Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 2 Feb 2010 21:29:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100202/1839308015.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100202/1839308015.shtml instituted a "cooling off period" where it shut down its comments for a while, hoping that it would drive away the less desirable comments. The whole thing made no sense to us. Those types of commenters would eventually come back, and the solution should be offering better incentives and better overall discussion for commenters, not blocking out everyone. And yet... (without giving credit to the site that led the way last month), it looks like super popular gadget blog Engadget has done the same thing, apparently after comments over the whole iPad thing got too heated. Engadget, of course, is owned by AOL -- and you would think that if there were any company out there that understood group dynamics online by now, it would be AOL. Honestly, I'm still really confused as to what this will actually do, other than make Engadget a lot less interesting for those readers who took part in the community.

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]]> sorta-missing-the-point http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100202/1839308015 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:24:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080331/134624706.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080331/134624706.shtml does look like its lawyers think it gives them rights far beyond what it actually does.

According to Engadget, Deutsche Telekom lawyers have sent a nastygram to Engadget, because the blog uses magenta in the logo for its sister site, Engadget Mobile. Of course, it's hard to believe that anyone would go to Engadget Mobile and believe it was somehow affiliated with T-Mobile. The logos are quite different, and the services they offer (obviously) are totally unrelated. In fact, this whole thing seemed so ridiculous that I assumed it was an April Fool's joke -- though the folks at Engadget insist it's not. And, if you want icing on the cake, last year Engadget was one of a few sites that defended T-Mobile for its magenta trademark when it became news last year.

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]]> morons-in-a-hurry http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080331/134624706