I deleted my Ecademy account about two months ago since I wasn’t using it and didn’t really like the way Ecademy was developing.

First thing I noticed when I came to close it down was… that I couldn’t.  No instructions anywhere.  I emailed a couple of times to Ecademy tech support, but got no answer.

I blogged a couple of times; nobody picked it up.

Finally, I found a link (via an angry ex-Ecademist’s blog) to an option that seemed to offer the possibility of deleting my account.

Amusing, then to see this strange Ecademy listing (above) appear at #1 in Google for a search on my own name just now.  It leads to this page.

Firstly what the hell is ‘unwired-Ecademy’??  Secondly, why is it connected with my name?  And why does my name keep turning up in Ecademy’s foreign databases?  Seems to me that they’re holding on to my information.  What else am I supposed to think? Surely the Spiders From Google would have updated the indexes by now if I had successfully deleted my details from their system?

Worse, I just discovered something else. I’ve created an Ecademy account for a client and have just noticed that I can’t log out from my client’s account.  For some reason, Firefox (or Ecademy) just won’t let me.

What is going on here? And what exactly is ‘unwired-ecademy’?

My friend Julia Lalla-Maharaj made the shortlist today in the YouTube Davos competition with her campaign to end FGM – female genital mutilation.  The winning campaign will get to put their issue in front of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

If you have a moment to spare and you think that female genital mutilation -  the removal of little girls’ genitals to turn them into commodities traded by men – is unacceptable, please watch the video and then vote for Julia on the YouTube Davos channel.

Thank you in advance!

Ok, so after about day 6 of trying last summer I just forgot about it and got on with my life.  Until someone sent me a link to Paul Walsh’s blog where he provides a link straight through to a ‘delete your account’ page.  This page is pretty much invisible if you’re trying to find it from inside Ecademy.  At least it was to me.

Not having used Ecademy for over 6 months, I followed the link and deleted my account.

On the one hand, you can’t blame them for hiding the ‘get me the hell out of here’ link.  Networking sites like Ecademy are all about ‘claimed numbers of members’ (however loose the definition of ‘member’ might be).  Sadly, it’s all about keeping those numbers up to convince advertisers and partners to part with money.

In reality, Ecademy’s ‘membership’ number was always hotly disputed by increasingly pesky self-styled sleuths whose investigations started to show how shockingly small a percentage of Ecademy’s claimed active members were actually that.  It became clear to anyone with a brain in the last couple of years that a large number (some even suggested a majority) of Ecademy’s members were completely inactive and had been since their addition to the system.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of why I didn’t find Ecademy useful or its increasingly spammy approach – there’s plenty of discussion online in other places if you’re interested.

So, around about day 180ish and I deleted my account.  Or did I?  Some say that if I were to go to Ecademy and try to sign in, I’d be through to my old account again Facebook-stylee.  I’ll let you know.

Today (Tue March 17th) sees the first Chamber networking event in Tavistock.

Location is the Ordulph Arms in Tavistock and there are more than 20 local businesses attending.  This is set to be a regular monthly get-together.  Chamber members £10, guests £12 to cover cost of the buffet.

The event features a short presentation, 4 business sponsors and plenty of time to network with other local businessess.  Everyone welcome – and if you’re interested in the next one, watch this space or speak to Chamber Chairman Nigel Eadie on 07802885117.

Visit the Tavistock Chamber of Commerce here.