Disqus - Latest Comments for BocaJuniors

Re: Top 10 Startups of 2011

BocaJuniors — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:05:24 -0000

Under Dropbox you state, "A complaint against Evernote was filed with the FTC, stating that Evernote misled users about its security and privacy,"

Re: Current TV May Want to Examine Where They’re Advertising Their Programs - FishbowlDC

BocaJuniors — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:17:18 -0000

Betsy, you should talk to the guys and gals who work on the web advertising side of Mediabistro. ;)

What you are seeing is just a Doubleclick (Google) ad. Probably because you visit left-leaning sites a lot, there were keywords in the article about Olbermann, or you were on Current TV's site earlier and they "retargeted" you.Current could probably filter out Townhall, yeah, but it's not like they are buying advertising there.

Re: louisgray.com - Silicon Valley Early Adopter Tech Geek Blog: A Scorched Earth Data Policy Is Bad for the Web and History

BocaJuniors — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 02:20:48 -0000

Couldn't agree more with your headline. Yet another reason I save everything of interest to Evernote. I also don't buy Steve's rationale:

"I want to make it easy for Google. The only way to do so was to scorch the earth. Anything more will confuse it. I want one site to earn the +1s, not three."

Really? Unless he deletes years of blog posts, Google is going to wander the internet dazed and confused?

Survey says...no.

He could always just remove his site from Google and provide an on-site search engine. Or nofollow all the internal links on those two sites. Or wait for Google to provide some kind of option to opt-out of +1. Etc, etc.

Occam's razor says: You completely delete years of writing because YOU DON'T WANT PEOPLE READING IT.

Re: Medellin – The Monotone City; The Truth About Living in Medellin, Colombia

BocaJuniors — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:35:40 -0000

I was there a couple months ago for 2.5 weeks, and am headed down in July for a more extended stay. Did you rent a furnished or unfurnished apto?

Re: Obama's Speech Was a Waste of Breath - Clive Crook - Politics - The Atlantic

BocaJuniors — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:52:30 -0000

President Obama disagrees with you daltonII. It was a campaign speech.

http://twitter.com/#!/Barac...

Re: New Report Contradicts Governor's Claim On State Employee Pay

BocaJuniors — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 14:19:47 -0000

I think this caveat says it all: "commissioned by public employee unions"

Re: Why Pepco is So Awful - Joshua Green - National - The Atlantic

BocaJuniors — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:09:33 -0000

Here is some background re: the past 5 years of Pepco, since the were privatized basically.

http://www.washingtonpost.c...

Re: Microsoft Co-Founder Loses Round One in Lawsuit Against Google, Apple & Facebook

BocaJuniors — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 17:01:43 -0000

I think you're exactly right. I heard Adam Curry float this theory a couple months ago, that really Paul Allen is trying to "successfully lose" the lawsuits.

Interestingly, there was a WSJ piece a couple days ago about Intellectual Ventures, a big patent outfit run by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, that has basically convinced/blackmailed everybody from HTC to Google to cough up big license fees. I wonder if Paul Allen does not like what Myhrvold has been doing, and that was the real impetus for his lawsuit.

Re: Palin: ‘Obviously, We’ve Got To Stand With Our North Korean Allies’

BocaJuniors — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 06:34:16 -0000

Ummm... She obviously misspoke, since she first talks about sanctioning North Korea for what they're doing.

Re: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/14/tsa-ejects-oceanside-man-airport-refusing-security/

BocaJuniors — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:36:56 -0000

Again, you can effectively waive some rights, not all rights. Fine print does not give carte blanche to a private enterprise.

The Lakers can't sell you a ticket online and then when you get to the Staples Center tell you, "You didn't read the fine print? It clearly states on page 3, paragraph 7, that Kobe gets to grope your 16 year-old daughter in the locker room."

Re: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/14/tsa-ejects-oceanside-man-airport-refusing-security/

BocaJuniors — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:16:41 -0000

You are correct, but the government is bounded by "reasonableness."

The police are not allowed to drive around and randomly stop pedestrians and search them for drugs. They can, however, seize drugs at checkpoints that were specifically setup to remedy a particular problem (eg. drunk driving). The TSA's rather, ummm, probative security procedures will be withdrawn under public pressure and/or end up being tested legally in the courts.

And with regard to private entities being able to infringe on your rights, there are limits to that as well. Just take a look at how court's have interpreted/balanced the individual's right to privacy and movement with the right of stores to detain shoplifters.

Re: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/14/tsa-ejects-oceanside-man-airport-refusing-security/

BocaJuniors — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 15:57:13 -0000

Yup. I still remember where I was when McVeigh flew a plane into the Oklahoma City federal building...

Re: Facebook Acquires Simple File-sharing Service Drop.io

BocaJuniors — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:36:05 -0000

Jeremy: You're right, in a sense, they charged money for premium services (like drops over 100mb). But the core service was free. Up until today you could create drops, embed content, collaborate through their backend, and much more. For free.

To be clear, I loved drop.io and used it regularly. Most everybody who used the service was probably like me, a freeloader. Nonetheless, kudos to the drop.io team, they deserve every penny they get from Facebook. I'm just guessing it wasn't a huge payout, that's all.

Re: Facebook Acquires Simple File-sharing Service Drop.io

BocaJuniors — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:32:29 -0000

Problem #1: Drop.io was free.

Problem #2: Drop.io was free.

Problem #3: Do I need to go on?

I'd be willing to bet that they didn't get all that much money from Facebook. A decent chunk of change that made it worthwhile to walk away from your own project, but nothing more. Think about it, a service with tons of paying users wouldn't just close shop same-day and then delete all data a couple months later.

Re: SlideShare’s April Fool’s Prank: Cruel, Or Just Unusual?

BocaJuniors — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:21:19 -0000

Yeah...

It's questionable for a business to run the risk of embarrassing its customers.

It's downright weird that they would set out to do it.

Re: Protests over Verizon deal with 1938media

BocaJuniors — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:23:28 -0000

Exactly.

This isn't a discussion of freedom of speech but corporate responsibility and "political correctness."

Freedom of speech protects Loren (and all of us) from the government telling us what we can and can't say. Verizon, on the other hand, has every right to censor Loren. They aren't limiting Loren's freedom of speech if they decide not to pay him for his content.

Re: Protests over Verizon deal with 1938media

BocaJuniors — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:09:30 -0000

File under: inevitable.

And if this news ever goes mainstream I think that everyone outside Web 2.0 and the racial grievance industry will be wondering: Who is Loren Feldman and what is Project Islamic Hope?!?!

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:15:54 -0000

I said: "Certainly we can all agree that Google or Internet Archive != fav.or.it"

You responded: "Sure, in the sense that the former is actually a far more egregious abuse of the sort of formalist copyright policy you're advocating."

Obviously, we must be talking past each other because I couldn't disagree more with your interpretation of my position. :)

In any case, the sentence that followed caught my attention:

"Unlike HTML, RSS was specifically designed to enable content from one site to be displayed on another. By publishing a feed, you are explicitly opting into that ecosystem."

Which begs the question, what ecosystem are we talking about? Splogs? Services that scrape full feeds? Except for the owners of such services, I know of very few people who want to be part of that ecosystem.

Most folks when they publish feeds believe they can (1) let users read their content in feed readers and/or (2) if they're lucky enough, get picked up by services like Google News (which display short summaries, not full text).

They're not opting into some ecosystem where they provide their full content free of charge for would-be competitors.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:33:47 -0000

Certainly we can all agree that Google or Internet Archive != fav.or.it

That point aside, this is precisely the reason that copyright law protects the content creator by default. Copyright doesn't protect a third party's right (fav.or.it, etc) to go scrape a site's content and reuse it freely unless the site says they can't. Copyright protects the creator's right to their content unless the site explicitly says that a third party can use it (and under what conditions).

Copyright does not place the obligation on the content creator to op-out their site of every service or group of services out there that wants to expropriate their content.

Now, re: Google Cache. The web has certainly created new mechanisms that the law is still grappling with.

In 2006 a district court here in the US sided with Google's ability to cache web pages, in Belgium a year later the court there sided against Google's interests.

In the US case one of the factors was that Google makes no money from their cache, as well as the fact (I would argue) that the judge didn't seem to understand some of the finer technical aspects of web caching. [decision here]

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:49:22 -0000

rogerben: Interesting idea, but it still runs into the fundamental problem that Duncan outlined -- copyright protection is not an opt-out/opt-in mechanism. Copyright automatically protects the content creator upon creation, not upon opting in or out of a third party standard.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:44:04 -0000

Nick,

I agree with you that Duncan focused on the negative of fav.or.it, and to be honest the aspect of reusing content without permission was what caught my attention as well when I visited the site earlier today.

Nevertheless, the site is attractive and could be useful. There is certainly space for such a service on the web, but with a couple caveats. Content creators must be able to opt-in to:

- provide full content
- own the comments to their content (otherwise comments aren't allowed)
- participate in monetization of their content (otherwise ads aren't displayed)

I know that getting buy-in from content creators would be a struggle for such a service as fav.or.it, but that is the cost of running such a service: you can't bite the hand that feeds you (the content creators).

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:57:29 -0000

Thanks, Allen.

These are my first comments using Disqus (and first time commenting here on Inquisitr for that matter). I just noticed that the "em" italics show up fine on Inquisitr but not back on the Disqus site. Odd!

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:23:47 -0000

Yeah, if we follow the strictest letter of the law of Copyright no one should reprint full-text posts. But if that were the case then Google Reader wouldn't be allowed to exist...

All due respect, you couldn't be more wrong.

The problem is that with the relatively new internet distribution method of RSS, the legal rules governing third-party distribution is a bit murky (at least in the United States). In other mediums the rules are quite clear and have established legal precedent.

For example, if I want to tape an episode of ABC's hit show Lost and watch it later, then that is fine. In fact, if I invite a couple friends over to watch an episode with me, that's perfectly legal as well. However, if I setup a business to make money from rebroadcasting these shows to the public (renting time on a public access cable channel, selling ads that replace ABC's ads, hosting an after-episode round table discussion on Lost mythology, etc)...then I'm in some legal hot water unless I get ABC's permission beforehand. Just because ABC broadcast Lost in a manner that made it super-duper-easy to syndicate doesn't mean that I get to "add value" and then make money from their content. Whining about how my round table discussion "added important value and facilitated conversation" won't prevent a court from siding with ABC.

Similarly, until now the prevalent netiquette has been that using a site's full feed in my own feedreader is okey-dokey (and encouraged!). But it is rude/bad/"evil" to reuse that site's full feed and display it on my publicly available site (especially if I am attempting to make money off it).

Whether the generally accepted principal of netiquette is adopted as legal precedent is yet to be seen. But if I had to guess, the courts will follow the generally accepted guidelines that govern analogous mediums.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:57:47 -0000

"The bottom line is when you read your 'full content' in google reader that is no different to viewing it in the format we show it on fav.or.it..."

Really? Really?

'Cause I can't do that with my personal feeds inside Google Reader...

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:54:55 -0000

"In Fav.or.it, there are no ads slapped around your content..."

Turn off your Adblock Plus plugin.

Here is what I'm seeing right now:

This post from Mashable is displaying an Adsense banner for Flock to the right of the content and wider banner below it.

This post from Think Progress is displaying an Adsense banner for "free credit reports" to the right of the content and Adsense text ads below it.

And this post from Techcrunch is displaying Adsense text ads to the right of the content and below it.

I could go on, but you get the point. Go to any "post" on fav.or.it and you get ads "slapped around your content."