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Since launching our revolutionary Ulitzer platform we have been the butt of a smear campaign perpetrated by a small number of social media terrorists from within Adobe's Flex user community.

I cannot imagine a Microsoft, IBM, Oracle or Apple employee publicly writing "SYS-CON should die!" under his or her corporate credentials, or leaving reader feedback on a Gartner blog implying "SYS-CON are thieves" next to his or her corporate credentials especially when the allegation is false and carries legal consequences.

Naturally we documented these attacks and forwarded them to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Adobe assured us that none of its employees would do such a thing and claimed it must be a few "disgruntled" members of the Flex community.

In other words Adobe shrugged off the libels and failed to rein in its people.

This lack of adult supervision is reinforced by the lawlessness of social media, where there is little to no accountability and careless invective is common.

It is hard to imagine responsible people giving such rants any credence but they taint the environment in which we all work, leave lasting misimpressions and damage reputations for no good reason.

SYS-CON has worked hard for two decades to build its good name and I have no intention of ignoring these smears on our reputation. I will take legal action against those responsible for these attacks.

I would tell Adobe's management that it needs to create and implement a clear corporate policy for employees who contribute to social media, and to educate its user base at the same time.

It is unclear to me why Adobe hasn't done this already before these hooligans taint it. It is doubly unclear to me since SYS-CON Media has had a long association with Adobe technologies.

We started publishing ColdFusion Developer's Journal nine years ago as a testament to ColdFusion's powerful entry position in the development tools market.

CFDJ was influential in Allaire's successful IPO and later during Macromedia's acquisition of the company.

Based on CFDJ's success we launched MXDJ for Macromedia users. By the time Adobe acquired Macromedia MXDJ was being printed and distributed in multiple languages including French, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Standard Chinese.

With more than 2,000 original articles to its credit, CFDJ today offers the richest technical content archive for the CF community.

SYS-CON has also published more than 4,000 stories about Flex, 15,000 stories about Flash and 8,000 stories about Adobe itself.

SYS-CON Media has doubtlessly published the largest number of articles, news, feature stories and blog posts about Adobe and Adobe products.

Both CFDJ and MXDJ (later renamed Flex Developer's Journal) have consistently been an integral part of Allaire, Macromedia and Adobe's service to their user communities.

We Have Seen This Movie Before
This is not the first time SYS-CON has dealt with online terror attacks.

A few years ago when we attempted to reveal the identity of an anonymous open source blogger, we suffered weeks' worth of DDoS attacks. The online lynch mob posted hundreds if not thousands of threads and blog entries smearing us.

Simply Google my name to see examples of these attacks by bullies who just didn't want to see advertising banners when they consumed free quality content on our website.

"Mass psychology" scientists study this kind of phenomena and the "mass psychology of fascism" is of course the most famous lab case.

The extraordinary experience SYS-CON Media lived through became part of a Forbes Magazine investigative cover story called "Attack of the Blogs" that found that "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo."

The lies, libel and invective we are living through today is another such episode. Our partners, readers and the industry in general know the facts and what's going on but in a rare example like the email below, we can't be sure if everyone is on the same page as the rest of us.

Subject: Request to Remove Curl Ulitzer Endorsement

In light of the documented questionable practices of SYS-CON and Ulitzer and the lack of a satisfactory response from SYS-CON regarding these allegations I and Curl no longer feel comfortable offing my endorsement.

I formally request that you remove it from the Ulitzer site wherever it appears.

Please acknowledge this request and inform when you have completed the removal of my Curl endorsement.

Sincerely,

Richard Treadway
VP Sales and Marketing
Curl Inc

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