Mark Gisleson 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (118) comment rss

  • On the post: How Long Until The RIAA Kills The Best Music Service Around?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2011 @ 11:21am

    Tried to sign up

    They took my Facebook permissions then told me they were full up.

    I HATE SITES THAT TAKE YOUR DATA THEN TELL YOU TO GO AWAY.

    Sorry, they may be the best thing since sliced toast but all I know is that they tricked me into giving them all my Facebook permissions and I got zippo back.

  • On the post: Bezos: Attempts To Collect State Sales Tax On Amazon Sales Is Unconstitutional

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 19 May, 2011 @ 01:16pm

    I used to write resumes

    and from the mid-'90s to about 2003, I had thousands of online clients from all 50 states. As a one-person business, figuring 50 different quarterly sales tax returns would have been a half-time job all by itself.

    Sales taxes are horribly regressive, and compound the enormous wealth inequity in this country. Bezos is right. (This time.)

  • On the post: Bill Clinton Thinks The Internet Needs A Taxpayer Funded Ministry Of Truth

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 16 May, 2011 @ 09:52am

    I don't think Clinton's solution makes any sense, but you should know that both Politifact and FactCheck have been ripped by other factcheck orgs for being exceptionally establishment-oriented. Politifact seems to go well out of its way to give breaks to Republicans not named Michele Bachmann while very aggressively parsing statements made by liberals.

  • On the post: How Does Guinness Figure Out The World's Most Prolific Blogger?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2011 @ 04:51pm

    Re: Guinness is full of it on several counts

    Just wanted to make it clear that I'm not a quality blogger either, but an aggregator (i.e., totally sponging my content off the sweat on others' brows).

    Mike Masnick is one of the more prolific bloggers I read, but he still can't touch Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, or Digby at Hullabaloo, or, frankly, any of several dozen very prolific political bloggers I read, and I'm sure there are some mommy bloggers who put these people to shame.

    But the real question here is do you value quality or quantity? Who's the better author, Isaac Asimov or Thomas Pynchon? Barbara Cartland or Isabel Allende? Zane Grey or Ernest Hemingway?

    Mike does a nice job of putting out a lot of quality product. Would acknowledgement from Guinness make him a better blogger? I don't think so.

  • On the post: How Does Guinness Figure Out The World's Most Prolific Blogger?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2011 @ 04:31pm

    Guinness is full of it on several counts

    I've been blogging since 1999, and daily since 2004 but I can't touch Mike's 38,000 posts because my average posts are much longer and work out to about a million words a year. Others are still more longwinded.

    Guinness also fails to recognize originality. Yes, you have to be creative to make news items speak to larger issues like Mike does, but what about those who create wholly original posts each day? Doesn't originality count for more than putting a spin on someone else's news story?

    How do you rate photobloggers or videobloggers?

  • On the post: Washington DC Football Team Who Shall Remain Nameless Won't Let Blogs Use Name Without Permission

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2011 @ 01:19pm

    Their name was always obscenely racist

    and now, like hookers charging for sex, they want everyone who mentions their racist team name to pay up front.

  • On the post: Restaurant Refuses To Serve TSA Agents

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 25 Feb, 2011 @ 04:11pm

    I've worked with TSA agents

    Before giving up my resume business (burn out brought about by Bush-Cheney anti-merit hiring policies) I did some work for TSA agents seeking promotions in the Twin Cities region. Both clients were highly qualified but both ended up quitting the TSA because the promotions went to agents who belonged to the same church as the administrator charged with selecting the new supervisors.

    TSA agents behave like asses because they report to asses who were hired by asses. That restaurant has every right to refuse service to the people who've made air travel intolerable.

  • On the post: If The Whole World Knows A False Statement Was Made About You… Why Still Sue For Defamation?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 17 Feb, 2011 @ 02:47pm

    Re: It's all political

    A.Coward, thanks for making my point for me again. Breitbart's still churning out the lies, and gullible saps are still swallowing what he's feeding them.

    Sherrod doesn't need to sue, she has to sue and she has to do so as publicly as possible.

  • On the post: If The Whole World Knows A False Statement Was Made About You… Why Still Sue For Defamation?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 17 Feb, 2011 @ 06:57am

    Re: Re: So Sherrod should just roll over and take it?

    No, it hasn't backfired. Search Fox News for this story. Check out the rightwing blogs. The right has its own media now, and they don't care about the truth. Breitbart's a liar? They don't care! They just keep repeating the same lies over and over again.

    Well informed people didn't take Hitler seriously either. And before you invoke Godwin's Law, remember that Godwin created it because liberals were scoring too many points by comparing Bush-Cheney policies to the 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism. They flunked that test, so they agreed on a rule to never talk about fascism again.

    Theirs is a closed universe, and you can't dismiss their lies so lightly because they don't acknowledge your arguments.

  • On the post: If The Whole World Knows A False Statement Was Made About You… Why Still Sue For Defamation?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 16 Feb, 2011 @ 12:48pm

    So Sherrod should just roll over and take it?

    I don't think you're very well informed on this one. Andrew Breitbart has been serially defaming Sherrod ever since the initial flap. He's now focused on the Pigford settlement. Please read Media Matters for America, which has done yeoman's work in chronicling all of Breitbart's attacks on Sherrod.

    Breitbart didn't attack Sherrod to be mean. He attacked her because his JOB is to attack liberals, especially minorities. The defamation was calculated and meant to injure the entire African American community. Sherrod was just the vehicle for a much greater slander.

    The major media was very slow to pick up on this libel, and they failed utterly to look beyond this one case. For the most part they did not walk this back to the ACORN tapes, which were every bit as fraudulent as the Sherrod video. And now Lila Rose, James O'Keefe's ACORN partner, is falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of breaking the law with more edited tapes.

    It's vitally important that someone with legal standing take these serial slanderers to court. Please search for Breitbart at Media Matters to learn more about his anti-liberal, anti-minorities jihad.

  • On the post: Forget Hot Coffee, Now Disney Is Sued For Severe Burns From Nacho Cheese

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 14 Feb, 2011 @ 11:32am

    That coffee was obscenely hot

    Roy Kroc had a personal fetish about hot coffee, and McDonald's used special equipment to literally superheat their coffee. Great if you're taking several cups back to your coworkers but back in the day I stopped ordering it because I could eat my entire McMeal and the coffee would still be too hot to drink when I got done.

    Their coffee was insanely hot, and I get very warm under the collar when people make light of that lawsuit over a seriously injured elderly woman with third degree who spent eight days in the hospital.

    There aren't two sides to that story. There's the truth, and then there's the myth the pro-corporate right has manufactured and which Rush Limbaugh and friends have repeated too many times to count.

  • On the post: Author Joe Konrath Experiments With 'Piracy' To See How It Impacts Sales

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 02 Jun, 2010 @ 09:57am

    Give it away and pray

    I've been making my living as a business writer since 1988. Over the years I've noticed that those who make money writing are rarely the best writers, just the best at selling themselves and getting paid.

    I have more respect for the "give it away and pray" crowd than I do for the slicksters whose business skills give them an edge over better writers. Much more respect.

  • On the post: Author Joe Konrath Experiments With 'Piracy' To See How It Impacts Sales

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 01 Jun, 2010 @ 07:09pm

    Konrath's not kidding

    I saw a couple torrents for Jack Daniels books earlier today.

    Didn't know he was behind it, but I did wonder if the whiskey folks paid him to create that character.

  • On the post: How Much Money Can You Make For Others, Rather Than Yourself?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 10 Mar, 2010 @ 09:46pm

    Maybe it's time for corporations to grow up

    and start sponsoring the arts again. Why can't they sponsor blogs about culture and then be the exclusive advertiser? Or really good sports blogs?

    Because you're right, no one wants to read about Cogswell cogs or Spacely sprockets.

  • On the post: Why Don't Newspapers 'Parasite' Themselves?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 08 Aug, 2009 @ 12:16pm

    Been there, done that

    When I started up City Pages blogging community in 2003, I wrote an anonymous front page blog that did exactly what you are proposing. Each day's early morning post was a mix of the best of the net and just about every linkable page of new City Pages content that had been posted since my previous blog post.

    I thought Village Voice Media should have a website dedicated solely to driving traffic to other VVM sites, but mine was a very small voice in a very large media corporation where all the important people were obsessed with 2) being important, and 1) not being laid off.

    VVM changed their site architecture since then, but I'd be glad to email you some samples of what we were doing. City Pages kept doing this concept after I left, but changed the concept radically a year or two ago.

  • On the post: What If Microsoft Had To Approve Every App On Windows?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 29 Jul, 2009 @ 08:17pm

    Mike, I deeply appreciate your criticism of Apple, but please don't use Microsoft as an alt example. That's too much like saying "if you don't like Hitler, you must be Stalin."

  • On the post: AT&T Blocks 4chan Over DDoS… But May Not Like What Happens Next…

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 27 Jul, 2009 @ 08:44am

    this DSL user not blocked

    My DSL is through Qwest, but more important (I think) is the fact that I use a private ISP.

    Altho I'd never been to 4chan, I had no trouble accessing their site.

  • On the post: Is The National Portrait Gallery Lying About The Cost Of Its Digital Archives In Fight With Wikimedia?

    Mark Gisleson ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2009 @ 08:31am

    You're forgetting the £900,000 for lawyers and copyright consultants.