Just ixnay on the Sys-Con, hey?

I've kept a curious eye on the whole Maureen O'Gara/Pamela Jones soap opera (1 2 3 4). Looks as if it's come to yet another head today as ("The entire senior editorial staff of LinuxWorld Magazine has today announced that they will be leaving the magazine, effective immediately.". (via Micah Dubinko).

We regret that Sys-Con Media has been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work.

Turner's move is certainly common sense principle, given the facts, but it's also brave, given the economy. Where common sense seems to have failed is in the management of Sys-Con media.

I've always looked rather askance at this outfit, but for lesser reasons in the past. For one thing, their policy standard of payment to authors of original work is abysmal, especially in light of how thoroughly they saturate all their outlets with advertisements. I was particularly amused recently when they invited me to "channel" my blog through their aggregator, and when, out of curiosity I wen to see the expected destination site, I found that the space in which actual blog entries would be presented was completely wreathed in loud, overbearing advertisements. I declined the invitation, of course.

But this latest display of fecklessness on Sys-Con's part is quite enough for me. Never mind the ninnies that perpetrated DDOS attacks on Sys-Con Web sites, the civilized response is the direct opposite of DDOS: just stay away from Sys-Con. I, for one, plan to do so quite conscientiously from now. In order to help me be sure I know their slime well enough to avoid it, I put together a list of Sys-Con properties:

If anyone knows of other outlets used by these buffoons, please leave a comment, and I'll try to keep the list updated.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia