleted it again. Alarmed by this the elderly lady immediately typed the password given to her by the venue, into the ‘members’ section of the venue’s website, to get another widget - but the members section didn’t work. Instead, there was a message saying that the members section was being repaired and would be ready on a date that was already long past (?). Confused the elderly lady then emailed the venue’s ‘support’ forum at an email address supplied in their welcoming email, to ask them what to do. The elderly lady’s email came back as undeliverable and stating that the delivery service had given up trying.

Days later and still unable to login with the password the venue had sent to her the elderly lady decided to request that the venue delete her blog from their website - and sent a polite message to that effect, to the venue’s ‘administration’ and ‘customer service’ email addresses, as set out in their TOA. These emails also came back within 48 hours as undeliverable.

Determined not to give up the elderly lady then discovered a ‘member support forum’ under a different name, on the venue’s site. After being requested to think up and enter another username and password to register for this forum the elderly lady was eventually able to place a question asking why none of the contact emails worked. Her question was answered by a predated general announcement, that due to too much spam all the venue’s contact email accounts were not used anymore. Following the advice given to another member also asking (at an earlier date) how he could remove his blog from the venue's website the elderly lady contacted one of the online administrators in a private email on the forum and asked politely - using words like ‘please’ and ‘with respect’ and ‘at your earliest convenience’, that her blog be removed from the venue. Within 24 hours the elderly lady received a copy of her own polite email back again, with a short one line announcement underneath it saying that her blog had been removed from the venue and not to try submitting it again. (No comment...!)

A couple of days later the elderly lady went online and typed the title name of her blog into her browser to see where it was in two major search engines. Happily the elderly lady’s blog was depicted on page one in both search engines, in no less than three different positions (places). Imagine then her surprise, to see that one of those positions was a ‘black listing’, by the same venue that had tersely agreed to delete her blog - announcing that they had removed the elderly lady’s blog for being an ‘inappropriate blog' and following this announcement with a list of criteria pertaining to what constitutes an inappropriate blog: i.e., junk blogs, ones containing pornographic and racial content, profanity, homophobia, plagiarized material, hacking.. etc…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm..... a big dose of ‘sour grapes’ on the part of the venue? A moot point anyway - because lets face it, if 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' , then 'the quality of the blog is in its content' - and truth will always out!