First thing this morning I read Kimberly's Cache 22, Has Ancestry.com Gone Too Far? followed by Janice's Ancestry.com Hijacks Cow Hampshire article. Soon thereafter I read Randy's Ancestry.com is Caching some web site data . This afternoon I caught Chris' Caching for Cash and somewhere in there I read Amy's Ancestry.com Nothing But Theifs and then Becky's Is This Fair Use? This evening I read Miriam's Ancestry.com: Copyright Violations and best of all is Susan's Ancestry.com scrapes websites; places harvested content behind membership wall. (Image below is from Susan's site)
As the day went on, Ancestry.com made changes to their site. Little by little they addressed complaints by the genea-bloggers but they stopped short of taking down the offending section altogether (which is what I'd like to see). I'd have to say, it's not looking good for Ancestry.com. In the court of public opinion, they've been found guilty of robbery. So what was their response? They released a "we're so great" press release this afternoon titled "Ancestry.com Online Community Creates More Than 275 Million Profiles and 3 Million Family Trees In Last Year" followed this evening by "Internet Biographical Collection Is Free At Ancestry" on their blog. Hmmm...
Last weekend I saw the musical, Best Little Wh*ore House in Texas. For some reason the song by the politician character... "oooooh, I like to dance a little side-step..." keeps running through my head. Go figure.
I'm thinking that the folks at Ancestry.com just don't appreciate all the business we genea-bloggers send their way. Not only don't they appreciate it, they don't want it. Instead of trying to show their appreciation for all the links and free publicity we put on our blogs day in and day out promoting the databases and information we find on their site, they're stabbing us in the back by trying to profit from our hard work. Now I ask you, is that any way to treat those who've supported them? I don't think so.
I stopped linking to Ancestry.com when they stopped Michael John Neill from using snippets of census images back in May of this year. Links are free promotional advertising and I won't be a part of it. (I've actually stopped free linking to all commercial genealogy sites and blogs that don't link to me, including Dick Eastman, the Footnote Blog, et. al.) If they want my link, they can buy it (like WVR does) or link to me on occasion (like Genealogy.About.com does). You can pull your support for Ancestry.com by ceasing to give them links within your blog posts too. That will send an even stronger and longer message than just the blog posts our community of bloggers have sent today.
Did you notice the disclaimer image at the top of this post? If you want to protect your future posts from appearing on Ancestry.com you might consider creating one of your own and displaying it prominently at the top of your content blog posts from now on. I don't think Ancestry.com will want to cache my page now, do you?
