Thank You For Supporting Our Net Neutrality Reporting

from the you-are-amazing dept

Just a couple hours left to
support our net neutrality coverage »

Hey everyone, I just wanted to post a massive thank you to each and every one of you who helped us reach our goal in our crowdfunding campaign for our net neutrality reporting. Having spoken to people who have run crowdfunding campaigns in the past, they talk about how nerve-wracking it is, and that's absolutely true. Something you don't quite understand until you actually go and do it. We had no idea if people would be willing or able to contribute, but so many of you did -- and many others who couldn't afford to still helped out by sharing and spreading the word. That's amazing to me. If you haven't read former Congressional staffer Jen Hoelzer's explanation for how we can make a difference, please do so, because it really explains everything.

There are just a couple hours left in the campaign, and wherever we end up, this was an amazing and enlightening experience that has left me awed by the passion and support that many of you have shown over this issue and over the work that we do. Here at Techdirt, this process has really just begun. The net neutrality fight is heating up very rapidly, and we need to take the success of this campaign and turn it into something. Thank you for believing in us.

Just a couple hours left to
support our net neutrality coverage »

Filed Under: crowdfunding, net neutrality, techdirt

As Deadline Approaches, Imgur Pledges Matching Funds To Support Techdirt's Net Neutrality Campaign

from the helping-out dept

Final days to support our crowdfunding campaign »

Last week we gave a special thanks to Twitch and Namecheap for providing matching funds for our big crowdfunding campaign, and today we want to welcome (and thank!) the greatest photo site on the internet, Imgur, for joining the campaign as well. As the company's CEO, Alan Schaaf said:

Imgur would not have been possible without the tidal wave of innovation that net neutrality makes possible. We're stoked to support Techdirt in paving the way for a genuine, important public dialogue about these issues.

It's been great to see these three companies step up to support the campaign, but it's been you guys, our community, that has gotten us so far already. We're still a bit short of the target -- and I know that money is tight for many and that there are lots of competing offerings where you can put your money (though, if you donate money to the Potato Salad Kickstarter thing and not to us, I don't think we can be friends... because, really?), but any help that folks can give to either get us over the target or to share with others, recognizing how important this issue is, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again to all of you who have already supported it or shared it with others. With a little more help we'll be able to meet our goal, and focus that much more of our time and energy on bringing you the best reporting on the fight to keep the internet free and open. As noted earlier, our plan is to bring in additional voices on this issue, to interview key players, to dig deep into some of the more unexplored stories around this fight and much much more. But it's only possible with your help, and the deadline is rapidly approaching.

Please support our net neutrality reporting today »

Filed Under: crowdfunding, net neutrality, techdirt
Companies: floor64, imgur, techdirt

Home Stretch For Supporting Our Net Neutrality Reporting

from the running-out-the-clock dept

Please support our net neutrality reporting today »
We're in the final days of our big crowd funding campaign for our net neutrality reporting. We're about 65% of the way there as I type this, which is amazing... but not yet enough to get us over the hurdle to actually get the funding -- or the matching funds from our matching donors, Namecheap and Twitch (and we may have another one to announce soon...).

I know that we live in an age where everyone's asking for money, and you have an infinite number of places where you can spend that money. Hell, every week, in this very spot, we put up three or four interesting and compelling crowdfunding campaigns that I know many of you end up supporting. But, hopefully you also recognize just how important all of this net neutrality business really is to the future of the internet you love. And you also realize how complex this topic is -- partly on purpose by the very broadband providers and bureaucrats who are trying to confuse everyone to get what they want. To really fight back, we need to be out there digging for the truth, looking at what people are saying and what it really means -- so that we can report back to you and everyone else, so that we're informed and can really take part in this process.

And we can't do that without your help.

As I mentioned in the past, our reporting on SOPA was toxic to many advertisers. On the advertising side of things, the blog went from profitable to unprofitable as a result of the SOPA fight -- even as our traffic doubled. Our revenue from advertising was cut by more than 50%. And the net neutrality fight is the same way for many as well. I'm not complaining about it, because we knew that was a risk of standing up for what we believe in, and we wouldn't change a thing. But, because of that I need to ask directly for your help today. If we can reach this goal, it will allow us to do a variety of things, including bringing in some additional writers and guests, spending more time digging through various FCC filings and other paperwork for important details (rather than spending time trying to find advertisers). It will hopefully give us the time to conduct interviews with a variety of key players in the fight, including bringing them to the blog to answer you r questions. By digging in, we can bring you details about how lobbyists are funneling money to minority groups to get them to speak out against their own best interests. We can discuss how the broadband players claim to be so against Title II, but beg to be classified under Title II when it gives them tax breaks and subsidies.

We have a lot more of those kinds of reports we've wanted to do. In the last week, I, personally, have dug out over a dozen very questionable filings to the FCC from individuals parroting telco talking points in a curious way. And I've reached out to a few of those writers to find out who they are and why they're saying what they're saying. There's an interesting story there, but I simply haven't had the time to work on it. If we can reach our goal, it'll free us up to do a lot more, and to dig a lot deeper. But we need your help.

In the sixteen years of doing Techdirt, we've offered you a few ways that you can support us, but we've never made a strong push or given a deadline. This time, I'm asking you to support our campaign, to tell your friends and family, and to share with them just how important true independent reporting on the net neutrality fight is going to be to the future of the internet.

Or, you know, you can give your money to the dude doing a potato salad Kickstarter campaign. But, in the future, which one do you think is going to be more important?

Please support our net neutrality reporting today »

Filed Under: awesome stuff, crowdfunding, net neutrality, techdirt
Companies: techdirt

Techdirt Receives Its First 'Right To Be Forgotten' Request

from the which-we-will-not-follow dept

Following the ridiculous right to be forgotten ruling in the EU Court of Justice last month, we knew that it would open the floodgates to crazy requests from people trying to take down embarrassing things about them online. Immediately after the ruling, politicians and pedophiles alike rushed to ask Google to take down links to content about them. Once Google set up a form for handling such requests, tens of thousands of requests poured in.

But, of course, it was only a matter of time until people started trying to stretch the ruling further and further impacting other sites -- including ours. We've already noted how former NSA top lawyer Stewart Baker has asked Google to "forget" all Techdirt posts about him, though he was doing it to highlight the absurdity of the "right to be forgotten" concept (though, I imagine he wouldn't mind if all such posts disappeared).

However, over the weekend, we received our first request to remove comments from Techdirt, with the request referencing Europe's new ruling on the right to be forgotten. Over the years, we've received many, many legal threats in attempts to get us to remove comments, but (to date!) no actual lawsuits, because nearly all the threats are bogus (usually they ignore the protections Section 230 of the CDA provide to Techdirt, but they also tend to have extreme -- and extremely incorrect -- definitions of what kind of content is "illegal"). This particular situation appears to be a bit more complicated, but we're still not removing the comments.

The request references three comments on this story from 2011, which was about a (very bad) ruling by a California state appeals court, that found two advertising firms could be held liable for spamming actions done by their affiliates (and sub-affiliates). We found this problematic for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it totally ignored Section 230, and put the blame on one party for actions done by another. In the comments, someone named "Bill Silverstein" popped up to defend the ruling. In what appears to be something of an aside, he mentions in passing that he, himself, is engaged in some sort of similar litigation against two individuals, David Szpak and Emmanuel Gurtler. To be honest, the details of Silverstein's lawsuit are not at all clear from the comment, but he clearly thinks that this ruling helps his case.

I responded to his comment suggesting that the ruling was still problematic and that the focus should be on going after the people actually responsible for the spamming. Silverstein then responded, disagreeing with me and ranting about spammers -- again mentioning Szpak and Gurtler.

Over the weekend, we received an email from Emmanuel Gurtler demanding that all three comments be deleted, based on what we believe is his own misreading of both the claimed settlement between Gurtler and Silverstein and the new right to be forgotten ruling. Here is the main part of the email we received (leaving all typos in place):

I am contacting you in regards to the comments in the above URL by Bill Silverstein (#6, #31) and Mike Masnick's quote (#26). The comments refer to a lawsuit which has been settled with Mr Silverstein. Part of the settlement offer, the Platiniff (Bill Silverstein) is supposed to remove all information about the lawsuit. Having the fault infromation and false claims listed on your site is causing great deal of reputational probl

"8. Silverstein to Remove Materials from Websites and Refrain from Future Publication. Within ten (10) calendar days of the confirmation that all payments have been completed, Silverstein shall remove from the Websites and all other media under his control and/or ownership, any reference to the Lawsuit, the Dev8 Defendants and/or Affiliated Entities, including but not limited to any personally identifying information regarding the Dev8 Defendants and/or Affiliated Entities. As of the Effective Date, Silverstein agrees not to publish or cause to be published, in any form of media heretofore known and/or subsequently invented, devised, or discovered any reference to the Lawsuit, the Dev8 Defendants and/or Affiliated Entities, including but not limited to any personally identifying information regarding the Dev8 Defendants and/or Affiliated Entities. Silverstein acknowledges that should he violate this Section it shall constitute a material breach of this Agreement. He further acknowledges and agrees that it will be difficult to determine the resulting damages to the Dev8 Defendants and/or Affiliated Entities, and, in addition to any other remedies the Dev8 Defendants and/or Affiliated Entities may have, they shall be entitled to temporary injunctive relief without being required to post a bond and to permanent injunctive relief without the necessity of proving actual damage. The Dev8 Defendants’ and/or Affiliated Entities’ failure to seek any or all remedies with respect to any given breach of this Section does not restrict them from seeking any remedies with respect to any other breach, and shall not constitute a waiver of rights."

Furthermore, as a resident of the European Union and per the above Settlement order, I am asking in reference to "European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46EC)" aka Right to be Forgotten, to have the aforementioned comments and/or quoted replies removed from your site.

First off, we have no way of confirming if the settlement happened or if that's in the settlement if it did. He provides no further information, case name, or anything. As far as I can tell, there is this lawsuit, which the defendants removed from California state courts to the federal court, but which was quickly sent back to the state courts, where it's much trickier to track down the records. And, either way, it shouldn't matter.

Second, and more importantly, even if everything about the settlement is entirely accurate, it pretty clearly says that Silverstein needs to remove statements about the case "from the websites and all other media under his control and/or ownership." Last I checked (and, hey, I just checked), Silverstein has no "control and/or ownership" of Techdirt. So that settlement term is entirely meaningless to use. Chances are it was directed more at pages like this one, which Silverstein created, tracking the docket of his own cases. Separately, any settlement between Silverstein and Gurtler is between those two parties. Techdirt and myself were clearly not parties to the lawsuit and are clearly not bound by any settlement terms in the lawsuit. So, uh, no, we have no reason to remove.

Third, moving on to the "right to be forgotten" claim. The recent ruling is quite clear that it applies to "the operator of a search engine" and even distinguishes search engine results from information on web pages that those search engines link to, pointing out that even if the original publication may be legal, it's the search engine (not necessarily the site) that would need to remove the links. Thus, there's nothing in the latest ruling that directly applies to us anyway. Furthermore, the EU directive in question is about "data controllers" for which Techdirt almost certainly does not qualify. Data controllers are organizations that collect data on people and then store it. Here, Silverstein just posted a couple of comments. Quite different. The latest ruling and the directive have nothing to do with us.

Fourth, as an American company based in the US, incorporated and headquartered in California, and with all of our servers within the US, we are not subject to European laws on this issue. This is just an attempt by someone in the EU to try to censor statements made in the US.

Either way, the entire situation is bizarre and silly -- but highlights the kinds of things that plenty of companies are probably now forced to deal with thanks to the ridiculous EU Court of Justice ruling. What's worse is that many smaller websites and companies that probably don't follow or understand these issues carefully are probably scared into taking down content based on similar threats. And, frankly, sending the email makes almost no sense at all for Emmanuel Gurtler. This was on a story from more than three years ago, getting basically no traffic at all. The only comments that reference his name are from Silverstein, and, in our opinion, don't necessarily reflect well on Silverstein, because myself and others argue that his interpretation of the law is suspect and troubling. It's difficult to see how any of that reflects poorly on Gurtler or hurts his reputation.

However, sending a bogus threat in an attempt to silence other people from mentioning his name? That doesn't seem to reflect particularly well on Gurtler.

Filed Under: bill silverstein, comments, david szpak, emmanuel gurtler, europe, free speech, right to be forgotten, spam, techdirt
Companies: floor64, techdirt

Techdirt 2013: The Numbers.

from the off-to-the-races dept

For the past few years, in early January, we've done a post summing up some of "the numbers" from the previous year. If you're interested, here are the posts for 2010, 2011 and 2012. To be honest, coming into 2013, I actually expected the number of visitors to drop from 2012. 2012 was abnormally high because of the influx of traffic we received due to being one of the key media sources concerning the fight against SOPA, which drove a tremendous amount of traffic early in the year. Therefore, I was kind of shocked to look at the actual numbers and saw that we continued to grow (slightly) in traffic in 2013 as compared to the previous year. In 2012 it was 24.2 million visits and in 2013 it was 24.5 million. While that may seem small, if we removed the SOPA specific bump from 2012, it actually shows a pretty good increase. In terms of the all important "unique visitors," we went from 14.2 million up to 14.7 million in 2013. 14.7 million unique visitors? Wow!

We had 3,860 posts in 2013, up just slightly from 3,758 from the year before. Comments actually declined a bit. In 2012 there were over 200,000 comments, but last year there were 163,187. It's interesting to see commenting go down a bit, though I'm not sure it means a whole lot. As we note every year, there's very little correlation between comments and traffic. And, we've certainly seen parts of the discussion move elsewhere, such as to Twitter and Facebook, which could explain the slight decline in commenting. Also, quantity of comments has little to do with quality, and we had plenty of excellent comments in 2013.

We had visitors from 238 different countries in 2013, meaning just about everywhere. For the last few years, we've joked each year that it appeared we had received no traffic at all from North Korea, but this year I'll note -- amazingly -- that it appears we received two whole visits from North Korea. For each of the past couple of years we've also noted a single visitor claiming to be from Christmas Island -- and that holds true yet again this year. From a quick glance at the map, the only countries I can see (meaning maybe not some tiny island nations) where we received no traffic at all are Chad and Western Sahara. Next year! In 2012 we'd mentioned no visitors from Turkmenistan, and yet in 2013, we got a whopping 69 visitors from Turkmenistan. We're unstoppable!

The top countries provide no surprises. The US represented 68% of visits, and once again Canada, followed very closely by the UK, were in the next two positions. The rest of the top 10 was identical: Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, India, France and New Zealand. In Asia, traffic from China continues to be limited (we've heard multiple reports of being blocked at times there), so it's no surprise that in Asia, not only are India and Japan ahead of China, but so is Singapore, the Philippines and South Korea. Even Malaysia is creeping up on China. In South America, Brazil continues to send the most traffic, while South Africa continues to lead the way in Africa.

As in the past, visitors from Gibraltar stuck around the longest (by far...) but we've chalked that one up to PaulT claiming to leave us open all the time. Oddly, folks in the Caribbean seem to stick around for quite some time as well, as Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas and Aruba make up slots 2, 3 and 4 on the chart of time spent on the site. Brunei is in 5th place. I'm going to guess we have a "small sample size" issue here, as the statistician kids call it. If we go to the continent level, folks in Africa and Oceania spend more time on the site than Europe and the Americas, but we're talking very small differences in time at this point.

Looking at cities, New York and London remain our top two cities sending traffic. Los Angeles, however, makes the somewhat surprising leap from 6th place in 2012 up to 3rd place in 2013. I'm going to try not to read too much into that. Next up are Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Seattle, Sydney, Houston and Washington DC. Once again, it's difficult to read too much into city data, since the populations of cities are so different and normalizing it per capita is probably a hell of a lot more trouble than it's worth.

Once again, lots of our traffic comes from frequent visitors. 9% of our traffic (a slight bump from last year's 8%) comes from people visiting more than 200 times. Thank you to the loyal daily visitors! You guys rock.

Over the last few years, we've noted that visitors using Chrome as their browser continued to clime rapidly up the charts. It's still up there, but holding steady in first place with 37% of our page views. Firefox stays in second with 22% and Safari (which last year jumped over IE) remains in 3rd place with 12%. Amazingly, there are still IE users out there, representing just under 10% of visitors. Remember back when the government decided Microsoft had an unfair advantage in monopolizing the browser market? Fun times. Windows still dominates on the OS front, representing 53% of traffic. Macs are 13%. Linux has a paltry 4%.

Mobile traffic continues to grow. It was 29% of our traffic in 2013 (22% from phones and 7% tablets). Last year we noted that Android had surpassed iOS for the first time, but this year iOS went way back over the top, representing 16% of all visits and Android getting 12%. There were a few visits from Windows phones and a tiny, almost inconsequential amount from Blackberry devices as well. Considering everything else in this paragraph, it won't surprise anyone to find out that the iPhone and the iPad were the top two devices to access the site, by far. The top Android phone was the Google Nexus 7 with the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Galaxy Nexus very close behind. I'd say all three were about equal in terms of visits.

As we've noted in the past, the days of the site relying on "search" for traffic seem long past. Direct visits and social sites drove much more traffic than search. Referrals from other non-search, non-social sites were also important (though less than search). Reddit continued to drive the most traffic of any site, followed by Google, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Yahoo, Fark and then HackerNews. We got just a bit of traffic from Google+, Techmeme and Netvibes. The biggest blog traffic came from BoingBoing, Popehat, Instapundit, Slashdot and BroadbandReports (in that order).

Last year, we noted that while most of our search traffic came on variations of "techdirt", there were a few other important keywords as well, including "sopa," "acta," and "cispa." This year, beyond a bunch of variations on "techdirt" there was also... "prenda law" "prenda" "carmen ortiz" (if you don't remember, she was the federal prosecutor behind the Aaron Swartz prosecution), "verizon customer service" and "kleargear." Some oddities: "george rr martin copyright maximalist" drove over 1,000 visits. How many people are actually doing that search? And, honestly, when I do it, no Techdirt post shows up in the first few pages. Weird. Also we had nearly 1,000 almost certainly disappointed visitors who searched for "hookers on facebook."

Okay, on to some more specifics of what got lots of traffic. Here's the top 10 list. And, yes, the first one isn't much of a surprise (take a guess where that traffic came from). Not too surprising, but good to know (from our standpoint) is that many of the stories that got the most traffic were ones that we "broke," rather than commenting on someone else's articles. We tend to focus on doing more analysis than reporting, but perhaps we should increase our reporting efforts...

Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2013:

1. Office Depot Sends World's Worst DMCA Notice To Reddit
2. Telco Astroturfing Tries To Bring Down Reviews Of Susan Crawford's Book
3. Obama Promise To 'Protect Whistleblowers' Just Disappeared From Change.gov
4. Oh Look, Rep. Mike Rogers Wife Stands To Benefit Greatly From CISPA Passing...
5. Redditor Points Out The Flaws In SimCity's Online-Only DRM, Gets Banned By EA For His Troubles
6. If Your Cable Company Were Honest, This Is What Its Commercial Would Look Like
7. Feds Threaten To Arrest Lavabit Founder For Shutting Down His Service
8. More NSA Spying Fallout: Groklaw Shutting Down
9. Online Retailer Says If You Give It A Negative Review It Can Fine You $3,500
10. NSA Whistleblower Ed Snowden: From My Desk I Could Wiretap Anyone: You, A Federal Judge Or The President Of The US

Next up, we have our list of the most commented on stories in 2013. We point this out every year, but number of comments rarely correlates well to traffic. And, in fact, none of our top 10 most commented posts were in the top 10 in traffic. In fact, looking through the top 20 stories for comments, only one appears in the top traffic getters (the story about "protecting whistleblowers" disappearing from change.gov), and that was 14th in the comments list.

2013's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume

1. Unfortunate: ACLU On The Wrong Side Of A Free Speech Case
2. Former RIAA VP Named 2nd In Command Of Copyright Office
3. Comcast: We Won't Terminate Your Account Under Six Strikes; We'll Just Block Every Single Website
4. Copyright Is Becoming Guilt By Accusation
5. Man Who Raped 14-Year-Old Sentenced To 30 Days In Jail Because Girl Looked Kinda Old And The Internet Is Mean
6. A Week Later: Reflecting On Aaron Swartz
7. Details Of Various Six Strikes Plans Revealed; May Create Serious Problems For Free WiFi
8. Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
9. 'Bug' Allows Same-Sex Marriage In Nintendo Game, Nintendo Releases Patch To 'Fix' It
10. Copyright Lobby: The Public Has 'No Place In Policy Discussions'

And now on to the commenters. The top two spots for most prolific registered commenters are actually exactly the same as last year, so John Fenderson and Ninja each retained their gold and silver rankings. There are some other familiar names as well, and a few newer names, but if you're a frequent reader of the comments, I'd imagine you'll recognize all of these. There are, of course, others who comment without registering, and some of you might fit into this list as well, but we have no real way of tracking it without registration. For what it's worth, this is the first year I fell off of the top 10 list. I came in at number 11, though, with 986 comments.

2013 Top Commenters, by comment volume

1. John Fenderson: 3604 comments
2. Ninja: 3048 comments
3. That One Guy: 2304 comments
4. Rikuo: 2008 comments
5. PaulT: 1849 comments
6. Wally: 1495 comments
7. nasch: 1337 comments
8. That Anonymous Coward: 1296 comments
9. Zakida Paul: 1266 comments
10. silverscarcat: 1183 comments

Last year, we also noted how frequently people got the "insightful" lightbulb or the "funny" LOL icon, as we think it's important to not just highlight quantity, but quality. We also looked at how frequently someone's comments hit those thresholds. That is, for every comment you made, how often did it get voted to "insightful" or "funny." Last year we noted that Karl just clobbered pretty much everyone with having 22.1% of his comments judged insightful. No one else came close. Amazingly, he beat that this year by nearly doubling his rate of insightfulness, with an absolutely astounding 40.4% of his comments being voted insightful. We may have to dig around somewhere to come up with some sort of an award for that.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:

1. Karl: 249 comments (40.4%)
2. John Fenderson: 191 comments (5.3%)
3. Ninja: 182 comments (6.0%)
4. That One Guy: 179 comments (7.8%)
5. Rikuo: 158 comments (7.9%)
6. PaulT: 139 comments (6.4%)
7. silverscarcat: 119 comments (10.1%)
8. Zakida Paul: 91 comments (7.2%)
9. Gwiz: 86 comments (9.4%)
10. Mike Masnick: 73 comments (7.4%)

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon:

1. Ninja: 54 comments (1.8%)
2. DannyB: 42 comments (4.8%)
3. That One Guy: 32 comments (1.4%)
4. Capitalist Lion Tamer: 31 comments (18.6%)
5. silverscarcat: 31 comments (2.6%)
6. ChurchHatesTucker: 30 comments (11.8%)
7. Rikuo: 30 comments (1.5%)
8. That Anonymous Coward: 29 comments (2.2%)
9. Violynne: 24 comments (8.9%)
10. Dark Helmet: 24 comments (6.0%)

For the past two years, the only person who made both of those lists was Leigh, whom we then hired -- and this year he made neither list! Poor Leigh. We keep him plenty busy with lots of stuff, though, much of which you'll hopefully be seeing soon. And it's nice to see a bunch of commenters make both of these lists this year. Nice work, everyone.

Once again, thanks for a fantastic 2013 and we're looking forward to an exciting 2014. We've got a few new tricks planned, so stay tuned...

Filed Under: 2013, numbers, stats, techdirt

Last Week To Order The Techdirt Holiday Bundle In Time For Christmas!

from the countdown dept

Our Holiday Bundle of gear in the Insider Shop has been a hit this season—and if you want to give one as a Christmas gift, time is running out. This Friday, December 14th, is the final deadline for Christmas shipping in the US, and to be safe (given the unpredictability of holiday mail) we recommend ordering sooner rather than later.

For only $99 (over $50 off the regular price), the Holiday Bundle includes:

• A Techdirt zip hoodie
• A Techdirt coffee mug
• Your choice of the DMCA Tee, the Seized Tee or the Logo Tee
• Access to the Insider Chat for one year
• Access to the Techdirt Crystal Ball for one year
• 5 First Word/Last Word credits per month for one year
• An Insider Badge on your profile and comments
• A group Google Hangout with Mike Masnick

Plus, don't forget about our ongoing t-shirt sale! When you buy three or more t-shirts in any styles and sizes, you get them all for 15% off. The discount is automatically applied in your cart.

Happy holidays, and a big thanks to everyone for supporting Techdirt through our Insider Shop! By the way, if you want to give us a present this year, you can always drop something in our tip jar.

Filed Under: holiday bundle, sales, techdirt, techdirt insider shop

Come Celebrate 15 Years Of Techdirt (And 50,000 Posts)!

from the here's-to-15-more-(at-least) dept

We recently wrote about Techdirt turning 15. A few weeks later, without anyone (including us) noticing, we also published our 50,000th post. Every day I'm in awe of the community here and the conversations and discussions that we've had. In the back of my head, it still feels like the early days, when I'd publish something and know that absolutely no one would read it -- even though that doesn't appear to be the case any more. I'm thrilled that I get to "virtually" spend time with all of you every day, and to celebrate, we thought it would be great to see some of you in person too! We're having a 15th Anniversary Meetup/Happy Hour in San Francisco next Wednesday, October 10th from 6pm to 8pm. The event is being hosted by our good friends at Hattery Labs and should be a lot of fun. It's free, but we have limited space, so please sign up to get on the guest list before we run out of space... We look forward to seeing many of you next week!

Filed Under: happy hour, meetup, techdirt

Help Us Expand The Insider Shop By Voting On Ideas For New Techdirt Gear

from the MOAR-EAGLES! dept

We want to keep our Insider Shop stocked with an always-expanding selection of fresh Techdirt gear, so we've set up a Step2 thread for you to vote on product ideas and submit your own.

Our Seized Tee and DMCA Tee have both been very popular, so we're definitely looking for your input on new t-shirt ideas—but we're also interested in whatever else you dream up! For now, we want to dedicate this thread to physical Techdirt gear—we'll be launching another thread in the future to discuss the new blog features and subscription packages. There are a few ideas already there, both for new products and for variations on our existing lineup. Head on over and help us decide what we should offer next.

Remember, you need an account to vote and comment on Step2, but your Techdirt account works there too.

Filed Under: gear, techdirt

Fifteen Years Ago Today, Techdirt Was Born

from the feeling-old dept

We don't tend to be too sentimental about these things, but a few weeks back, I realized that we were rapidly approaching the 15th anniversary of the start of Techdirt in its earliest form. On August 23rd, 1997, I sent out the very first "Up To Date" email newsletter, which was roughly modeled on Danny O'Brien's much more clever and much more knowledgeable (and sadly missed) Need to Know newsletter (for what it's worth, Danny discovered my mimicry a few months later, and has always been quite kind about it). The very first newsletter was sent to -- I believe -- three people, and was really an alpha test of the concept. It's obviously quite different from what Techdirt became, but you can also see some inklings. Some of the things in the newsletter were silly (underestimating HTTP as a protocol? Oops!). Some were pretty good predictions (CNET's SNAP portal being a joke, Netscape trying to charge for its browser being a recipe for failure).

Either way, today marks 15 years of doing this in one form or another. One week after this initial test, the newsletter went out to about 100 people -- mostly fellow students at Cornell's business school. A month later we were up to about 1,000 subscribers, and it built from there. By February of the next year the website finally came into existence (and with it, the Techdirt name, which beat out my second choice "bluedot" because a friend told me that sounded boring, while Techdirt sounded edgy). A year after that, the site itself morphed into a blog -- though the word "blog" still didn't exist -- using Slashcode 0.3 (which was a complete mess). And within a few years it was a part of my full time job.

Anyway, I wanted to share the moment, as I figured some of you might get a kick out of seeing that original offering. We're hoping to put together some sort of gathering in the fall to celebrate this anniversary (too much stuff going on to have it coincide with the actual date) and we'll share more info on that as we finalize those plans. Either way, none of the last 15 years happens without you folks being dedicated readers, commenters, submitters, link spreaders, etc. From starting out with a total audience of 3 people to the millions who now read our content every month, it's been quite a ride so far, and I hope to continue going strong for at least another fifteen years.

Filed Under: anniversary, techdirt

First Word, Last Word And Letting Our Biggest Fans Help Shape The Conversation In Our Comments

from the hop-to-it dept

With the launch of our new Techdirt Insider Shop, one of the new features we've enabled on the site is something we're calling First Word/Last Word, which you may have noticed appearing on the blog. The feature allows Techdirt Insiders with credits to help highlight key comments as either "The First Word" (on top of all the other comments) or "The Last Word" (beneath all of the comments, even if other comments are added after). You can designate one of your own comments, or feel free to designate a truly awesome comment from someone else.

Because this is such a new feature, I wanted to discuss a little of the thinking behind it. Despite blogging for well over a decade, I'm still amazed by how much controversy there is over blog comments. Some people insist that they're completely useless. Others spend many hours of their day engaging in discussion and debate in the comments. There are various attempts to try to "improve the quality" of comments out there, including banning anonymous comments, heavily moderating comments or doing things like having editors highlight the best comments. Others have integrated third-party platforms to manage comments, such as Facebook or Disqus. Gawker keeps pushing the bleeding edge with a series of commenting experiments that try to increase the importance of comments while decreasing the number of comments that actually get viewed.

Over the years, we've taken a very open approach to comments. We don't require a login to comment (though there are benefits to having one). We don't require people to identify themselves at all. And despite the default assumption some have that anonymous comments are bad, we quite regularly find that comments from anonymous users are some of our most insightful and funniest comments. To that end, we've always focused on trying to do more to highlight and encourage good behavior -- such as highlighting the comments voted most insightful and funniest, both with badges on the comments and in our weekly summaries.

With the First Word/Last Word feature, we're trying to take all of that a step further. We've seen how a single trollish commenter can sometimes (not always) derail an interesting conversation by getting in early and saying something completely brain dead, then watching (probably with laughter) as the thread disintegrates. Our expanded Crystal Ball may take care of that in some cases by giving insiders more early access to kick off the comments. But, not everyone's going to be able to rush in and be first. With "First Word/Last Word," Insiders with credits can help highlight one or two of the absolutely key comments on a story and put them in places of prominence to help define the overall conversation.

This is very much an experiment (and like all experiments could flop completely). But what fun is it if you never take chances? We've trusted our community for many, many years, and here's another attempt to trust those who become Insiders to help curate the absolute best comments for everyone to see. We hope you'll take part and help us develop an even more interesting and compelling comments section.

You can get your own First Word/Last Word credits at the Techdirt Insider Shop. Most purchases include at least one credit, and subscriptions like the Watercooler Package and the Behind The Curtain Package include a cache of credits that replenishes on a monthly basis.

Filed Under: comments, community, features, first word, last word, techdirt