myTobago – your questions, review and comment about Tobago

To all Tobago lovers..
I have just been sent a link from a close friend living in Tobago of a new website recently launched.
I only had time for a quick look but it looks very nice.

Here is the address:
http://www.tobagoisland.com

Barry (????)

We welcome every site designed to promote Tobago, so wish the site every success. It is such a pity that you felt the need to announce the site by registering a bogus account on the myTobago.info forum and used a bogus email address. You indicated that you were from Southampton, but our monitoring logs indicates that you are in the Midlands. It seems something of a coincidence that the site you are announcing is hosted in Northamton.

Either way, good luck with your site, but a little honesty and straightforwardness would do not harm.

Steve, why didn't you delete the message? I had a look, but theres nothing on the iste. You cant even see who its by or what its purpose is. Theyre taking the piss.

My website is honest, it's telling people of places they can visit, restuarants, beaches, and everything there is to see and know in Tobago.

I am currently working on it right this minute putting in a message board where people can post about their visit/experieces of Tobago.

My site is called Karen's World you can stop by anytime and sign the guest book or map and tell me about your tobago experiences i will love to hear all of it.

I love when people talk about my homeland.

This is a link to my site. http://strongblkprincess.islandmix.com/

Thanks for reading.

Hi Barry

The myTobago forum is moderated, not censored.

Jill and I make best effort to check posts looking for those that are obviously malicious, libellous, obscene, use bad language (?????), are personal attacks or which in any other way could cause serious offence or compromise the high standards of the board. We do not delete or edit messages simply because we do not like the content. There have been many posts I would have preferred to delete, but once you start censoring, where do you stop?

No, as I said, I truly welcome any and every site that promotes Tobago. I am happy to co-operate and work with any of them, in principle. The ones I object to are those that totally rip off other people’s work. We had that recently with a guy called Malcolm Dent, of Gosport in Hampshire (UK). He produces travel documentary videos. You would have thought that anyone operating as a professional photographer or film maker would have an understanding and appreciation of Intellectual Rights, but not him. He produced a website comprised very largely of text ‘lifted’ from myTobago. We use seeded information throughout the site to help us catch people who simply copy information on the site. When we brought the matter to his attention, Dent appeared genuinely ignorant of the fact that you can't simply copy and use material from another website or book, etc. We took a copy of the site and lodged it with our solicitors, but as a non-commecial site I'm damned if I want to waste money on legal bills. After our warning, he simply changed a few words here and there to make it more difficult to prove plagiarism.

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Hi, Karen.

Thanks for letting us know about your site. I've only had a quick look, but there seems to be some useful information there. I'll have a good look as soon as time permits. All the best with it (How about a link to myTobago in your favourite links?).

... THere is only one 'MyTobago'.... and it rocks!

I showed the site to my partner who loves it - and having managed the set up of a VERY high profile international site, he knows what he is talking about.
Steve is right - getting into litigation detracts from everything else he is doing and unless someone is obviously profiteering it simply would not be financiallly viable.
So guys - just boycott a.n.other and make sure your posts stay HERE.

Personally I believe Steves form of moderation works and far prefer it to censorship - how else can users make an informed decision based on their own preferences? Don't think any of us voted communist at the last election......... (then again we were possibly to busy gen'ing up on tobago to bother to vote!)

So Steve 'nil carborundum est' and don't ever retire....except to Tobago

Thanks Steve for taking time off your busy schedule to look at my site the suggestion you gave me i will do just that.

My reason for putting up the site is i was tired of seeing places of everywhere else but my island and that motivated me to what i did. If you have any suggestions and ides for me i will appreciate them.

Hi Sue

Thanks for your support but the last thing I want anyone to do is boycott other sites about Tobago. In fact just the opposite - as long as readers come back and suggest any good features or attributes they come across on other sites and which might be appropriate for myTobago.

The owner of the tobagoisland.com website has contacted me and given his assurance that neither he, nor anyone connected with tobagoisland.com, posted the above ‘Barry Mitchell’ message. I therefore unreservedly apologise for inferring that they posted the message themselves under a bogus name and to wish them every success with their site.

Hi Steve,

It's nice of you to be so generous about the other Tobago sites - but in my unbiased opinion neither compare to mytobago for the inormation on them!

I enjoyed browsing Karen's site. However the other site seemed to lack information - lots of words but told you nothing!

Regards
Louise