Yesterday afternoon and evening left me in quite the tizzy. Kerri posted a link on Twitter to Dr. Val who had posted a blog about Wellsphere being sold to HealthCentral. Wellsphere aggressively and systematically recruits bloggers and posts their content on its site. The Wellsphere owner and CEO, Ron Gutman, has surely garnered some major cash-a-rama by selling Wellsphere to HealthCentral, but even though the bulk of Wellsphere content is appropriated, what do the bloggers get? Nada.

I first learned of Wellsphere back around October, although I don’t recall now if I had received an email from them or if I clicked on a link from someone else’s blog to get there. I made an account, just for the sake of reading the content, not to contribute. It seemed like an online health community like any other so I didn’t think twice about creating an account. I browsed a bit, and actually found the site hard to navigate, but I chalked that up to being unfamiliar with it. In retrospect that should have been a clue, but there have been legitimate websites I’ve joined and initially found difficult to navigate until I got used to them so I dismissed that.

Part of that navigation issue was what I perceived as poor organization. For instance, I joined the Type 1 Diabetes community, in addition to some other communities like Depression, Eating Disorders, Women’s Health and Nutrition. In looking through the blog posts under the T1D community, I found a lot of marginally related posts, or even posts I would say shouldn’t have been under that category at all, posts that seemed more related to T2D or even just general nutrition. A red flag? Maybe, but it was another thing I overlooked, thinking that poorly categorized content wasn’t necessarily an indication of something more questionable in nature.

Now, I suffer some SSS, Something Shiny Syndrome – I see something shiny, it distracts me, holding my attention just long enough until I see something else shiny. Wellsphere was something shiny. I looked, found it poorly organized, didn’t feel like sorting through the dribble to find content that truly interested me, and I moved on to the next shiny thing.

However, somehow it caught my attention again a couple of weeks ago. Again, I don’t recall how, but I’m going to say it was likely a link on someone else’s blog. This time, I perused again, but a little more thoroughly. I still found those same issues I had initially found, but I saw some familiar faces, other D-bloggers with whom I’m familiar, so I started looking into how to get more involved in the community there. There were bloggers I know who had their content posted on the site, so I looked into how to do that, assuming it was similar to the blogging features on Diabetes Daily and TuDiabetes, two sites on which I’m active and for which I have tremendous respect. That was a misplaced assumption on my part as I later discovered because it was nothing like DD or TuD.

I inquired about participating, and received an email from Dr. Geoff Rutledge, Wellsphere’s Chief Medical Information Officer, explaining how the blog-website relationship works. Below is the complete text of the email I received:

Hi Leeann,
Thanks so much for your request for http://www.thebuttercompartment.com/ to join the Health Bloggers Network. Congratulations! We have reviewed your blog and found that it meets our standards for quality of writing and content. I would like to extend to you an offer to join the Diabetes Type 1 community, and I also would like to offer you a “Top Health Blogger” status on Wellsphere, which entitles you to a special badge that you can display on your blog.
Here is more information on how participation in the network works. We republish your articles on our site, and include on each article your photo, your blogname, and a link back to your site. We also publish your profile with a link back to your site, and we feature you on special WellPages on topics that you write on, and in your primary community.
We will set up your profile if you don’t already have one, and you don’t have to do anything but give us permission to publish your content for the Wellsphere audience. We don’t require a particular schedule for posting, though we have invited you to become a member of the Health Blogger network based in part on your history of posting on your blog.
Our growing network of bloggers (now over 1700) have told us they value what Wellsphere is trying to accomplish – helping people of all walks of life and across the spectrum of health to achieve healthier lives. They also appreciate the opportunity to reach the Wellsphere audience (now at more than 3 million visitors each month), and to benefit from links in each posting that drive traffic back to their blogs.
If you would like to join the network, all you have to do is confirm via email to me, Dr.Rutledge@wellsphere.com
Good health!
Geoff
–
Geoffrey Rutledge MD, PhD
Chief Medical Information Officer
Wellsphere
Dr.Rutledge@wellsphere.com

There was no fine print included, and I suppose if I were a smarter cookie, I would have thought to ask for such, or gone looking for it. I did neither though, and took the simple explanation at face value.

When I saw Kerri’s tweet and read Dr. Val’s post, I entered panic-mode, realizing that I had gotten myself into a pickle that I didn’t even fully comprehend since intellectual property law is not my forte. Of course, I couldn’t decide if I was madder at Wellsphere for the unforthcoming methods used to attract bloggers and the profit they made on out-sourced content, or myself for blindly going along with it. I went to the website to see about deleting my posts, but naturally, there was no way to do that, nor could I find a way to delete my account. I immediately emailed Dr. Rutledge and followed up by also emailing Wellsphere Support stating that I relinquished consent for them to publish my blog content and demanding that all content associated with my blog be immediately removed.

In the meantime, I continued to follow the Twitter discussion and other internet chatter on various blogs across the health blogosphere. Holy cow, everyone was atwitter! I felt like a big dummy, but at least I wasn’t alone. Plenty of people who hadn’t even signed up with the site were irate about it, and there was a real sense of community in light of the festering parasitic pathogen that had infected what boils down to a bunch of people who write primarily for the purpose of helping others. It wasn’t only those of us who had entered the unsavory agreement who felt screwed. Wellsphere apparently has lifted content such as vlogs posted on YouTube without attaining the creators’ consents, and as stated in their Terms of Service, they claim all content as their intellectual property to do with as they please, for which they got some phat coinage from HealthCentral when they were purchased by them.

Kerri posted that she had emailed Dr. Rutledge in the wake of this shit storm, and had gotten a fairly prompt response, apparently asking her to give consent to have her content posted. I don’t know what exactly Kerri wrote to him, but I sure as heck know she wasn’t inquiring about how to join. I had written the dude too, so where was my oh-so-prompt response? I emailed him again, I emailed Support again, and I emailed Veronica Ho, Wellsphere Community Ambassador, demanding that all content associated with my account be deleted. A couple of hours later, when I had yet to receive a response, I was inspired by Kerri to change my Wellsphere profile of which I took a screen shot:

Improved Wellsphere Profile: Click to Read

Within an hour, I was unable to log in to the website, so it seems my account has been deleted. Others who had made similar profile changes were also tweeting that their accounts had been deleted. The real question is whether or not all content that had been linked to my account is still on the site. I was unable to access any site content after my account was deleted, but Jason was able to get to the site on his computer so we set out in search of The Butter Compartment content. While the search engine “sucks” according to my IT expert, AKA Jason, as far as we could tell there is no longer any of my content on the site.

I’m not completely convinced that my content is no longer buried somewhere on the site since it’s poorly organized as I said before. I never did receive any responses to my emails. Because I’d like some written verification that nothing of mine is on the site at this point, for my own records and peace of mind, I’ll continue to email them requesting such verification. There’s a phone number on the site as well as a snail mail address so I can be a PIA via phone and the US Postal Service too, if need be.

There are lots of lessons to be learned here of course. It’s certainly been a rather embarrassing lesson for me, one that I could have done without. I think the entire health blogging community, even those who had the foresight to watch from the sidelines, has learned something though in this ever-emerging world of internet health information.

To find out more about the Wellsphere Scandal, please tune into the Dr. Anonymous Show tonight on Blog Talk Radio at 9PM, Eastern Time. Dr. Val will be a guest discussing her post on the scandal. If you’re unable to tune into the live broadcast, you can listen to the podcast later. In addition, if you Twitter, do a search of “#wellsphere” to catch up on the active discussion there. Through Twitter, I happened upon Rural Doctoring’s discussion. Of particular note is her link to Symtym’s discussion of Wellsphere’s Terms of Service. Lots of good dialogue by both health care providers and patients out there in the blogosphere about this so those are just my highlights of choice.