Let’s be clear. This is a “movement” that originated at the highest level of powers in Washington. It’s a movement that, if successful, would benefit large oil companies and their rich executives far more than the average American consumer. It’s a movement with protests populated by paid staffers from industry-funded organizations. In short, there is nothing “grassroots” about it.

I find it fascinating that the left is stumbling over themselves thinking this is a beltway movement, when in fact it’s much, MUCH bigger than that.

Anyway, as one of the two #dontgo founders… I felt it my duty to respond to this false accusation.

Please also note that Progress Illinois is funded by SEIU Illinois State Council.

Below is my response.

——–

Progress Illinois,

You obviously have no clue whatsoever about the movement you’re writing about do you?

I’m going to point out the indisputable flaw in your post, and in doing so, I also want to point out the extremely poor job you did when “researching” for your little story.

My name is Eric Odom. I, along with good friend Allen Fuller, started the #dontgo Movement. Let me list some facts for you.

1) I’m a registered Libertarian here in Illinois.
How many times have the “powers in Washington” gone through a Libertarian who voted for Ron Paul and will be supporting Bob Barr to do their work for them?

*chirp, chirp*

2) I was never contacted by ANYONE in Washington about #dontgo
Yeah, that’s right. Unlike you, who receives funding from big Government supporting unions to spout your nonsense, I don’t accept money from anyone for my blogs or websites. Unless, of course, someone wants to buy an ad on a non-political site of mine, but that is rare.

3) Big Oil bypassed me when writing the checks
Man, did I miss out or what??? Allen and I launched dontgo.us and dontgomovement.com on our own time and on our own dime, and now we find out that Big Oil and politicians are fueling the movement that we enabled? How did I miss that memo and where the hell is my cut?

4) You never contacted me about your accusation
Usually, when you accuse someone of something, you need to have some facts. If you don’t have facts, which you don’t, then you need to have the accused individual’s side of the story.

Even though dontgomovement.com has a nice and shiny button right up on top that says “CONTACT”, you couldn’t be bothered to actually contact me.

And if you had just used a nifty web tool called Google, you would have found a CNN, Redstate, TNR, Washington Examiner, and MANY other sources that plainly state the site is mine.

You could follow that up by using that cool web tool called Google and it would lead you to my blog. The blog on which I have a button right up top that tells you how to… get ready for it… CONTACT ME.

But instead, you spouted off an accusation that contains no truth and makes you look foolish.

Pat yourself on the back for this, “Progress Illinois”… you give Americans a website to be proud of.

Not.

This how my itinerary reads from February 6th through February17th.

I’m only 28 years old, but this kind of roaming around isn’t as easy as it was back when I was circling the globe. I remember flying from Auckland New Zealand to Fiji, then to Seoul Korea with a final destination of Reno, NV (stopping in San Francisco), all within 55 hours.

Now I travel for a week straight and I feel like I’m coming down off of a two month caffeine binge.

It sucks when you start feeling old…

Sure, I might be posting somewhat prematurely considering the fact that while posting this our site is locked down and in “maintenance mode”. That being said, this blog can be found and seen so I figured why the heck not?

In this post I’ll talk about two things. First, I’ll plug this blog and explain what it’s all about. Second, I’ll talk a bit about what Blogivists.com is.

Eric Odom @ Blogivists.com
As if I don’t do enough blogging already!!!

I’ve decided to launch this blog as a sort of “developers” blog for Blogivists.com. In this blog I’ll write about some of the technical aspects of the community, as well as random updates that have to do with the back end of the system.

We have a LOT of cool things planned for the site, including a ton of theme releases, plugins, discussion forums, wiki’s and more! If you’re an RSS junkie like me, please grab my feed and stay tuned for updates.

If RSS is not your cup of tea, feel free to bookmark me and check back often.

Blogivists.com
I’m sure Mike VanWinkle and the rest of the Sam Adams Alliance crew will soon publish a much more detailed explanation of this site. But until then I’ll offer the short version.

Blogivists.com is an exciting new project being put together by Sam Adams Alliance. The project is being built around a vision to develop a web community where citizens and activists can set up free Wordpress blogs. The blogs are 100% free with no strings attached.

What do you get with a free Blogivists.com blog?

-100% FREE hosting for life
-Personalized domain (www.yourblogname.blogivists.com)
-Free Blogivists.com e-mil address
-Safe and secure blogging environment
-Like minded, limited-government seeking community
-Many themes to choose from (coming soon)
-Plugins that help make your blog more interactive
-Widgets to customize your blog
-Powerful world class Wordpress software
-The ability to embed videos and images
-LOT’S MORE!!!

I’ve built several communities like this in the past, but this one looks to be the most exciting. I’m honored to be a part of the Blogivists team and I look forward to the things to come.

If you ever have basic technical questions or would like to suggest a feature for the site, please comment here on my blog or drop me an e-mail.

Blog Hard,
-Eric Odom
eric@blogivists.com

Basically, Dreamhost “accidentally” billed most, if not all of its customers for an entire year. And in many cases, clients were billed twice a month through December of 2008.

We had a teensy eensy weensy little billing error last night… my first clue something was up when I saw this morning’s daily billing report (so far): $7,500,000.

It turns out due to my excessively fat fingers, nearly every one of our customers has been seriously over-billed in the last 12 hours.

As you can imagine, thousands of customers are pretty pissed off about the error, and they’re bailing out left and right.

Dreamhost has been known for two things.

1) A humorous approach with its business model
2) Cheap hosting that provides a perfect example of “you get what you pay for”

In my opinion, Josh Jones made a terrible mistake by trying to inject humor into a situation that was not in any way funny. This mistake provoked tens of thousands of dollars in bank and credit card fee’s, likely caused checks and other payments to bounce or be returned, and essentially created havoc in hundreds of people’s lives.

Bad form.

And in regards to #2, I work with a client who is using Dreamhost for several fairly large scale sites. We’re in the process of moving those sites, so while this billing issue is a huge headache, it isn’t the reason we’re moving.

No, we’re moving because the hosting, in our experience, is a complete nightmare. Our sites are constantly down, and when they’re not down they’re running so slow our bounce rate is through the roof.

So this billing issue is just another notch on the reason to leave stick. We’re done.

Who are we moving to? Most likely Siteground.com. Some people complain about Siteground, and I’ll be honest and say my experience has not gone without a complaint or two in the past. But for the most part Siteground has been a champ as far as load speed, site up time, and quick response via customer service.

We have several VPS accounts, and I personally control more than 40 reseller accounts that all run smoothly.

Of course, there are many good hosts out there, but Dreamhost just isn’t one of them.

My two cents…

The latest weapon is a video that is shot along the idea of “we are the world”, bringing internet hot shots such as Ask a Ninja and Tay Zonday (Remember Chocolate Rain?), among many others in for the production.

I think it’s *possible* that Microsoft could lob a lawsuit into the courts over the fake statistics, unless somehow it’s spun as a parody of sorts. Which, is what it appears to be.

But unlike others, I think a lawsuit will bring HUGE attention to Firefox and it will just continue to grow.

By the way… I pulled together stats for ALL of the websites I’m involved in, which represents more than 140,000 unique visits per month, and we’re showing 40.9% use Firefox.

Just for weekend kicks, I managed to dig up some old pics. The first one is the graphic created by Microsoft to promote its World of Windows 1995 event. I haven’t been able to find any solid details of the event, but as I understand it, Microsoft put together a large scale “world fair” style gig to launch Windows 95.

It’s interesting that Microsoft would spend millions of dollars on an event like this back in 1995. Of course, this was long before any serious competitors entered the arena so I’m guessing Microsoft made instant billions with a release like Windows 1995.

This second picture is of an outdoor big screen somewhere at the event. I bet that people at the time thought this was incredible. Bill Gates talking to his minions on big screen?

It’s always difficult to think of what you would do if you could go back in time, but I think this would be a top pick for me. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel back in time and go to World of Windows 1995? I can just imagine everyone drooling over the dinosaur hardware and archaic software.

And let’s not forget… this was before Google.

I certainly have. In fact, it happened today. I came across a post about Matt Cutts and his comments on subdomains vs. subdirectories that I knew would be a great post over at Search Engine Tattler, but at the time didn’t want to jump in to my admin panel and write the post.

It was at this point that I remembered a Firefox addon I used to use, but for some reason stopped using when I switched from Windows to Linux Ubuntu. The plugin is called ScribeFire, and it’s a MUST have for those of us who post across a plethora of blogs.

The plugin creates an icon in the lower right side of your Firefox browser. When you lick on the icon, it opens up a “post window” where you can post to any blog you maintain. Once you create an account and give Scribefire your login details, the script pulls all of your blog data into the Firefox window. You have your pages, your recent posts, your categories, etc.

You can also add tags, and the editor allows for easy access to basic functions such as links, bold, image, etc.

When you hit publish the script automatically uploads everything to your blog. Basically, you can blog from any webpage you visit!

I haven’t tried ScribeFire with blogger, typepad, or wordpress.com, but it works like a charm on all of my hosted Wordpress blogs. If you need the ability to QUICKLY blog from any page you’re viewing, this is an excellent solution and it might be just what the e-doctor ordered.

It’s good to know that a lot of the internet marketing/tech community is quite “non-partisan” politically. Most of the comments on Shoemoney’s post run along the lines of “well, both parties look pretty bad”.

Maybe we’re not in as bad a position as I thought.

Earlier this evening I found a blistering post claiming that Blogrush is ran by idiots. After reading that post I stumbled on to this post about the Blogrush scam. Then, I found a September post at Mashable which begged the question, “BlogRush: Traffic Generator or Pyramid Scheme?”

Need more? Try these.
I say goodbye to BlogRush
BlogRush: 8 Reasons to Be Wary…and Optimistic

Obviously I’m a little late on this story, but it’s still quite disgusting to watch it all unfold. Like I said in my first post on this, I felt the whole deal sounded crappy from the start.

John Reese, a man who made a million bucks from selling a thousand DVD’s that explained how to make a million bucks must have thought to himself “huh, this new media thing looks nice and shiny. I want it!”

Basically, Reese created an instant buzz with a state of the art widget that promised the world, yet came through with nothing. Some are claiming Reese used the widget to gain mass backlinks and free e-real estate for his affiliate links.

Either way… it’s turning out to be nothing more than a failure.

So is BlogRush worth installing on your blog? Not at all.