NOTE: I wrote this post last week and it’s been sitting here all this time. At first I didn’t know if I was actually going to post it because I don’t normally post rants. But something happened yesterday that just got me going all over again.

Here are a couple of things that perplex me.

Everybody’s an Author!
I read several blogs where the person is (supposedly) in the midst of writing a novel. We all know that just about anyone can self-publish a book these days and it doesn’t have to be good. The one woman who started out blogging about the same time I did, just posted a new blog entry a few days ago after a lapse of a month. She went on and on describing her “dinning” room in great detail. Frankly, it was boring. Not only was the writing not engaging but she used “dinning” instead of dining at least 12 times. Once she used it three times in a single paragraph. After the 12th “dinning” I stopped reading. Enough.

The other woman has published several self-help books for tweens but didn’t really write them herself. (More like she collected stories that other people had written and put them all together.) She has faked rave reviews of all her “books” on Amazon and someone even called her out on them. Now she claims to be writing a novel which is not an easy feat. She also has lots of typos and misuses of words on her blog which are annoying. Like describing a book she was reading and saying the heroine of the book was “abroad the Titanic.” Hmmm. I think you could be a broad (a not so nice word for a woman) on the Titanic, or you could be aboard the Titanic, but probably not abroad it.

I may not be a writer but at least I have the sense to turn on spell-checker! And you certainly won’t catch me abroad the Titanic in the dinning room. There you go.

Social Media
Maybe I am getting old, but I don’t get social media. I really don’t. I do have a Facebook account but I never post anything. I do read several other people (mostly old dog show friends) but that’s about it. I realize it’s a nice way for people to connect to other people they haven’t otherwise kept in touch with, but ... I don’t get it and I don’t like it.

And, as far as I am concerned Twitter and Tweet are what birds do. Not people. Do people really believe that all these celebrities sit around all day tweeting? If they have that much spare time to engage in such petty activities then they are obviously over paid.

And speaking of social media, who cares if some football player is heartbroken because he learned that he had an online “affair” with a girlfriend who didn’t really exist? I mean, talk about dumb. Yet we’ve heard about this every night on the news.

Or YouTube videos going viral? Isn’t that a word that is normally associated with disease? oops, again showing my age because now “viral” has a whole new meaning in an online dictionary. Pretty sad. Also sad is all those teens doing dumb things that could kill them just to get their videos to go viral.

Teens are bullied online. Photos have been posted that have caused suicides.

Social Media is contagious (for most people) and therefore could be considered a viral disease eating away at the fabric of our society.

{snip}

That was what I wrote last week. Yesterday my friend Carolyn called me to chat. She happened to mention that she had seen what she thought was the exact same photo of Hailey and her dam Diva that appeared on my blog last week on a site called Dog Lover on FaceBook. This one. She wondered if I had taken the photo or someone else did. No, I told her, it was my original photo and thought she must be mistaken.

But there was my photo, on this “Dog Lover” site for all to see and “share”. When I asked them to remove the photo since it was copyrighted on my site (I have to assume this is how they got it?) they replied that “many people have this photo now because we all share on FB, so I won’t take it down.” What? Share? There is no “sharing” when something is not yours to share! I was fuming. Still am since I had some back and forth with this person just a few minutes ago. They are still refusing to remove it. What is wrong with people?

I tried to look up how to report it and just got pages and pages of stuff. To report copyright infringement you have to file a claim, blah, blah, blah. I’m pissed but I’m not sure I want to go through all that. It’s not like I am some great photographer whose photos make them money. But it’s the principal of the whole thing.

The best I could do was click “this is harassing me” regarding the photo which I am sure they will not see anything harassing about a cute little dog and its mother. Sigh. Before I clicked the button “report to FaceBook” a little thing popped up that requested I first ask the person to take the photo down. Been there; done that. I clicked the button. My last comment to the person was that I had reported them. I also told them that I didn’t have access to all those sites that now supposedly had my photo on it, but if they would remove it from theirs at least it would stem the flow of “sharing” to even more sites.

Did I say I hate FaceBook? Am I alone in this?

I was also going to talk about cell phone usage but maybe I’ll just save that for another day.

I am still not certain how my photo ended up on FaceBook anyway. Just a reminder to anyone that reads this blog, there is a copyright notice under my “About” in regards to usage of photos. Please do not use any photos on my blog without my permission. Please ask before “sharing”. I guess I am going to be looking into putting copyrights on my photos themselves.

P. S. This just in from the person on FB after I said I had reported them. (misspellings are theirs, not mine!)

dog lover wrote: “Everrything on the internet is not secure state public.If you have dogs ,you may be proud of. I wish you many fun by Dog lover. greetings”

And now I have steam coming out of my ears!!!

UPDATE: I have figured out (thanks to Rick B.) how to report this person, so now I have a copyright infringement filed with FaceBook against this person. We’ll see how it goes!

(photos: Alone on Thin Ice) Green Turtle Pond