Green Thieves: RiverWired

Here they come, folks, to the ageless "Greensleeves," they prance piping forward, dancing for dollars, veiled in green, those who will stop at nothing, not even the pretense of social consciousness, in search of a quick buck. RiverWired, a site billing itself as "green" Social Networking, has stolen this blog -- lock, stock and barrel -- without permission and without attribution. And it has "monetized it". These web pages appear, crummily I should point out, with ADS. Paid advertizing. If this is a "Green community," social networkers beware.

When I finally caught up with them and demanded they stop RiverWired took four days to respond. When they did this was their note: "Dear T. Lief, Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. We're in the process of contacting bloggers about their participation in the content aggregator service on our site...(ie, too busy stealing) We had trouble finding contact info..."

But no trouble pulling down the entire blog, ripping off all identifiers and no response to my direct request they remove my material. When I again demanded they stop, I received this from one Cris Popenoe, who'd been copied with all previous communications:

"Everything has been removed.

Cris Popenoe"

Surprise, surprise, I checked today, that was a lie. A quick search of the blogosphere shows that the blog greenlagirl.com complains of the same shabby treatment. Anyone doing this legit would not have taken the liberty Cris Popenoe, et. al., have taken. Nor responded the way they have. So it may be helpful to other bloggers and green sites, particularly those doing without ads, to list those enlisted in this FOR PROFIT scheme.

It has numerous touts who'd go nameless, except they are likely bad actors, too. And naming bad actors is the best we can do for now. For example, one dubious ally is killerstartups.com. Another is Random Thoughts of an Eco Tech Entrepreneur (name says it all, doesn't it?). Fucc blog, Ypulse blog, Appscout, Dexly, Screenalicious are some other touts for RiverWired.

This is another example of the dollar-driven pollution green advocates face. It's a tide. Making money off the boom in environmental consciousness is the only thing taking off at the moment. With so much dung being passed off as green, sadly, its hard to be anything but a gadfly.

This RiverWired scheme reminds us of the carbon neutral companies reported on in an earlier post. Only its goals are not even as laudable, since the site provides nothing except what it takes from others and more chatter and meetups for carbon neutral dating...

To update that post, THE TRUTHINESS OF CARBON NEUTRALITY, which examined the offset companies who have gone so far as to flog the virtues of private jet travel to boost their business, the New York Times has finally caught up. It 'reviewed' the phenomenon in an article on Sunday, April 29th, 2007, called, provocatively, "The Carbon Neutral Myth – Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins."

However, in the slovenly journalistic fashion that has become the norm at the Old Grey Lady, the article propagated the results of a survey done by a carbon neutral offset provider to rank the quality of their own cohort!! This is Judy Miller redux. You remember Judy, the reporter who was in bed with Scooter Libby and the Neocons? She chose jail and a false martyrdom to forestall the disclosure that it was her run-amok, unvetted Times reports on the presence of WMD that led the charge in the run-up to the Iraq War.

This recent Times article smacks of the slapdash; it's dismal, source-avoidant, research-free infotainment. It's available for comparison online at www.tni.org.

The press could help if they'd show courage in daring to write more than eye-catching leads.