As a side project I run a site devoted to aggregating the RSS feeds from UK Political Blogs. One of these blogs is from Craig Murray, the ex-Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan. Two days ago he published a robust article about Alisher Usmanov. My team of robots collected this from his RSS feed and added it to his page on UKPoliBlog.

In a somewhat surprising turn of events, I was phoned this afternoon by somebody who may belong to Schillings[1] the lawyers, asking that I remove a potential libel from my blog Voidstar. As I have no personal interest in football, Arsenal football club or rich Russians, I wasn't sure what she was on about. After some beating round the bush we eventually worked out where it was and I've duly removed the offending article. She happened to mention that it had been found via Google, and when I explained what was going on, said that they were having quite a bit of trouble tracking down all the places it's ended up. On a technical note, I can't remove the article completely or the team of robots will just fetch it again. So I've left a stub there.

So let that be a warning to you all. Random re-publishing of volatile political blogger's RSS feeds can lead to interesting phone conversations!

[1]Schillings is the UK’s leading law firm dedicated to protecting the reputations of high-profile individuals, corporates and brands. According to their website.

[edited to add]. I'm supposed to have had an email and fax backing up the phone call but nothing has turned up yet.


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[ 04-Sep-07 6:59pm ] [ ]