I use GoogleAlert to look for places where my name appears on the web (a strange but instructive exercise in narcissism). I was really confused by a recent hit entitled “Example Resume Simple, Go Now“. Huh? I’m hardly out there looking for help with my resume. It’s not that it doesn’t need it, but I’m not looking for a job so I don’t really care.
So I click on over to see what’s up, and find that these guys just aren’t real bright. They have a section headed “Our top example resume simple resource” which is clearly being automagically generated by some web trawl, and it’s none too clever. It’s picked up and included a page I wrote for a class in 1998(!). If this page happened to be on, say, resume writing, this might make sense, but it’s on CRC cards (or see Beck and Cunningham’s original CRC paper) and has nothing to do with resume writing. I do use as an example the problem of one person sending their resume to another person, and it’s presumably that (very thin) connection that caused their search tool to pull that page up and include in their list of Really Great Resume Writing Resources. Ugh.
I just hope there aren’t poor saps who are clicking through to my ancient CRC page and then getting really annoyed because it’s not about resumes. Or at least that they’re not annoyed at me. I’m totally fine if they’re annoyed at the silly people at all-about-resumes.com, ’cause they deserve it. (One hopes, of course, that at some point their page will no longer include my CRC page, making this post simple a relic of a bygone era. For now, unfortunately, it’s still there.)
Weird.
You should probably contact that website, if you have not done so already, to ask them to stop using your work without permission. As you possess the copyright to it, they are infringing upon it illegally. Even if they only link to it, there have been a few instances I know of where that’s been enough to press a copyright violation.
Also: Is there any reason you’ve not been answering any emails since we got back from GECCO? I’ve sent no less than five or six, and have heard nothing back. Since some of said email concerns paying you back for rather substantial hotel bills, I confess I’m a bit nonplussed. Ditto AIM: you’ve been on, but not responding at all (Wayne reports the same).
I’m not too worried about trying to get them to remove the link. In general I don’t want to try to discourage people from linking because I think that open linking is a key part of the value of the web, and they’re not including very much of the actual text of my page on their, so I’d argue it’s fair use. At the moment I think it makes them look sillier than me, so I’ll leave it alone. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
I’ve been really behind on a ton of stuff since GECCO, so you’re in good company although that doesn’t excuse my behavior. I kept putting your e-mails off until I could get all the bills, etc., together (which, of course, I always thought I’d be able to get to in the next hour), which was obviously not cool. Sorry.