Full list of Sys-Con's Ulitzer authors

Ulitzer Authors

Click here to see the full list of Sys-Con's Ulitzer authors. (1.8MB)

How you can help

Quick how-to:

  1. Reserve a range of IDs from the table above that no one else has (e.g., 20-30) by leaving a comment on this post.
  2. Try to contact the authors on Twitter or via their blogs, etc. Make sure that they are aware of being listed as Sys-Con Ulitzer authors (send them the link to their author page) and that they are aware of what Sys-Con is doing (you can refer them to my blog post at http://aralbalkan.com/2284).
  3. Finally, let everyone know that you've contacted your authors and heck, maybe even go for a second batch? :)

You can ask for your Ulitzer/Sys-Con author page to be removed by emailing editorial@sys-con.com.

(Thank you all so much!)

Why do this?

As I mentioned previously, Sys-Con makes money from advertising that they place on the content that they scrape off of author's RSS feeds with or without their permission. Without those authors and their content, they wouldn't have pages to put ads on. So one way to tell Sys-Con that we don't appreciate their ethics is to contact Sys-Con/Ulitzer authors and make them aware of what Sys-Con is doing.

The problem is that they claim to have "6,000 authors". To go through their interface one page at a time to try and contact these people would be very time consuming to say the least.

Instead, I've created an HTML file with a full list of Ulitzer authors that you can download. Be warned, it runs to 1.8MB and contains exactly 6,287 authors.

Along with the author's name, I've added links to do quick searches on Google to try and find the author's Twitter account (so you can contact him or her and inform them) and also a search on Twitter itself for the author's name.

Update: Based on Mathias Baert's suggestion, I've added IDs to the rows so that you can reserve a block and handle contacting those authors. If everyone takes a little piece of it and contacts a number of authors, we should make some progress towards the full list :) Please leave a comment to let us know which rows you'll be contacting.

Isn't it just amazing what you can do with a little bit of python! :)

The geeky bits

In case you're interested, you can download the two quick scripts I wrote (author-scripts.zip, 80KB).

The two scripts are authors.py, which downloads the list of authors from Sys-Con's page and saves them as a Python list and html.py, which contains a copy of that list and creates the simple HTML table I've linked to above. Since the list is in Python list format in the latter script, you can probably find some other interesting mashups to create with the data.

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