Living in the past....

Under a rock is the best place to hide....

[Visi]

Here I was sitting at home minding my own business....creating my own great american novel, when the stillness of concentration was interupted by a telemarketer. A unique approach is what they were offering. Apparently they wanted to publish my book in their massive "Guide to American Novels" book. This book contains copies of all the "Great American Novels" ever written. All I had to do to have this done was at my own expense make a copy of this, buy a stamp and forward it to them.

Of course I did this. Now some of you may ask about copywrite issues, but they represented a large company, well known in the world of American Novels and I never thought twice about sending them the information. After getting my novel and putting it in their massive book (at my expense), lo and behold they told me that I could be the first novel in the book, if I would pay them to "re-arrainge" the listings. This seemed like a good idea, until I realized that all the authors had this same "priviledge" offered to them, and the biggest wallet won.

So here I sit today, inside the "Great American Novel" book, they have all my ideas and text, published under their name, and I am near the back of the book because of lack of funds.

This was almost the end of my "creativity days", but not quite. That demise occurred when I found out that another "publisher" had not even asked me about including me in their book, but did it anyhow.

So what's the point of all of this? Many of my peers by now have seen through the above and recognized the world wide web syndrome described at its finest. I do not understand how "databases" such as Google can come in uninvited, cache my creativity and retain this on their servers without permission. It goes farther with other search engines, having the gall to ask me to pay to be listed? Without us the authors of the web, search engines would not have anything to offer, but we pay in bandwidth costs, loss of control of information (via cached pages), and having our sites commercialized.

For those making money from the web, I can see and understand your perspective, but to the average user, the internet is slowly becoming less and less appealing. Information is so deeply buried under the guise of marketing, in your face ads, and pay for results listings that it will not be that long before it is just another place to shop. Seems that the founding principles have been lost, washed away with the chase for the almighty dollar. I didn't become a webmaster to feed my content to others to make money off of it, yet this is what we all do today in our "google crazed" world.

A diverse opinion to what I normally read on these posts, but perhaps an opinion shared by more than a few.

<pulls the covers back over my head, closes out the "real world", and goes back to wishing for simpler times>

[lazerzubb]

Sorry to hear about the loss, yes Google's Cache have always been a hot issue, it seems to have been slowly calming down.