Roasting Seattle bloggers |
Loading ...
This is funny! I laughed when I saw Peter Caputa (comments pictured above) taking breathless swings at our Seattle Blogger group for — how dare us — considering to organize an alternative meeting/event website? “Whiners,” he calls us.
Hmm, life seems to be rough as a Seattle blogger lately: last week our group was called “Belly Achin” by Myles from Meetup.com (who has since apologized three times) in response to my satirical portrayal of our last meetup and now this Caputa fella is giving his three rusted pennies of expert opinion.
Time for a reality check, Mr. Caputa.
Do the math on your own comments. He must realize what working 80 hours a week for 3 years works out to be, doesn’t he?
52 weeks x 3 = 156 weeks x 80 hours = 12,480 hours. Divide that by 24 and you end up with 520 days! That’s well over a year of non-stop coding.
WTF?
If with that amount of time one person couldn’t develop a comparable or better backend and frontend to a site like meetup.com, well, then sorry to be blunt here but that individual needs to find a different profession (or be shown the door if he works for somebody else). This can’t be what Mr. Caputa is suggesting.
Also, hopefully somewhere along the line one with this much “experience” would learn that hotlinking copyrighted material is so definitely not kosher. As the screenshot clearly illustrates above — oops, somebody is trying to do exactly that! Wonder who that might be?
I won’t go all nitpicky on the spelling of ‘update’ because I make spelling errors all the time and I’d be a major hypocrite there but one thing I never, ever do is hotlink copyrighted images without permission. Apparently all those painstaking coding hours “building tools for event planners” doesn’t teach anything about netiquette or copyright infringement. Doh!
Finally, if Mr. Caputa would have actually read the original thread that he was too busy trying to pilfer images from, he would have seen clearly that Myles asked for permission to use the image photographed and captioned by me and my answer — in public view for all to see — was a resounding NO. Wait, though, reading the original material before whipping out the blogging client? Sometimes, that’s just too much to ask. For some people, anyway.
And now before publishing I see that Mr. Caputa has stolen the image and put up on his site without permission. That’s called copyright infringement, dude. Take that down NOW, or I’ll contact Typepad and report your ass. Check out the copyright on the bottom of these pages … these images are not there for the taking. Just a caching problem with Firefox on my end (showed our image on his site), he didn’t actually copy the image over to his server when I viewed the source of the page. This is my error. I also left a message in his comments, which unlike the comment that follows, showed up on his site. However, he still is hotlinking which is wrong.
So who is Mr. Caputa stroking in his commentary but a fellow by the name of Andrew Teman. I don’t know either of these guys, BTW, but there’s millions of people on the web that I don’t know. These guys could both be really smart, really talented people who were just way too busy to look at the details behind this situation before firing off derogatory blog posts.
Reality check #2: Andrew Teman who the other guy points to as posting something logical about the situation. He called our Seattle Blogger group “twits” among making other equally intelligent comments. Oddly enough, his comment form held my comment for moderation and then it appears to me as if he discarded the commentary I left (maybe I surprised him by actually showing up to contest his post, I don’t know), but anyway here is my response to him, verbatim, that apparently was too hot to handle for his blog:
Now, lastly, regarding Meetup: I could say a lot about their organization and website, but I’m going to hold off on those comments. Our group has received several apologies and the person behind the original poorly realized press incident (Myles) has apologized three times and there is no need for further dissertation and dissection on this matter at the present time. I’m sure it would be fun blogging sport to see posts from other bloggers like Mr. Teman and Mr. Caputa rationally evaluate the sequence of events and call our group names. Again, I don’t know either of these guys but if they came out to Seattle I’m sure that they both would be welcome at our group meeting. It’s really a pretty laid-back, fun group.
In closing, I’m going to use this energy and time for a positive purpose and help our group come up with a good alternative. As a group we may not ultimately choose to utilyze this alternative. Heck, maybe the volunteer group will be a failure. I understand it’s not easy developing robust software with a group of volunteers, but just because folks are volunteers doesn’t mean that they aren’t highly skilled volunteers. I’m also not going to puff out my chest and make wild assertions and promises; not my style. Rather, I’ll put that energy into the work at hand. At the same time I’m not going to piss all over our volunteer group either, thank you very much. We may stick with Meetup as a group for many years to come and may look back on this incident and get a good laugh someday.
Oh, and no, we aren’t using Meetup to organize the project. That joke was lame.
One thing I do know for certain: comments like these two above which were at best poorly researched and at worst trollish, and the original comment made by Myles from Meetup that was panned by almost everybody I’ve read to date, are certainly highly motivational.
Sometimes the customers you alienate can become your competition. Today’s lesson in … the Learning Zone.
Related Posts- Showdown at the Seattle Meetup Corral (4/2005)
- Skype Meetup Wrapup
- Seattle Skype meetup April 12
- Meetup to introduce new features
- Blog or beverage: Seattle Blogger Meetup December 2004
- Seattle November 2004 Meetup tonight
Man…where to even begin? Let me just address a a few of the funnier things in this post, because frankly I have neither the time nor the interest in disecting this whole thing…although it is tempting and I may get carried away. Anyone who is reading all three of these posts should be able to extract the idiocy on their own without my needing to break it down.
First, on the hotlinking of images…let it go. An error on PC’s part, but seriously…you are acting like he punched your sister. Of all of the things to focus on here, you are clearly making something out of nothing. Barely worth a single mention, much less three or so scattered paragraphs. Honestly.
Second, if your post on the meetup thing was satire, it was so poorly done that no one outside of your group got the joke. That explanation sounds more like damage control spin coming on the heels of a few people calling you out on your whining. “Oh..it was a joke, come on!”. Either way, lame. You mention that Pete should find a new profession. Take your own advice here, comedy/satire is not your forte.
Third-ly, I personally know Pete and know that he is in the office 7am to 9pm every night and works his ass off. And before there was an office to be had, I was there with him in his living room on 14 hour Saturdays and Sundays working along side him creating some things that were good enough to get him a full time gig doing what he loves and some investment capital to get things moving. Typical nitwit-ery to jump on him for spelling errors, image hotlinking, and math “mistakes” when he was just trying to illustrate a point. It is all crap that blurs any real points that are trying to be made either way.
Lastly, and by far the most comical was your mention that the comment you left was “apparently was too hot to handle for his blog”. Seriously. Get over yourself. I was at work and all comments are saved for moderation due to a deluge of comment spam that has come with a significant traffic increase of late. You could call my mom a whore and it wouldn’t be “too hot for my blog”. Seriously, if you are going for funny, THAT is funny.
Good luck on your meetup or building the next meetup, or whatever you do. I am bored with this already.
Comment by Andrew Teman — April 27, 2005 @ 9:37 pm PST
Mr. Teman - Glad to see you finally got the posts approved — AFTER, I posted this. Imagine the coincidence there?
Gee, this long-winded diatribe sounds a little more coherent than all the names you threw our way without knowing any of us. Let’s see, a picture of a one-year-old making throw-up references … yeah, that’s real serious journalism!
And I could care less how long you’ve known your buddy, Pete. The guy used seriously bad netiquette and you are rambling on about pirating music through your blog. Yeah, you are two guys that I’d really like to get to know better. Not.
This post was put up to show the idiocy, all right. Bullseye there.
Comment by TDavid — April 27, 2005 @ 9:46 pm PST
Oh — and one more thing from one of the so-called Seattlite “coconut heads” here. The fact that your post goes on about how cheap our group is … well, imagine my laughter when I saw that your buddy was so cheap that he had to pilfer our bandwidth to make his point. That’s there for all the dissection anybody needs.
LOL!
Comment by TDavid — April 27, 2005 @ 9:51 pm PST
Easy on the conspiracy theories there Davy. Since you MUST know, I got home from work and then went to the gym. When I got home, I turned on my laptop, moderated the comments and saw the trackback to this link which I then responded to. Does this fit your timeline a bit better? Can I go now officer?
The rest of your comment makes little, or no sense…especially the throwing up reference. I seriously don’t even get it.
I’m sure you are a decent guy despite all of this silliness, but your sense of humor is slight and your recognition of it is completely lacking. Good luck with whatever it is you do, and next time you are in Boston, we can do a meetup. I’ll bring the $2.
Comment by Andrew Teman — April 27, 2005 @ 9:54 pm PST
Quick, somebody call Oliver Stone. LOL Davy .. I like that one. Davy’s locker! The throw-up reference is the caption on the original picture which started everything. If you actually took twenty seconds and read the captions on each of those pictures you’d understand things better.
Boston? Right on. Hopefully a Red Sox fan!
Comment by TDavid — April 27, 2005 @ 9:57 pm PST
Oh it’s time to get over it Mr. Teman. Meetup.com is fine for what it does, though poorly monitized. The little project in the works to replace it for free will surprise you, be patient if you can …
Comment by FranciscoIV — April 28, 2005 @ 9:24 am PST
I’ve unlinked the image from my post. My post was hasty, as most of mine are. I do sometimes hotlink photos because I didn’t think it was a big deal as I always attribute. I’ll stop doing it now, though, that you have educated me on the wrong-ness of it. I’ve also updated my spelling error.
I also wasn’t calling you whiners. I was paraphrasing Andrew. I don’t disagree with him per se. But, that wasn’t the meaning behind my post. And I think that meetup was a bit to quick to be so concilliatory. A company needs to know when to walk away from customers that don’t bring them any value. If you guys don’t find the service right for you because of the fee, and don’t want to pay it and want to complain publicly, than so be it. But, I wouldn’t expect a company to be happy about it. They’ve been providing you a free service for a long time, and they deserve a bit of credit for that. Further, it is human to defend decisions in the manner that they have (ie calling you a name), as you have so perfectly shown in the way that you defend yourself.
As far as their choice of monetization routes. As I’ve written on my weblog, It is not the choice I would have made. But, I respect it tremendously. They have chosen to cater to their customers, instead of serving their customers to advertisers, which is the monetization route that I would have chosen. Their decision shows that they respect “you” and your cause(s)… most of all.
As far as how much time I have spent building software for events, your math is accurate. It is a lot of time. And that is just me. As Andrew pointed out, there are also a lot more people that have contributed. What we are doing is a lot more feature rich than meetup and we are focussed on providing the service for larger events. Thus, the longer time frame. My point, which I didn’t illustrate effectively, was that any project takes time. And for the price, meetup offers a lot of value.
As far as your project goes…Looking forward to seeing this. I am all for people rolling their own code. If you average out the time spent, I am not sure there is a payback. But, not everyone is interested in the payback. So, more power to you. If you are looking for a head start, I’d reccommend you check out CivicSpace’s Drupal plugin for organizing events. Boris Mann of bryght is a good guy to talk to re: that.
Peace (I hope).
-Pete
Comment by Peter Caputa — April 28, 2005 @ 10:56 am PST
Hi Pete - sure, there is peace. Thank you for being civil and removing that hotlinking. Obviously by your comments you are much more reasonable individual than your buddy. I don’t take positively to people who start out conversations and introductions by grade school name calling along with a dose of bandwidth theft from somebody who agrees with that type of person. It speaks volumes about the source that resorts to namecalling to make their point. This is the web and lots of people are listening. Yesterday, thousands on this blog alone. If Teman doesn’t care about this now, maybe someday he can buy a vowell from Vanna. Glad to hear that you seem to give a damn, though.
I said I didn’t want to get into Meetup too much at this time, however, there are a few things as a (relatively brief) member of that site that I’ve noticed that I’m willing to share at the present time.
RE: meetup choosing to cater to their customers and not show them advertising? I disagree. Did you see the Google Adsense they’re using? They’ve also been running premium memberships for some time. It’s their fault, not their customers, that they haven’t shown enough value for more people registered on their site to want to pay for the premium services. What, they give me a hyperlink in my profile if I pay them $5/month? That’s an absurd incentive. One can get dozens of links, ping many different services, etc, by making one blog post, so where is the value there to pay for a freaking profile link? So when a new member joins the group, I have to do the copy/paste to get to their site. Gee, that’s real accomodating, Meetup, thanks. They have 30+ people in their organization and somebody over there has to be responsible for making more members interested in paying for premium services, don’t you think? Hasn’t anybody realized something as simple as a hyperlink?
But instead of maybe firing a few people, what is their solution? Let’s go after the organizers. Go after the people who are doing 99% of the work to manage and evangelize the groups as well as their site. Not only are these organizers unpaid, they actually have to pay now. Meetup has never organized or been to any of our meetings and they weren’t facillitators in my case of anything. They are simply a place with an RSVP script that the group was using.
Teman ranted wrongly about our group being cheap but he wasn’t there and neither were you. Nobody in our group was getting outraged or ‘whining’ about the situation and it’s risky to characterize events that one wasn’t actually present at. Rather, we were reasonably discussing the options and the option we actually chose was to stay with Meetup — for the time being.
Excuse me, but I wasn’t donating to Meetup.com because I was grateful for them doing almost nothing, I was donating to our group organizer, Anita for doing almost everything. It mattered none to me what organization software was used either before joining the group, during the group or in the future.
This is not an issue of being cheap, it’s an issue of value vs. perceived value. The gas to get to the meetup (not to mention parking) cost me more than the $2 USD I chipped in, along with others outside the city, I’m sure
Here’s something else of note: I didn’t find out about our Seattle group through meetup. I found out about the group through a blogger in the group posting on his own blog (Robert Scoble) which I was subscribed to long before even knowing about Meetup. From a member perspective, the only thing I have ever really used in meetup is the RSVP function which is hardly worthy of hundreds of dollars a year per group since it’s used only once a month for all of one minute. I’ve made a couple of posts on the messageboards but one can setup a messageboard in five minutes as there are dozens of open source alternatives there, so again, no real value there.
There are over 300 people in our group, so it is pennies per member per year if everybody chipped in. Money is not the issue when you are talking about pocket change per member; the issue is whether or not Meetup brings the group any significant value (besides the RSVP function) and if something else was used could it better benefit all the group members? I think that’s where the big question mark lies.
Personally, I didn’t care for it when it was free, so why should I be more concerned now that it’s costing the organizer money?
Comment by TDavid — April 28, 2005 @ 12:03 pm PST
Oh yeah and you could always just do a Yahoo group or use evite.com, both aceptable RSVP alternatives…
Oh an Pete, nice post, well done.
Comment by FranciscoIV — April 28, 2005 @ 12:20 pm PST
Thanks for the feedback on Meetup. I haven’t used it that much, so I wasn’t as aware of all that. Your perspective is certainly valid, and I appreciate you sharing.
As far as Andrew, if/once you get to know him, he’s actually a very very reasonable and friendly guy. He’s just a bit passionate and opinionated about things. Read his blog for a little while and you’ll get his style.
Upcoming.org also has some functionality for rsvp’ing. If you guys would like to test drive WhizSpark, I wouldn’t mind you using the yet unlaunched stuff, if you provide feedback for improvement. At some point I would charge. But, if you’d like to use it for 6 months in exchange for feedback, I could set that up. It might give you some thoughts for what you are coding too.
Comment by Peter Caputa — April 28, 2005 @ 2:02 pm PST
[…] bringing this to my attention and the linkage. Normally, I’d kindly request that our full-sized image be removed but that particular one clearly advertises this blog, so I won’t be […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Netcraft toolbar adds Risk Rating — April 29, 2005 @ 8:54 am PST
[…] From time to time the subject of hotlinking arises. Hotlinking is the act of linking to an image from another server or website on your webpage/blog. If this is done with the siteowner’s permission than this is ok but most of the time it’s done without permisison and that’s bandwidth theft. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Another hotlinker caught red handed — September 23, 2005 @ 3:55 am PST