Brian Timpone Responded to my Blockshopper.com Complaint Blog Post.

First of all, I want to thank Brian for addressing my Blockshopper complaint. There are many websites that steal content and are hidden behind fake accounts or just straight up spammers.

Here is the original post

I don’t need to tell anyone that Blockshopper.com is highly controversial. It’s at the forefront of where the Internet is heading, meaning lack of control over our personal information.

Can we alter this path, or have we already lost control?

I received an email from Brian Timpone

Hey Matt– read your blog. I’m the founder of Blockshopper.

Point of clarification– we publish public information.

The information about an individual’s home purchase– collected by
government– does not “belong” to that individual any more than record
of their campaign contributions or lawsuits filed would.

It seems you are confusing personal information willfully submitted to
a social net or to a private company (e.g. phone company) with a
certain expectation and public information collected by governments.
Like every media outlet in the US has done for 100+ years, we collect
that information from governments and use it to publish derivative
news & data products.

If you think governments shouldn’t be collecting this information,
that’s another argument I suppose.

Glad to answer any questions for you about what we do/why we do it. I
think you’d be surprised by the answers.

best, brian

I have since replied, asking for Brian to write a guest blog post telling my readers why blockshopper merges information from social networks to public tax records.

Hi Brian,

I know what you do and why you do it… This has nothing to do with governments “big brother”. So let’s not go there.

Let’s focus on the fact you have created a website that pisses a lot of people off, Is using content from social networks to generate keywords for Google SEO, and tries to wrap a “web 2.0″ real estate website around it to make everything OK. I have no idea how profession or education of homeowners helps the consumer with real estate.

My whole argument is that we should have control over the content we put on social networks. We should have the right to opt-out from websites that use our content for purposes that we don’t agree with.

The argument of, “don’t use social networks, if you don’t want your information public” is total BS. We live in a world were being connected helps get a job, find lost friends, and learn new things. When companies start bending those rules for profits it creates outrage amongst the public.

FYI, I’m going to blog all this…

Brian, Not only would I like to hear your reasoning on why you made blockshopper, but I think a lot of my readers would too, Since you are glad to answer any questions about what you do, why you do it, please write a guest blog post for my website. I will not edit it and post it as a guest post.

It will be open to questions and comments from my readers and I’m sure it will be interesting.

Matt
I would leave you my phone number, but you probably already know it.

[UPDATE]

Brian’s response:

Matt– you clearly don’t know what we do or why we do it.

We collect and clean up public data and make it readable and useful.
And we write news stories about home transactions. Real people do
this– just like they’ve done at community newspapers for a century.

This isn’t about keywords or some automated SEO trick; we have 3
million visitors because our content is useful and interesting.

As for “I have no idea how profession or education of homeowners helps
the consumer with real estate,” you might ask one of those hapless
home buyers living in a half-filled or foreclosure ridden subdivision
if they wish they had been more interested in “who” was buying next
door.

Local news local because its about people, Matt.

Thanks for the guest post offer, I’ll think about it.

brian

So, for all the people that find my blog with the search term “blockshopper complaints”, BTW there are a lot, and to the one person that searched for “Blockshopper must die”, I think this is a great opportunity to ask Brian a question.

If you have a question for Blockshopper, please ask it in the comment section.