Astrologer of the Week – Radu Moisoiu
I started researching the astrology of Rudy Giuliani to compare Hellenistic techniques to my own methods. He has Saturn conjunct Midheaven as a defining feature in his chart so I googled “saturn conjunct midheaven” and top of the list was “Saturn conjunct Midheaven · astrological aspect · astrology aspect” from the Astrology Weekly website. Quite a good interpretation really but one important thing was missing. If I had have written that on my website, I would have included this: “Planets in Youth: Patterns of Early Development, Robert Hand, p. 304.” There is no reference on that page at Astrology Weekly to Robert Hand or to his book. There is a page at Astrology Weekly called “Astrology books”, but even this has no reference to Robert Hand or Planets in Youth.
If you google any of the major astrological aspects, at the top of the page will be Astrology Weekly. None of these interpretations include any reference to the original author, and like the interpretation for Saturn conjunct Midheaven from Robert Hand, I doubt very much they are from free online books or from the author of the website, Radu Moisoiu.
I own two of Robert Hand’s books and I have found Planets in Youth very useful. I bought it to help me understand my children better, but it is actually a great book for interpreting charts of adults as well. You can pick up a copy at Amazon
Jamie Funk. 5th March 2010
UPDATE!
As a result of some heated debate on Astrology Weekly, Radu has admited his over sight and explained himself. He has now removed the questionable material. We have also been made aware of possible copyright infringements of the photos we had been using to illustrate this Blog and they have been removed also. All other illustrations are by myself, Marina and have no copyright issue. We will gradually replace the removed photos with material from Creative Commons. We were genuinely unaware we were breaching any copyright law here, thinking it fell under Fair Use.
“The key phrases in the Copyright and Fair Use article are: “… the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism.” “… one important factor is whether your use will deprive the copyright owner of income.” Kineda.com
As an Illustrator I realise the “depriving the copyright owner of income” could be the case, but this is a woolly area..So to make sure we weren’t ripping anyone off, we thought it was wisest to remove the photos.
Marina. 6th March 2010
References: Click the links!
Related posts:
Astrologer of the Week – Nick Dagan Best
Astrologer of the Week – Deborah Houlding
Astrologer of the Week – Radu Moisoiu PLAGIARISM http://funkastrology.co.uk/astrologer-of... via @AddToAny #astrology
@funkastrology Ouch, nice takedown!! A little stinger to celebrate the Scorpio Moon! Plagiarism is so uncool.
Two of Rob Hand works that I have found very useful over the years, and still do today, are HOROSCOPE SYMBOLS and ESSAYS ON ASTROLOGY, both first issued in the early 80s, both pretty brilliant.
I noticed that Radu has disappeared and hasn’t done his weekly update in several months.
@Johnny, i don’t have those books but should get them. the other one i have is Planets in Transit, which has been wonderful in helping me through a rough decade of pluto squaring my virgo stellium.
@ TTT, thanks for that info, very interesting. i’m really agro about this plagIarism. Radu has cornered the market on people searching for astrological aspects. It was a cunning strategy to build up the Astrology Weekly forum so fast. what he has done is take away traffic and therefore business from websites of legitimate astrologers.
thanks to Matthew Currie for adding to Marina’s thread, i can’t believe it hasn’t been deleted yet, the mods must be mighty pissed off.
http://www.astrologyweekly.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22942
I love Robert Hand’s work. I refer to Horoscope Symbols and Planets in Transit all the time.
Thankyou kindly Radu. now when you google any astrology aspect, Astrology Weekly still comes up the top of the page, but the link goes to “Sorry, the page you requested was not found on this site.”
Re Cornering the search term market for astrological aspects:
“Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.” wiki -seo
all the links are set up like this:
“Saturn conjunct Midheaven · astrological aspect · astrology aspect …Saturn conjunct Midheaven · astrological aspect · astrology aspect /aspects. … Saturn’s aspects to the Midheaven. Saturn conjunct Midheaven …”
is that keyword stuffing or what? now all those links go directly to the astrology weekly website even though ALL the content for ALL astrological aspects has been removed.
thanks RevJ
here is the cached page for the copyrighted material
thanks Wendy
So Radu was very apologetic and said that the material was student notes, with no references. Thanked me for notifying him and said it helps fight the dark side!! I thought give him the benefit of the doubt as I tend to see the good in people. Was too worried about our own photo copyright issue to question him further.
But now I have heard of Spamdexing and word stuffing! You type in an astrological aspect on google search. ANY aspect. Venus trine Mars, Jupiter opposition Neptune. You name it and Astroweekly will come top of it’s search engine.
Then you get this error message. Well, when we’ve deleted pages you just get a standard Error 404 message blank page.
But with him you get a fancy page complete with witty moon message and an invite to explore the rest of the site and a link.
Now is this right and fair to all the legit Astrologers out there? Those who have worked hard and created their own aspect interps to have them poached by this joker!
There is one think I hadn’t thought of, this cached thing. It could be that this is still coming up because the pages are cached. But I don’t know enough about the technicalities. It just looks dodgy to me.
I guess we just have to see if in time this goes away when the cache is gradually replaced. Then we will really know.
excellent news! thanks everyone for your help on this, it was nasty work but it had to be done in the interests of astrology, it was a good cause and honest astrologers everywhere will now benefit. all the links for astrological aspects to Astrology Weekly have now disappeared from the search engines, and the ratings at Astrology Weekly have dramatically crashed as a result: alexa site ranking
Having read most of the Hellenistic astrological texts in CCAG and other sources from 1968-1972 I can say that plagiarism is standard practice amongst those writers. Nothing new under the sun.
Hand’s cookbooks are sort of nice too. Most of it is incorporated into the daily interpretations given on Astrodienst. I have found it to be totally useless. When he briefly went to discuss and use midpoints he was on to something. But then he fell into the Hellenistic Wonderland. Since then I look at him as “big Name but small balls”. He is quite honest about how those books were rush jobs. Caveat emptor!!