Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Help Insure Barbara Bauer's Pyrrhic Victory

We AW Bloggers were going to start an "AW Blogging Event" and I was going to be posting the guidelines of the event here this week. With the site down I not only can't remember all the proposed event details, but I can't tell the whole AW world at once what we're planning and invite them to participate.

So, here are some alternatives for us AW Bloggers - and it's something to help put a scammer in her place, to show a certain Ms Barbara Bauer that she shouldn't mess around with writers - especially those of us at Absolute Write. And to show everyone in the blogosphere that the AW membership is a community, not just a writers' forum.

Some of this is direct cut and paste interspersed with my thoughts and I would like to give all the credit for this idea to the originator, Digital Medievalist. This is technologically "medium" difficulty. I will post an "easy" option next.

There is a new "free content" beta going on at Google. In otherwords, they will host a web page for you for free, if you have a Gmail account (these are easy to get - I have a gazillion invitations I can give away - I'm not kidding, a gazillion).

Google says about this service: "Create your own web pages, quickly and easily. Google Page Creator is a free online tool that finally makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes."

It's free hosting, and if rumor has it that "Google seems to privilege it's own content" - well, I betcha they'll do that for their own brand new concept... :-)

Now, Digital Medievalist believes (and I agree, wholeheartedly) that it's important that the posts are individual - not some cookie cutter form letter/online petition thing type thing, or straight linking. We're all writers - let's write!

Here's the strategy she conceived:

1. Include a link to the main writer's beware site Writers' Beware 20 Worst Agents

2. Link to and mention Absolute Write, and the Water cooler and what it has meant to you

3. Use your own words, and individualize the post as much as possible, linking to as many others as you can (there are lots of good links in the post below this one and comments thereto) As well as if you check the degenerate Tag page for . Another place is the blogger blog search tool and there's always Google.

(By the way, I did a search on the Blogger search tool, there were 3,015 posts matching barbara bauer - is any publicity *really* good publicity??)

OK - so, I wouldn't ask anyone to do what I hadn't done already. Here's the site

Very simple. Not a lot of bells and whistles, can't see how to customize the template (but I don't really care to) and they have a nice library of standard ones.

Too complicated? Option two:

Link, link, link!!
Start a "BBBlogroll" in your sidebar and put all the links, to all the blog posts about this idiot that you can find, in it. I'll be adding my BBBlogroll soon.

ETA: Miss Snark has two great posts in a row on this. Be sure to add them!!

17 comments:

Peggy K said...

Great idea Dawno and DigMed, I'm getting right on it!

Just one other idea: limit your blog search to posts dated the 24th or later - a lot of the other posts are not to "our" BB. That search currently gives 90 hits. (Click here to search).

ohdawno said...

thank you - great point, peggy!

Anonymous said...

I'm collecting links on my front page to all the bloggers that have blogged about her, for easy linking.

Pretty sure there's a static page for her coming soon on Loving Twilight, too :)

ohdawno said...

Go Kira!!

Anonymous said...

Page of collected links: http://kiraconnally.com/blog/?page_id=213

If you want to be included, email me or post your link in a comment. I'll get it up ASAP.

Matt said...

I'll make a new thingy for her, but not tonight. I did post my interpretation of BB's day in pictures on my blog, though.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you, Dawno. :D Spread the news - put scammers out of business!

Anonymous said...

I LOVE IT!

If you go to technorati, Barbarabauer is lised in their "hot tags this hour"

:)

ohdawno said...

whoo hoo! I'd love to see it in even LARGER font!!

ohdawno said...

Heck, it's between American Idol and Bush!!

Anonymous said...

OOoooo, Dawn! Lovely ebil plot! I'll post a news item on my site this afternoon to back up you crazy kids.

~Sara

Anonymous said...

I found 115 links this morning :)

Brian said...

I just blogged HERE: http://www.atomicbearpress.com/comics/log/2006/05/absolute-write-is-gone-help-fight.html

I had not been to AW for a while and was shocked to find that it was gone.

Brian said...

Oops, the URL got cut off, here is the link. My bad.

LINK

Mad Scientist Matt said...

Dawno, could you send me a gmail invite please? I want to put up one of those free pages, and I'm thinking of skewering this whole thing by writing a musical starring a singing catfish named Barbara.

I'm not sure exactly how I got the idea of a singing catfish, but it may give me an excuse to write a script that really does mention "a fish of soap."

ohdawno said...

Done, Matt. Look for invite from Ebil.Librarian.
Might end up in Spam folder...you never know...

ohdawno said...

Thanks TNH, for the reminder - that's the site that broke the news and got this rolling.

I've used it liberally under Bab's name :) I can only hope that anytime someone Googles Bab that's the site that comes up first instead of her (very ugly, IMO) webpage!