Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Canadian bloggers: Are you being scammed?


I blogged on this recently but I don't think enough people took this seriously so I'm going to give it another shot. Let me introduce you to the Canadian blog aggregator "Opinions Canada" -- a butt-ugly aggregator of allegedly Canadian blogs that is the brainchild of raging fetus fetishist SUZANNE Fortin.

$ whois opinionscanada.net
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.melbourneit.com]
[Querying whois.melbourneit.com]
[whois.melbourneit.com]

Domain Name.......... opinionscanada.net
Creation Date........ 2007-01-28
Registration Date.... 2007-01-28
Expiry Date.......... 2009-01-28
Organisation Name.... Suzanne Fortin
Organisation Address. P O Box 99800
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. EmeryVille
Organisation Address. 94662
Organisation Address. CA
Organisation Address. US
... etc etc ...

Would you like to become a member of Opinions Canada? Curiously, you might already be without even knowing it.

Look down the list of current members. Are you there? Did you know you were there? And if you didn't, are you perhaps a little miffed that you're there without ever having applied?

In any event, whether folks want to play in SUZANNE's sandbox is, of course, entirely up to them. Personally, though, because I take my blogging seriously, I'm not interested in sharing a blogroll with the likes of SUZANNE, Blazing Cat Fur, Dr. Roy and a host of other drooling, right-wing cretins and retards.

So check the list, and deal with the result accordingly. After all, you're known by the company you keep, and being listed on the same page as Blogging Tory "Neo Conservative" is probably not the way you'd like to be remembered. I'm just sayin'.

14 comments:

fern hill said...

Woo, I'd never checked that out. There are some people I actually respect (past tense perhaps coming soon) on that. Impolitical? Dawg?

CC said...

Easy there, Fern ... I'm guessing a whole lot of people are going to be a bit puzzled as to how they ended up there.

The Doc said...

Is this strictly illegal, any more than - say - Google reporting your name when you type 'Canadian Blog' into 'ye almighty searcher of all knowledge'?

I agree, it's wrong, but I wonder if there's anything REALLY wrong with it, other than bad feelings.

Incidentally, I took SUZANNE to task over the specific details of one of her blog posts. I realised it was in vain, but I got the sort of pleasure one gets from poking a wasp nest and watching the anger swarm.

Apparently, according to SUZANNE, the world experts in foetal intelligence are a couple of Tunisian doctors with a single paper between them.

WILLY said...

Ew!

Dr. Roy is a Canadian blogger?

He lives in the US.

I thought he was just a pretend Canadian, coming up to the old NS homestead every now then to intimidate the locals and maintain HC benefits.

The Doc said...

Also, OpinionsCanada is certainly based in the US... Sunnyvale CA, to be more precise.

That may be where it's being hosted... though.

Raphael Alexander said...

I was told via email by SUZANNE long ago that she was running it. Old news for me I'm afraid. I thought it was common knowledge.

That guy said...

Huh, I appear to be there too. News to me.

Deb Prothero said...

SInce I've just discovered that the blog I share unefemmeverte.blogspot.com is on this list, my question is:

I don't know Suzanne because I generally avoid the right wingers unless one of my favourite bloggers points to something silly goin' on, then do I want to be associated with this Blog Roll? If all the left leaning writers removed themselves from this list, how would it affect the audience? If it's a world wide audience, as one might be inclined to presume, and if there are no more lefties on that Blog Roll, does that not give Canadians a black eye. If Suzanne does not interfere and only lists Canadian Blogs, maybe some of us should stay on there???

Any advice would be appreciated, since I'm kinda new at this.

Anonymous said...

Man, I am kind of saddened that my site isn't on there haha

www.zerodivision.ca

JJ said...

fern hill, most of the bloggers on there don't even know they're on there.

A few months ago, I got an email from pale at ACR, saying that she'd discovered that ACR was on this strange aggregator, "Opinions Canada", and asking me if I knew anything about it.

Which, of course, I did ;) and ACR got themselves removed.

SUZANNE knows this isn't good etiquette -- IIRC, she did it about a year ago with another aggregator she was running. She put Myblahg on it and Robert M was pissed about it.

Dave said...

Well... that was interesting. Think I'll let SUZY all-caps know where she can stick her little aggregator.

This part of her "policy" I found rather interesting:

OC Canada does not accept blogs that

* Promote racialism, terrorism, pedophilia or other extremely deviant forms of sexual behaviour.

* Contain nude, gory or disturbing images on the front page. Blogs that occasionally show such pictures for illustrative purposes are fine. Pornography is not acceptable.

* Do not generally follow the rules of punctuation and spelling, or that use chat lingo or that regularly use vulgar language. The occasional use of expletives is tolerated. Constructing every other sentence with a vulgar word is not.


That should disqualify over half her list. Particularly from the Blogging Tories.

900ft Jesus said...

Thanks for bringing this up. Didn’t know I was on the list.

Deb Prothero has a point, but really, if decent blogs expose Opinions Canada like CC does here, that’s far better than giving that bull-shit aggeregator credibility. As stated by Cynic, linking our name to this list which includes racists, hatemongers - and really, really poor spellers - paints JO-JO with the false image of someone who is credible and fair.

900ft Jesus said...

whoops, meant SUZE... not JO-JO (bad, bad head cold)

Chimera said...

I got an invitation to join it back when it was being formed (and back when SHE and I were still on speaking terms). I told here she could put me on the list if she wanted, but I was not interested in doing anything special for it; nor was I interested in limiting myself to any special "ettiquette" parameters just to stay there.

I never made it onto the blogroll. I guess complete ambivalence is useful for something, after all.

[BTW...word verification for this entry is "bjzif." Who is Zif? Did I get HER verification code by mistake?]