If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our blog's RSS feed. Thanks for visiting; come back anytime!
Today’s entry serves a dual purpose: to document the wonderful work of postcard artist Racey Helps, and to document splogging of our recent posts. What is splogging, you ask? It’s a form of copyright infringement on the Internet, in which people who have no qualms about stealing and/or are too clueless to write their own text, steal the text of other authors and don’t credit the copyright owner in any way. It’s a sleazy way of trying to get “keyword-rich” text without actually writing any. (It will also get you yanked off the Internet, eventually.)
Cutting to the chase, here is “keyword rich” text about vintage postcards and, in particular, the old postcards of Racey Helps. Little is known of this postcard artist, who is believed to have lived in Bristol, England. He married Renee (nee Orr) and fathered at least one child, Julian Racey Helps, who was born about 1950. Helps’ artwork was published by the Medici Society in London, England; Medici began a subscription service in 1910 whereby a subscriber could receive new prints from represented artists and by the 1930s, Medici was publishing artist-signed postcards by such well-known postcard artists as Molly Brett and Margaret Tarrant.
Racey Helps’s artwork was also widely available on postcards for many years and around 1970, his work illustrated a series of eight-page Medici booklets with titles like The Story of the Snow Prince and To Greet You: The Story of the Tea-Kettle House. The Western world was fascinated with space exploration during the Cold War of the 1950s and this interest peaked in the 1960s and 1970s with man’s first walks on the moon. Based on the charming context of this vintage postcard, we think it was published in the 1960s or 1970s.
And thus ends the “keyword rich” text. Copyscape is a handy tool, allowing authors to monitor how and when their work is used on the Internet. Seldom have we needed to use it, with the exception of one misguided Wikipedian, whose excerpts from our website were removed within two hours, and one eBayer for whom things didn’t work out too well, either, when they copied a postcard guide we’d written and posted the whole thing on their eBay “Me” page.
Apparently, the webmaster of a spammy website with zero page rank (PR)has decided to try splogging us. The postcardmarketing.co.uk domain excerpted two of our recent postcard articles about the Fourth of July and the Civil Rights movement as seen in vintage postcards, and we want our readers to know that we didn’t authorize use of our materials on such a website. If one hovered over the postcard pictures on the web page, you would have seen (since removed, of course) that the webmaster had also “hot linked” to other peoples’ websites. Hot linking steals bandwidth for which you, the domain owner, pay. There were other links to our work about how to use the Internet to document old postcards on these pages of the website: Photo Post Card Blogs and Old Post Card.
According to whois, the individual who registered this website uses an address of Absolute Marketing Solutions/P.O. Box 180/Rochdale/Lancs OL12 6WX/GREAT BRITAIN. Googling Absolute Marketing Solutions leads one to AskAMS/Charter House/Suite 180/, with the rest of the address being the same. Their telephone number is: +44 (0)1706 870 080 and the administrative manager listed on their website is Emma MacDonald. We’ll be e’mailing Ms. MacDonald, the site’s webmaster, and the standard “abuse” e’mail address for the company very shortly. Perhaps Ms. MacDonald et al would like to rethink this matter before we file a formal complaint with Google and their AdSense revenue (if any) dries up. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as the old saying goes. The IP address that whois showed was 74.124.197.13, which is hosted by Corporate Colocation, Inc./2109 Micheltorena St./Los Angeles CA 90039. If you find you’re having problems with this splogger, either because of copyright infringement or hot links to your website, contact both “AskAMS” and abuse -at sign - corporatecolo.com. Corporatecolo’s telephone number is 1-888-742-4147. Or have a chat with Ms. MacDonald, emma -at sign- AskAMS dot com.
Unfortunately, this whole situation highlights the ease with which scrapers can scrape content from websites and blogs. Some platforms are more secure than others. We had planned to convert this blog to WordPress in the future; however, we’ll be doing that sooner than anticipated. Thanks, AMS, for such excellent service. Not.
Browse the postcard publisher category at our website to see artwork by Albertype, the Detroit Publishing Co., Raphael Tuck, Rotograph and other well-known postcard publishers.
Learn more about our battle against copyrighted content theft, and why we switched to WordPress as our blogging platform.
Copyright ©2007 VintagePostcards.org
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed!
