an update

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I missed this yesterday because I was visiting with friends back home until late last night and then spent most of today on the interstate driving back from southern Virginia. Mike Krahulik (Gabe), has posted an update to the Ocean Marketing saga over at Penny Arcade:

I just wanted to post an update with some of the stuff that has happened over on my end with regards to all this Ocean Marketing stuff. Around midnight last night Paul sent me a mail saying that I could expect to hear from their attorneys. As of right now that still has not happened and honestly I don’t expect it will. Our attorneys (who are real people with an office and everything) are ready should it get to that point though. Head over to Penny Arcade to see the rest.

Just Wow!

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Mike Krahulik (Gabe), writing at Penny Arcade:

I got an incredible email today from a Penny Arcade reader. Dave shared with me an email chain between him and Ocean Marketing (the folks behind the Avenger controller) Trust me when I tell you that this is one wild ride. I’m serious, Mr. Toad would look at this ride and just give a slow clap while shaking his head. I have tried to arrange this as best I can in chronological order. I’ve also removed email addresses and other private information. So let’s just jump right in, here is Dave’s first mail to Ocean Marketing: See the entire email exchange. John Siracusa, Will Shipley, and Dave Nanian summed up the entire ordeal nicely on Twitter:

Another Statement From Louis C.K. (December 21, 2011)

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Louis C.K, writing on his website:

hi. So it's been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That's a lot of money. Really too much money. I've never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we're all sharing this experience and since it's really your money, I wanted to let you know what I'm doing with it. People are paying attention to what's going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes. So I'm breaking the million into four pieces. The rest of his post outlines exactly what he plans to do with the money. Spoiler alert: he's a generous man. Andy Baio made a good observation on Twitter:

I do hope Louis C.K. moves that pile out of Paypal to a safer location, and soon.

Huffduffer

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Today I learned about a great new (to me) service that allows you to create your own personalized Podcast feed of audio you fine on the web. Perhaps I'm late to the game on this, but I had never heard of it before. The service, called Huffduffer, sports a tastefully designed site which I appreciate. The user interface is intuitive and simple. I first saw mention of Huffduffer over on the website of one of my new favorite podcasts, Roderick on the Line. Merlin Mann, one of the co-hosts of the podcast, has enabled a "Huffduff It" link at the bottom of each post. Curious as to just what Huffduffing was, I soon found out what Huffduffer did. I love it. I pass a lot of my time during the week while working, coding, doing chores around the house, cooking, etc… by listening to podcasts, mostly from Dan Benjamin's great 5by5 network but sometimes NPR. Occasionally I find one-off episodes of some random podcast I want to listen to, or a random interview of someone I manage to find in audio form. Gone is the old, tired, and tedious was of having to drag random audio files into iTunes in order to get them on my iPhone or iPad to listen to, only to then get out of my house and realize I forgot to configure that particular audio file to sync (I selectively sync only certain podcasts/music to different devices). Huffduffer allows you to create your own new personalized podcast RSS feed, and easily add random bits of audio you find around the web to that feed. iTunes treats it just line any other podcast, and downloads the audio. Once setup, that feed is always set to sync to your respective devices, so it works beautifully. From the best I cans tell, the service is free. This worries me, because I don't want the service to be sold to some behemoth corporation which will ruin it, or to have ads on it. My only request would be for Huffduffer to charge money to its users customers so that we can insure it continues to operate successfully. You may be interested in subscribing to my own Huffduffer feed.

This Week In Douchebaggery: AllThis

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Well, it's Monday - I guess that means it's time for another douchebag to create a startup on the Internet. Introducing, Allthis.com. They list themselves as being in "beta" on their website and claim to be "the ten-minute exchange". Apparently users can bid on and purchase blocks of other users' time! How exciting! And, oh, hey, Mashable wrote an article about them! Wow! Awesome! You know what's even more awesome? You likely already have a profile there! Where people can buy 10 minutes or YOUR time! Fantastic. Look at the notable digerati that have already signed up! All of these profiles have since been removed by AllThis. See the updates at the bottom. * Mike Monteiro * Marco Arment * Jason Santa Maria * Jeff Zeldman * Frank Chimero * Merlin Mann * Dan Benjamin * John Siracusa * Andy Ihnatko * Leo Laporte * David Chartier * Jeremy Keith * Jared Spool * Jacqui Cheng * Tom Merritt * Veronica Belmont * MG Siegler Ok, I'll cut the crap. This site has me really steamed. I reached out to them on Twitter to ask just WTF they were doing:

To which they replied:

Really? No scraping? Then how come each of those profiles listed above are IDENTICAL to the metadata that is listed within the profiles on those social services they're associated with. My response:

Their response:

So apparently, our "friends" created those pages for us. You know, by painstakingly copying our profiles, verbatim, and listing them on their site. Bullshit. This "startup" is scraping prominent peoples' Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles and listing them on their site in order seed the site with accounts that their users might want to buy the time of, without first asking permission to do so of those users or even telling them that they've done so. Did they think no one would notice? Did they really think this was okay to do? Did they really think there wouldn't be pushback from these users by blatantly scraping their profiles, including avatar images, in order to misrepresent that they were using the site? When they finally decide to put up a defense to this, they'll no doubtedly point out that each of the profiles listed above has this disclaimer featured prominently beside the person's name. So prominent that they chose to display the text as a light grey on a white background. It's all about the user experience, after all: Also…"yet"? Awfully presumptuous, I think. It looks though, as I'm not alone in being upset about this:

Update, 12:45 pm eastern: Amy Hoy has also written an excellent post on this topic.

They will remove you from their site if you threaten them — however, they will pretend to not “understand” why you are “upset” — and go on thieving from other people. So, the best way to stop this is to enforce our copyrights. If they steal from you, don’t bother telling them to remove the profile.

She's done a lot of leg work to find out who their DNS and Hosting is provided by and posted their info on her site. [Check it out](http://unicornfree.com/2011/what-to-do-when-allthis-steals-your-photo-bio/).

Update, 2:26 pm eastern: AllThis, in response to the deluge of negative Tweets, has begun removing a lot of the prominent profiles listed above. It looks like Mike Monteiro got his lawyer on the case:

In other news, check out the newly launched [AllThisPR Twitter account](https://twitter.com/#!/allthisPR)!

Update 10:19 AM, Dec 20: It appears that all of the accounts I'd listed above have now been removed from their site. According to this Tweet they sent to Amy Hoy last night, they've now turned off non-member pages:

Good work Internet.

Update 12:39 PM, Dec 20: AllThis seems to be waging a war on Twitter against it's detractors. These people are the height of class:

Another instance of their classy communication techniques:

Update 2:09 PM, Dec 20: In addition to hitting BoingBoing, the story is now climbing up the page on Techmeme. Chris Sacca has weighed in and AllThis looks to finally start showing some deference regarding their actions:

Update: 8:00 AM Dec 21: Nick Douglas, writing for Slackstory chimed in:

> I think Allthis thinks they’re being cool and edgy? That would count if their business were, like, funny t-shirts. But Allthis is about helping nerds and suits network. They really wanna shoot for Louis C.K. and come across as Dane Cook? This site won’t make trading time cool. It just makes it gross, desperate and awkward.

Update, 10:56 AM, Dec 21: Matt Gemmel wrote an excellent piece on AllThis as well. He was one of their victims too:

I clicked the link, and saw that I somehow already had a page on their site (also since removed by them), which showed who currently held the supposed right to ten minutes of my time, and even showing my supposed calendar over the next few days (all times were marked as available, of course, since they had no knowledge of my actual availability).

I highly recommend [you read](http://mattgemmell.com/2011/12/21/allthis-sleazy-dishonesty/) Matt's article. His commentary on the whole fiasco was put much better than I could have done so myself.

Update, 11:40 AM, Dec 21: {merlin voice}Turns out{/merlin voice}, AllThis are still being assholes on Twitter:

Update, 11:54 AM, Dec 21: More good news for AllThis. Also, there was a puff piece posted on VentureBeat yesterday about AllThis in which they had interviewed one of the founders. I did not notice, but GigaOm did that this article was written by the same reporter who formerly worked at Mashable, and wrote that glowing review of them back in October. Make of that what you will... Bobbie Johnson at GigaOm, wrote an excellent post about user hostile techniques such as this starting to show up more and more within the industry:

I think what jars me the most is that these companies almost all claim to be “social”, but they are in fact employing marketing techniques that are uniquely anti-social. They use our images and our identities to fluff up their services and boost their bank accounts. They do all the things you or I would be pilloried for. In the grand scheme of things, shadow profiles are just a tiny part of this encroachment. But they are still bad behavior that help no one except the companies involved (and even then, they probably don’t help them in the long run). Shadow profiles are precisely the sort of marketing method that has been rewarded — rather than punished — over the last few years.

> Perhaps it’s about time we really held them to account for it.

Update, 12:33 PM, Dec 21: David Chartier noticed that AllThis has now removed the search box from their site so users can no longer find out of their profile was also scrapped.

Also, Liam Boogar, writing for The Rude Baguette, wrote a post about what AllThis should have done and what they did wrong:

To all you pre-PR startups out there: head this warning – angry users are the best thing that can ever happen to you. It’s like on YouTube: your video isn’t popular until someone comments about how your video relates to Justin Bieber, and then someone else complains that people only talk about Justin Bieber on the internet. People that are angry are impassioned, and this is the best thing you can hope for in users. Take those angry users, and turn them into ambassadors by demonstrating not only the value of your product, but the value of your team. In short, don’t “AllThis” up your PR.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

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The video above, is classic Christopher Hitchens, during an appearance on CNN talking about the subject of the death of Jerry Falwell. No one could communicate his point so harshly, yet so well. The humanist movement has lost a giant today. Juli Weiner, writing for Vanity Fair, has an excellent piece on Hitchens. Hitchens worked for Vanity Fair since 1992.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades. William Grimes, writing for the New York Times, has a wonderful obituary which discusses his life. Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.