slamboard

Edit:

I removed this post because I wasn’t happy with my first attempt at creating a screen cast.

In it’s place, I am going to have a reminder.

Archive.org is very useful for reviewing the content that was on a website in the recent, or less recent past. Being banned from accessing the URL of the current website does not impact your ability to look at content that has been archived by third parties, including Google.

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

I want to compare and contrast two very different instances of crowdsourcing for you. One is the exposure of the Kimkins fraud. The other is the Anonymous attack on the church of scientology that is being talked about in the papers today.

I am 99.9% certain that there is no overlap in the participants. Anonymous is a shadowy collective that is mostly comprised of technically savvy teenage misanthropes. They are, by their own headcount, legion. I brought up their recent activities to a young man in their demographic this morning and he advised me that they are just looking for attention. He was surprised when I told him that papers of record were discussing their attack on scientology. According to him, the media are giving them what they want.

There has been an element of anonymity in the Kimkins controversy, but some of the most active and effective people are not anonymous. I think the rascally teens that comprise Anonymous might be a bit impressed if they found out about the incredible crowdsourcing effort that found all those Russian Bride Pictures.

Both groups incorporate humor into their activities, although they have serious goals. Sometimes Anonymous behaves badly. Jeannie Baitinger referred to the anti-kimkins people as terrorists on more than one occasion, one of which was on national television.

I have been on the periphery of something that was attacked by Anonymous before and I realized that while they have strength in numbers, their Achilles heel is their inability to have a sustained interest in any one target. In fact, I think they abandon their efforts as soon as the attention that the crave begins to wane. If the people who put in the effort to expose the Kimkins fraud had the same attitude, big things might not have happened.

I have been critical of scientology on a regular basis and I have very little sympathy for their plight now that hundreds of thousands of hackers are trying to bring them down. I won’t shy away from being critical of Anonymous either. They have many interests and activities that are beyond the pale with regard to societal norms. For the most part, Kimkins detractors are the kind of people who represent societal norms.

I have a confession to make. I have a full and rewarding life and I do not obsess about the continuing story of Kimkins and Heidi Diaz. In fact, I do not even lurk on some of the most active venues for news, opinion and speculation related to the woman, her diet and her website. I am in regular contact with a person who does look at the LCF almost everyday. I go to blogs like that of Jimmy Moore to find a sort of best of synopsis of what is going on. Sometimes there several days where the story does not cross my mind. If you are someone who is devoting too much time to tracking the minute details I would suggest that you make some kind of commitment to step away from it.

The only thing that I ever became engrossed in to the point where it was an unhealthy obsession was the Gulf War. I was a college RA and I spent many of my duty nights glued to CNN. When the physical and mental effects manifested themselves, I was shocked and scared to realize how unbalanced my life had been for those weeks. I made up my mind to avoid being sucked in to coverage of an event in that way ever again.

Kimkins is optimized for search engines. The SEP work was carried out before Heidi Diaz came clean about her actual weight. If you search the term Kimkins on Google, you will see Kimkins.com at the top of the search. Below the site description are seven links to pages within the site. One of them is the old Who is Kimmer page. On that page is the fraudulent after picture and also the 198 lb weight loss claim and the text of the old interview with Jimmy Moore. This page should be deleted. I have to wonder whether it had been left up on purpose.

Edit: The page no longer accessible.

Heidi Diaz has decided to, in her words, come clean on the Kimkins website. She is no longer claiming to look like any of these after photos. I couldn’t help but notice that the recent photograph of the real Kimmer that was added to the website today looks a bit vertically stretched. I am curious as to what other people think.

Please feel free to leave comments on this blog. I have had to use full moderation, but I will be approving as often as possible.

Google Trends is a tool from Google that has not really caught on. I guess the disclaimers about accuracy might have something to do with that. Nevertheless, when I was researching something entirely unrelated, I got the idea to see what the Trends Graph for Kimkins looked like.

Take a moment to picture what you think it might look like before you click the link.

This is just a quick post to remind people who have an interest in Kimkins that there is a Slamboard YouTube Channel with a couple of relevant videos.

I chose not to embed these videos on this blog, but they are embeddable for any other bloggers who want to publicize them and comment on them. They are surveillance videos.

Riverside County, California private investigator Robert Charlton was an integral part of the work done to expose Heidi Diaz (the obese woman known as “Kimmer” of Kimkins diet fame). Robert has written a fascinating article about his involvement in the case and the days and days of surveillance it took to finally obtain pictures of this reclusive woman:

During the several days spent on surveillance, I observed Ms. Diaz out of the apartment twice. She was usually seated at a window on her computer. I remember thinking “what a strange woman”, just sitting at the computer all day long creating diet schemes to take money from people who have placed their hopes in her hands to help them lose weight.

I passed by her vehicle one day and noticed a tray of sugar cookies with sprinkles just recently opened and sitting on the passenger seat of her mini van. This from a woman telling other people to eat 500 to 800 calories a day all the while she is taking in much much more than that.

Read Mr. Charlton’s blog post here.

I have been busy with a lot of other things while this whole Kimkins thing rolls along towards some inevitable conclusion. I am making a post at this time because I noticed that the top hits on a Technorati search for Kimkins are all from affililiates and other Kimkins proponents. Technorati searches are listed with the most recent blog posts at the top. Relevance and authority doesn’t factor into the order.

Bloggers who are interested in trying to prevent people from researching Kimkins without seeing the truth should post often.