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My Sys-Con Nightmare (aralbalkan.com)
108 points by tortilla on July 27, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



So I called them out on it. I tweeted about it

Something about this juxtaposition of old-fashioned wild-west mans-gotta-do with urban hip web 2.0 trendiness just doesn't quite work...


You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with twitter clients and those who dig. You dig.

(You are right. Doesn't work at all.)


Weird. I seem to be experiencing quite a bit of cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile a publisher like Sys-Con, which as he notes, draws in Microsoft, IBM and Sun as advertisers, and publishes reasonably well-respected journals like ".NET Developer's Journal", "AJAX World Magazine", etc., with articles like "Turkish Fags Who Live in London: Aral Balkan".


I thought the same, but just 10 minutes searching around the sys-con sites I found plenty of evidence that Sys Con Founder Fuat Kircaali has a pretty intense temper and uses his entire company to channel it.

He would make a pretty hilarious sitcom character. It's pretty entertaining until you realize it's real and like Aral you're the victim of his wrath.

Google him and go to his own sys-con page (I won't link straight to it to avoid paying them google juice) and see his article on "Social Media Terrorists" for a classic result of what happens when a powerful man has too much of a temper. I took a screenshot incase they pull it down:

http://skitch.com/pelle/b3fam/social-media-terrorists-coldfu...

I would be embarrassed to have anything to do with that company. And yes the advertisers (like Sun, IBM etc really should not encourage that sort of behavior. Luckily Sys-Con is such a web 1.0 like company and I had happily forgotten all about them until I saw this article.


I thought the same thing. The fact that the article is said to have been in Turkish doesn't help with the fact finding effort.


Whoa, it looks like a garden variety internet cook has managed to get himself into a fairly powerful position and hold it for years. At least, that's how it appears from Googling.

The internet anti-bullshit machine should make short work of this, assuming there is actually something to do and all of this guy's wealth and status isn't just psychotic delusion.

Just spread the meme around and he'll self-destruct under scrutiny.


Friends from the security community tell me SYS-CON has been well known for a good while and nobody takes them seriously, but they make decent money from ads. They are essentially ad spammers.

As such, I assume the way to hurt them would be to follow their ad supply chain until you find someone who cares about copyright. The chain seems to end with the likes of Microsoft, Sun, etc. but I don't really understand how their ad network is setup.


At least SYS-CON is aptly named :-)




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