This morning I checked my email to find a message about Miss Video Game. One of my fellow writers wanted to promote some of the Dtoid readers that had made it into the top 48 (note: it was suppose to be the top 50 - I guess two girls dropped out after they made into the top 50) which is all good but one of the other writers noticed some familiar looking articles on their front page.
Miss Video Game was using the Destructoid feed to post our articles but there was nothing at the top of the feed to indicate where the articles were coming from. When I emailed the people behind MVG about this, they quickly remove our feed and replaced it with Gizmodo's feed. Of course, they are still not citing a source for the feed, just linking each title to the original story which makes it look like the articles are written by them.
[Update: I guess my email to the editor at Gizmodo was worth it because it seems MVG has finally credited Gizmodo at the top of the article column. I guess Gizmodo sent them a letter asking them to give them credit too.]
I also loved the fact that they still haven't responded to my email. I guess they'd rather remove the feed instead of apologising for not giving our site credit for the stories. How unprofessional.
I still can't believe this company still continues to screw up almost everything they do and yet girls still remain in the contest. I noticed that even the final contest between the final 5 has been pushed back from June to August to November now. I believe even the final 50 competition has been pushed back from April to sometime in August.
MVG has also decided to hold the final competition at Festivale Arcadia instead of holding the event on their own. Apparently doing this is going to make the contest seem more legit in the eyes of the 20,000+ gamers attending this festival. Yeah, ummm ... And G4's Girl Gamer contest made it more legit being on a cable TV station and where is she now?
This contest is so badly run that they can't even get their act together to run each part of the contest on the original dates set. I can't believe after all this time, they still can't get it together.
[Please note: I'm not providing links to the site because I refuse to provide them traffic any more.]
8 comments:
This is the biggest problem with RSS. There's no standard programmatic way to describe usage rights for the feed. Hopefully this will be fixed soon; sites like MVG have plausible deniability because the RSS standard is unambiguous in how and where the feed can be used.
In a nutshell, it sucks. :(
Nice article by the way. Keep it up.
@Hanford Fortunately copyright law is not ambiguous on this subject. Your content is yours and under your copyright and therefore whatever terms of use you specify on your site. The users of a feed are required to do their due diligence to investigate the terms of use. (BTW, IANAL)
I am surprised that noone gets ahold of the BBB or some other investigation site to look into this developing scam of a fraud aka miss video game. besides I really dont think we need a "miss video game", just sends all the wrong messages and ideas.
Even though you do not link to them, your articles can be considered as a commercial. As Oscar Wilde said: „It is better they talk bad things about you then not no talk about you at all.“
You are really angry over something that is purely for fun. If you took it seriously then thats your own fault. It's fun, watching the site and the competition develop is fun, and its a unique way to find new people to game with. As someone who has mostly male friends it is great for me to find other girls to play games with. As for MVG, it's not a scam. It's a real registered company (you can look them up in the registered companies in Canada) who joined a large festival to make the whole thing more fun. Why not have it at the festival? I think you are making a big deal out of something that shouldn't be taken so seriously. Sorry if it made you so upset, but thats your own thing.
@Xigre: Speaking of proper citations and annotations, the Oscar Wilde quote is ACTUALLY:
"The only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked about."
- Oscar Wilde
RSS as nothing to do with it.
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