Posted by geeknews at 10:58 AM on February 5, 2010
It was revealed last night that Daniel Brusilovsky an early Teen Podcaster and more recently an editor over on TechCrunch was asking for computer gear in exchange for posts on TechCrunch. Michael Arrington got wind of this, and after an investigation revealed the extortion scheme on TechCrunch, Michael did the right thing in order to maintain the reputation of the site and the other bloggers there. TechCrunch took the extra step of immediately removing all the posts Daniel had written.
I have known Daniel for a while now, initially as a podcaster and was pretty shocked to read the post. I recently saw him at CES representing TechCrunch, how they got an underage person a pass to the event which is supposed to be 18 and above is beyond me. He was also a guest on a podcast we were helping record. I cannot imagine what the host of that podcast is going to do with that material now.
Shortly after the posting on TechCrunch Daniel posted “The Line was Crossed“. Reading the post he talks about letting people down, but I do not see where he takes responsibility for his actions. He pawns of the mistake for his age and while I am sure age played into this, there is no excuse as he knows very well that extortion was wrong. Daniel has been in the New Media and blogging space for a long time he knows the rules.
I am not satisfied with his response and quite honestly it looks like he is more in damage control spin mode. Does his spin and lack of serious apology have to do with the Teens in Tech Conference? At this point his reputation is damaged to such a degree that I am surprised that he is moving forward with the event. If you are going to ride the new media / blogging pony then you have to realize we live life online, and online is were he has to make peace with those that trusted him.
His actions should be a wake up call to all of the other folks out their who are in positions of trust that the internet can giveth and it can taketh away!
I take a little time during the show tonight to say thanks to my family for their support of the show. I also have a lot to say about podcasting models and the realities of sponsorships in the real world. Plus a great deal on technology as you come to expect. The chance to win an iPad continues. Big Thank You to the show sponsors as well.
Credit cards are easily duplicated and merchants may be worried about the validity of the cards being presented to them. The technology being presented by Magensa.net allows merchants to check cards on the fly.
The only thing that consumers may be concerned about is the double swipe of the card. If I see my card being swiped in the reader twice I am going to be asking how come.
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Posted by geeknews at 1:58 AM on November 24, 2009
I had lot’s of fun on this show.. Pile of things to cover. I am headed to Texas next week so will be taking the show on the road. I will be doing a Thanksgiving evening show so if your full of Turkey and still awake, I will try and knock out a show earlier in the evening Hawaii time. Drive safe and have a great holiday! Your trials of our sponsors products and feedback is greatly appreciated.
Posted by geeknews at 2:27 AM on September 12, 2009
Here in Hawaii over the past couple of days a social media war been ongoing. According to a local blog post local Twitter celebrity, Arleen Anderson @alohaarleen with 80,000 followers has had some serious accusations made against her. A war is being waged against her from a lot of well known locals on multiple fronts, and she is fighting back instead of responding to the accusations.
Looking at this from a social media perspective the so called social media expert is not following the social media playbook. She should be setting the record straight because silence just fuels the fire. There have been multiple demands for her to explain the accusations, yet she has not done so which raises more suspicion in my mind.
To add to the drama, court documents from other states that if indeed are linked to her have also been revealed within the referenced blog post. If the documents are genuine then I predict her business and social relationships she has here in Hawaii will never recover.
Court documents, purportedly show she has had to make restitution on at least 2 court cases, and was lucky not to go to jail for 5 years for a conviction for stealing from Special Olympics. The accusations in Hawaii revolve around money as well.
It is obvious that some of the Twitter users that have 80,000 followers have used guerilla strategies by repeatedly following and unfollowing those that do not follow back to build huge follow list. I am not sure how she got 80,000 followers, rumor was she hired someone local to help her build the following. What I think is weird is that her Twitter posts appears to be a lot of back slapping going on. There is hardly any information of value in those tweets, each to his own but the content stream is pretty boring.
Before this story broke few days ago, I had heard some second hand information a month or more ago that concerned me enough to put me on guard.
Going back to December of 2008 I had @alohaarleen, in my studio for a segment on my 2nd annual 24hr Podcast. When youre doing a 24 hr show the content runs together but some of the advice she gave was not what I would expect from someone with 80,000 followers. Obviously there will not be an invite for the 2009 24hr podcast.
Here is where the rubber meets the road, when you endorse someone on Twitter, Linked In or any other social media site, you need to know you could be supporting someone with a questionable background. Some people take their presence on Twitter as a fun social activity, but I take my presence on Twitter, as serious, as my blog, and my business! This event has made me realize that while followfriday is a fun. I will be very careful in the future who I endorse and expose to my listeners of my podcast.
While it is impossible to know the history of people you follow, you can act when you are made aware of questionable character. I waited two days for an official statement, non has been forthcoming. From actions I see in her Twitter stream she has done her best to silence any critic by using @spam and having her followers help silence those speaking out against her.
So the question I ask all of you. Does trust play a major factor in whom you follow on Twitter, and do you follow people that you no longer trust?
New Intro today we have a winner! Had a nice meetup on Wednesday, flew home to Hawaii today after some great meeting in Silicon Valley lots of exciting things coming down the road. Lot’s of tech as usual in todays show, very busy weekend ahead for the family and I share some cool news at the end of the show about the kids.
Texas is the state with the most listeners to the Geek News Central Podcast congrats to our Visa Gift Card Winner! New promotion starting next show, tune in to win. I talk a little about the state of podcasting and give you all a little information about a new website that we will be building full details shortly. We will need the communities help! Next show will be live from Silicon Valley, looking for a good meetup location for dinner suggestions?
Tonight I was working on a website I have not touched in years. I decided to install Wordpress on it and went looking for a new theme. Being the Theme directory at WordPress is useless in actually finding a topical theme I went to Search Google for WordPress Themes to see what other sites are out there.
I found a website with really nice themes that were free. Normally I have paid for each of my themes but I found a great one on the website. I downloaded it, and installed it in taking a close look at the page at the very bottom of the page I was shocked to see three linked url’s led to sites that I would never link to ever!. Here is what it looked like at the bottom of the browser window, believe me you do not want this on your website.
Loading the theme editor and looking at the code in the Footer I found that the author had encrypted php at the bottom of the page. Needless to say alarm bells went off big time and I deleted the theme from the site.
Do not and I repeat do not download WordPress themes from wordpressthemesbase.com they are running a link farm scam in all of the themes I downloaded that will cause you a lot of harm when Google indexes your page.
You may get a free Theme but you will be pretty disappointed when your page rank goes to zero!
This will be like the US Tour de Todd as I will be all over the place over the next week. No meetups as I will have little time between each stop. I will have another early live show with hopefully no issues on Monday around 9pm Eastern
Posted by geeknews at 2:51 AM on November 16, 2007
This is the last show produced here on Historic Ford Island in Honolulu next two shows will be done by guest hosts and I will be back on the show on the 27th of Nov from our new recording location overlooking Oahu in Upper Makakilo
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Posted by geeknews at 11:24 AM on January 19, 2007
Have you ever been surfing the net and hit a website that tries to launch a swarm of pop up ads. I am sure many of you have had this happen especially when using Internet Explorer 6.0 without any utilities to stop such action. Imagine being a teacher and having that happen during a class where students are exposed to pornographic images.
Well this happened to a teacher named Julie Amero in 2004, she was fired almost immediately and then prosecuted and tried shortly after that on a variety of charges stemming from the pop up swarm.
We all know that schools rarely have the latest technology and I doubt that they had software installed to prevent the actions that occurred. But what is a travesty is how it all turned out you are going to just shake your head. www.alternet.org
Everytime I hear about investigations into Stock Options and executive perks I usually ignore the story. But you would think a company as big as Apple with smart investment people and a bevy of lawyers would know better than to allegedly falsify documents.
This appears to be another case of people being greedy, with executives wanting to maximise the amount of money in their pockets. It’s funny how money will make the smartest people do really dumb things.
If the Federal Government goes after Apple in a big way this will be another case of short term gains that will result in long term pain. The question is has anyone done anything bad enough to warrant time in a federal pen?
I do find it curious that Steve Jobs has hired his own Lawyer. He must be worried about something but hey don’t rich people like Jobs always have a lawyer hanging around. [Law.com]
As I have been watching the Microsoft Syndication (RSS) Patent dispute over the past couple of days the single word that comes to my mind is “Arrogance” and lets look at the definition of the word Arrogance.
Arrogance – Overbearing Pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors
Microsoft’s actions are such that they have made it very evident that they do not respect those that should rightfully be labeled as inventors of RSS and they outrightly slap those that developed RSS in the face.
The overall debate in the community has been quite negative with a few voices asking for reasoning. In my opinion big corporations are always looking to use their muscle and lay claim to something they have no right to lay claim to. When Microsoft came to Gnomedex in 2005 and announced how they were going to have RSS/XML integrated into there forthcoming applications I think we were all pretty much pleased.
But the current situation with this patent application has a lot of people pissed off and highly concerned. There are a lot of prior art issues and I think Microsoft will have an up hill battle on its hands to get this approved, but they have a army of patent lawyers, and I am sure that the patent office treats Microsoft patent applications a lot more seriously than the average persons application.
I am hoping that Microsoft will make an official statement on the issue but I am not holding my breath. If the succeed in getting this patent approved it will be a great tragedy and I am sure the source of some serious litigation.
watch the fed banking lock down.
