PEOPLE. Am I going to have to write yet ANOTHER post about how mommybloggers need to SUPPORT and encourage each other, instead of tearing each other down? Yes, apparently so. I just found out that a blogger who I haven’t met personally but who has never been anything but kind and caring both on her own blog and to everyone I know she has ever interacted with was publicly attacked on Twitter. She was accused of “stealing” someone else’s blog alias, of just “copying” other bloggers. And although I missed it when it happened on Twitter, the person who made this ridiculous accusations on Twitter is supposedly an “A LIST” blogger. Which, what the heck ever, you know?

I am just spitting mad about this, because the blogger who had this happen to her is one of the truly nicest people I have ever encountered on the blogosphere. I’m talking about someone who absolutely LOVES her readers and does everything she can to make her blog a place that is friendly and welcoming to everyone.

She gives out cute awards to her readers, is generous with linking to others,and has created a popular series on her blog called “Fight the Frump” in which she shows hilarious photos of fashion disasters, often with her own head Photoshopped on to the bodies of people who really should have checked the mirror before going out. She also started an online magazine with a bunch of other terrific bloggers that gives great tips for maintaining your house, great things to do with your kids, and more. This is a blogger who CARES, my friends.

This is a blogger who follows MY “Golden Rule of Blogging” (but is NOT COPYING ME)-she only uses her blogging powers for good, NEVER for evil. I don’t know who this “A LIST” blogger is who posted this vicious bunch of lies on Twitter about her, but when I do find out, I am going to make sure to cut every tie I might have to that person online somewhere, as soon as possible. I am not interested in making the blogosphere a WORSE place to be, and either is my beautiful, kind, caring, loving blog friend, MRS FUSSYPANTS.

She wrote a post about it, tried to make light of the situation, but I know she is hurting. Wouldn’t you be? She even said in a tweet that this was a blogger she “adored”. She even made a badge for “Fussy Haters” to post so they can just come right out and admit who they are. I say let’s show Mrs. Fussypants how much we DON’T hate her in any definition of the word. If you are a fan of Mrs. Fussypants, feel free to grab the badge at the end of this (right-click, save as) and post it yourself.

I don’t expect that every blogger will love every other blogger, that’s statistically impossible. But my gods, if you don’t care for someone’s blog, then DON’T READ THE DARN THING. If you just can’t resist bashing another blogger to your friends, that’s what CHAT is for. Heck, on MSN Messenger or Gmail Chat or Yahoo or whatever, you can bash people all you want to your own friends. But don’t use Twitter to cut someone down, because that is just MEAN. Whomever this “A LIST” blogger is, I can’t believe it didn’t occur to them that Mrs. Fussypants would SEE that tweet. But you know why she is a BETTER PERSON than this supposed “A LISTER”? Because she didn’t even give out the person’s name in her blog post. She didn’t turn around and publicly attack someone else.

Mrs. Fussypants, I think you are the bee’s knees, darlin. I am in awe of your ability to attract readers because of your sense of humor, your kindness, your willingness to help anyone who asks, and the love you spread through your blogs. I remade your badge to let you know what I think:

EDITED TO ADD: PLEASE READ THIS POST-http://table4five.net/2008/07/01/an-open-letter-of-apology-to-sweetney/ I have apologized for writing this post without knowing all the information, and without thinking first, and breaking my own rule because I didn’t say very nice things myself, did I?

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1. A recurrence of the depression I have suffered from since my late teens, for which I take an antidepressant every day, and for which the antidepressant is apparently not working.

2. An anonymous comment suggesting that I can not “declare my independence” if I do paid posts, and ending with “independence, my ass”. Nice.

3. And now, a public humiliation on one of the biggest blogs there is. That’s right, I was made fun of on TechCrunch today. Now, to be fair, I was not named specifically, my blog was not linked to, but comments I posted on the PayPerPost message boards were copy/pasted into the article, with the word “pathetic”. I was blasted for “freaking out” over losing my PageRank and lamenting the loss of income potential. One sentence was described as “a winner”, and it was not a compliment.

I’ll be honest. I read the post, which was linked on a PPP message board thread, I read the comments (most of which called Mike Arrington all kinds of names, but some that agreed that I was getting what I deserved for “shilling” for PPP), and then I burst into tears. I cry very rarely, but this hurt. My poor husband, who had today off, went to run and errand and came home to find me sobbing on the couch. He promptly bundled up Kaitlyn and took me shopping for Christmas stocking stuffers at Target, followed by lunch at Blimpie’s, and then I felt much better.

And the support I am getting on the PayPerPost message boards is unparalleled. I defy anyone to show me another company that has a community like PPP’s. My fellow Posties are outraged not only at TechCrunch for treating me so horribly, but for the fact that he came to our message boards looking for something to criticize. And that he picked on a Mom just trying to earn some extra money to help her family.

I’m not going to link to the post, but if you really want to read it, you can find the post at TechCrunch. It’s the one titled “payperpost users freaking out”. I’m not embarrassed to admit that those are my comments he is making fun of. I was feeling very emotional that day, and while I admit my comments were pretty hysterical sounding, it doesn’t excuse someone calling them pathetic. Mike Arrington doesn’t know me, I guarantee he never visited my blog, he was just trying to be controversial and drive traffic to his site. As usual.

That’s all I’m going to say about that. This weekend, I’ve got more great DVD reviews for you, plus I’m giving away a copy of Shrek the Third starting tomorrow, so please stop by this weekend if you can. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to eat deep dish Chicago-style pizza and watch “Anchorman” on HD with my family. Who definitely do NOT think I am pathetic.

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1. For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.
4. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
5. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.

Gee, “Anonymous”, thank you so much for leaving me that lovely comment on my Declaration of Independence post. How nice of you to suggest that anyone who blogs for pay can’t possibly be independent, and to end your comment with “independent, my ass”. Aren’t you sweet?

I am so close to just throwing my hands up in the air and giving up. All my work over the last seven months, all the blood, sweat and tears, especially the tears, the nights of lost sleep, the rejoicing when my PayPal account reaches the $300.00 mark (yay, we can pay ALL the bills this month!), the heartache at losing some really great people as readers because they hate sponsored posts (but run the BlogHer Ad network, Adsense, etc.), the posting, the commenting, the social networking, the time, the energy.

But if I give up, the terrorists win.

Could someone please clunk me over the head with something heavy so that I can sleep for about a week? Thanks. That would be great.

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Or at least, they used to have one. Do me a favor-if you don’t already have it, install the Firefox Search Status Extension. It just takes a minute, and it puts two small bars on the bottom of your screen. One that will show you your “RageCrank”, and the other that will show you your Alexa score (another website that gives out rankings based on traffic).

Now, open a new tab, and click on your blog or website. What happens? Does any part of the “RageCrank” bar turn green? If so, hold your mouse over it to see what “Oogle” considers your “RageCrank” to be. You know what I see when I look at this blog and at MomReviews? NOTHING.

That’s right! “Oogle” has taken away my “RageCrank”, and that of many, many, many other people. The boards at that big paying-me-to-blog company (that I don’t want to mention by name because I have read that “Oogle” might decide to penalize me even further for even having the words in a post) are exploding with posts about the dropping of “RageCrank”, and I understand that the AOL boards are doing the same thing. This is affecting a LOT of bloggers and website owners.

But here’s the thing, and I’m sorry if it’s naive, but it’s the way I feel-”Oogle”, I hate to tell them this, but they do not OWN THE INTERNET. The Internet was invented as a way to share information, plain and simple. “Oogle” might have it’s fingers in a lot of pies, but it is not the only game in town. There are other search engines, other RSS readers, other email systems. And I for one intend to give those other companies more of my business. I have an account with “Oogle Reader”, but I also have Bloglines, so I’ll stick to that for now. I have “OogleMail”, but I also get email from my blog host, and it works just fine for me. It even filters spam messages for me.

And there are plenty of other search engines, like Site.info, Yahoo, Lycos. I’m not saying I’m never using any “Oogle” products again, because I know I probably will. But I refuse to be bullied. It’s MY BLOG, and just because I choose to sell my own text ads rather than use “Radsense”, that should be my choice. And it’s not fair of “Oogle” to arbitrarily decide who can and can’t have “RageCrank”. Unless they are going to take it away from everyone, or make it a service you have to pay for and subscribe to, then there has to be one set of rules that apply to everyone, whether they use “Radsense” or not.

I could go on and on, I am so upset about this. I have companies sending me review assignments assuming that this blog still has it’s old ranking, but it doesn’t! I don’t want to spend valuable time writing reviews that will later get rejected. GAH! ENOUGH! And if you are wondering why I used fake names in this post, it’s because I also read on a certain message board that “Oogle” might also be penalizing people for even mentioning this, since it’s “proprietary information”. Yeah, whatever.

And that’s all I’m going to say about “Oogle”.

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“So”, Shelfari asked, kindly, “Do you have an address in Gmail? Give us your Gmail address and we’ll tell you if any of your contacts are also on Shelfari! Come one, do it, be a love.”

In my weakened state, I complied. Also, because I got the original invitation through my table4five email address, Shelfari had that one as well. And then the FUN began.

“This is an automated reply from Google Adsense. We are sorry you are having trouble with your account, we will respond shortly.” Um, huh?

“Hello, Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.Your feedback has reached an area of Customer Care dedicated to login and registration questions and problems. If you are currently able to sign in to your account but have a question specific to a particular Yahoo! service, please return to our help site at:” Wait a minute, what?

And this one, from a website I’ve never even HEARD OF:

“Thank you for lodging a systems administration support request with eleventeenth technical support. You will be notified via email as your request progresses or you can login via http://support.eleventeenth.com (using your email address) to check the status of your request – if you don’t already have a password for this address, please email us at support@support.eleventeenth.com to get one.

The details of your request are as follows:

Ticket ID: HNT-31053-227
Requester: elizabeth@table4five.net
Ticket Subject:Do we like the same books?
Ticket Status: new
From: elizabeth@table4five.net
Body:
Just a friendly reminder that I invited you to Shelfari. Come see the books I love and see if we have any in common. Then pick my next book so I can keep on reading.”

Shelfari SPAMMED SOMEONE ON MY BEHALF THAT I HAVE NEVER EVEN HAD AN ACCOUNT WITH.

I’ve deleted my account, but I have no idea if that is enough to stop the automated emails. I clicked the feedback link and left a scathingly pissed off comment about how much I HATE SHELFARI, but the problem with internet feedback forms is, they are easy to delete. I don’t know if anyone who is anyone at Shelfari will ever even see my feedback.

If you get an invitation to Shelfari, from me or anyone, DELETE IT immediately. If you get a follow-up invitation asking why you haven’t joined, DELETE DELETE DELETE. Don’t sign up, don’t click invitation links. It’s a big, huge, scam. And by the way, if you are reading this thinking “well gee, Elizabeth, I pink puffy heart love Shelfari”, I am happy that you haven’t had any problems. But I can not in good conscience let this go. We are all busy, our time is important, and a website that spams people through their emails has to be stopped.

Torches and pitchforks, anyone?

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