The last few days in the “twitterverse” have been in an uproar with the story of the video clip that went viral which was done by Francesca Ramsey(Sh!t white Girls Say). Apparently the video was posted over at a site of a well known gossip/entertainment blogger who thought it would be a good idea NOT to credit the source or the creator of the video. When twitter literally erupted in outrage the “blogger” perez hilton decided to pull the video. No apology or public acknowledgement was made. Just straight off rip of someone else’s work and being caught red handed just dropping it.

It would be infinitely more pleasant to be able to say that this is an aberration and that things like this happen infrequently, unfortunately that is not the case. With the exponential growth of the internet and the constantly changing demographics of people who are looking for content and those who seek to profit from providing content, this happens all too often.  Writers are not credited or compensated fairly – work is used without proper attribution and worse.

This whole undercurrent is why I have committed this year to putting together a network of bloggers and sites that will pool their resources and efforts to counteract some of the negative ish that is and has been going on behind the scenes on the net and in the blog-o-sphere.  My goal is to ultimately have a network of bloggers that will develop standards with regards to content and submission and to encourage both the individual blogger as well as to raise standards of professionalism for news blog sites.

The rationale behind doing this simple. There are no set standards for most sites.  Standards for submission of content are lacking and therefore the content in many instances winds up being suspect or syndicated repeatedly. While syndication is fine for the larger sites with budgets that can afford it, not all site owners have the resources available to avail themselves of content syndication on that level. Conversely there are many site owners that prefer to be able to offer predominantly original content.  This leads to the issue of finding quality writers to provide said content. From the writers perspective, being fairly compensated for churning out articles on a regular basis is  an ongoing issue which in many cases starts off with misunderstandings and in some cases misrepresentation of the manner in which compensation is to be doled out.

A lot of the confusion could be averted by the creation of standards that ensure that compensation is explained clearly and concisely up front. That professionalism is a priority at all times and that encourages serious writers to align themselves with professional associations that will allow them to build on their writing skills.  Even to ultimately offer resources for writers that are looking to start their own blogs.

I believe this can be done and I have already started working with several sites and writers who feel like such a project is sorely needed.  If you are a blogger, writer or the owner of a site who is interested feel free to leave a comment and or message and I will contact you directly.

As long as we do not unite and present a joint front  and pool our resources to ensure proper legal representation of our  work,  our work will continue to be ripped off by those willing to take the chance that there will be no legal or monetary consequences for doing so. There are people who feel that they can get away with this kind of thing because we won’t get legal representation, we don’t know the law or our rights and we won’t be so bothered to pursue cases like this.

They are dead wrong. Apparently the major news organizations have figured this out. Just this week they agreed to come up with a standard for monitoring how and where their content is syndicated and are discussing compensation for writers and content from within this group.

The knowledge and talent to do this is already out there – the time to do it is  YESTERDAY

 Note: the creator of the video above is Chescaleigh and  you can view the video above plus more of her work on her YouTube Channel

She has her own blog also – you can check out her  blog at  Franchesca.net