I was playing around with the functions on Google Calculator last week, when I noticed some of the calculations weren’t quite right. Maybe Michael Bolton from Office Space was involved in writing the Google Calculator app, and wound up putting a decimal in the wrong place, but something sure isn’t adding up.

For those that don’t know, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius and freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. In Fahrenheit the range is 212 degrees (boiling) to 32 degrees (freezing). Even for those of you who might not have remembered those figures off the top of your head, most of us did learn them fairly early in our academic careers… probably right around fourth or fifth grade. While those numbers may vary slightly under extreme pressures, for the most part they are pretty much standard. A simple search on Google will in fact verify that they are correct.

Overall I think that Google Calculator is a pretty cool tool. You can even type math in using English, and it will do it’s best to figure out how to interpret the numbers. Usually it does an excellent job. When I was playing with it the other day, however, I got this odd response:

Erm… no.

Way off. Not even in the same ballpark. Google did manage to group the numbers in a meaningful way, correctly guessing what I actually meant by that question, and yet somehow still came up with the wrong answer. If you can’t do it in your head, that should be (64F/2) = 32F = 0C, or water’s freezing point.

Maybe it just has a problem with temperatures on the low end, I thought, and that if I go the other way we might get better results:

Wow. That’s hot. Also wrong.

Apparently not. That one should be 106F * 2 = 212F = 100C, or the temperature at which water boils. Instead we get temperatures hotter than most home ovens can go.

To give Google the benefit of the doubt, I decided to try and take out the conversions altogether, and just let it do simple temperature calculations, staying in just one measurements system:

Not even close. Google fails.

Nope, still no math love from the search giant. I guess Google just needs to go back to school.

Now, I covered this back when the launch actually happened, in this Linkscape post, resulting in quite a few comments, and there was more than a little heated conversation in the Sphinn thread as well. This prompted some people, both on Sebastian’s post and in the Sphinn thread on it, to ask why all of the renewed interest?

It is not extreme, its just that it isn’t new. The fact that they bought the index (partially)? That was known from the beginning. The fact that they don’t provide a satisfying way of blocking their bots (or the fact that they didn’t want to reveal their bots user agent)? Check. The fact that they make hyped statements to push Linkscape? Check. {…} I don’t get the renewed excitement. – Branko, aka SEO Scientist

Well, I guess you could say that it’s my fault. Or, you could blame it on SEOmoz themselves, or their employees, depending on how you look at it. You see, the story goes like this…

Back when SEOmoz first launched Linkscape, it would have been damn near impossible for a shop their size to have performed the feats they were claiming, all on their own. Rand was making the claim “Yes – We spidered all 30 billion pages”. He also claimed to have done it within “several weeks”. Now, even if we stretch “several” to mean something that it normally would not, say, 6 (since a 6 week update period is now what they are claiming for the tool), we’re still talking a huge amount of resources to accomplish that task. A conservative estimate of the average website, considering only html, is 25KB of text:

30,000,000,000 websites x (25 x 1024) bytes per website = 768,000,000,000,000 bytes of data (768 trillion bytes, which is 698.4TB)

(698.4TB / 45 days of crawling) x 30 days in a month = 465.6TB bandwidth per month

Now, I know that one of the reasons that Rand can get away with some of his claims is that most people just don’t grasp the sheer size of those numbers. In todays age, bandwidth is cheap, with many hosts even boasting of unmetered, or unlimited, bandwidth on their accounts, and computers are fast. But in reality the reason they can make those claims is that in all likelihood no one on a shared server or a cluster will ever hit their bandwidth limit, because their processor usage will cause them to go over their limits way before actual data transfer becomes an issue. On dedicated servers, where the resources are not shared, hosts actually care about how much bandwidth you use. For instance, last August The Planet (one of the best hosts I know of for dedicated servers) upgraded their plans to offer 10TB/month at no additional cost. Prior to that they only included 1TB with their plans. On most hosts the charges for people who go over their bandwidth allotment are usually rather steep.

This means that basically for what Rand was claiming to be 100% true, they pretty much would have needed to own their own datacenter. Now, these days, of course, there is another option. Five months ago a new company, named 80legs, came out of beta. With 80legs pretty much anyone can build their own spiders, run them on 80leg’s servers, and spider 2 billion pages per day. They can do this of course because they rent the service out to many people, it’s not just one company powering one link tool. However, 15 months ago when moz launched their tool, 80legs wasn’t an option.

So, I called them on their claims, and a bit of controversy followed from it. Moz refused to clearly identify how they were actually gathering the data, and would not release information on how to keep whatever spiders were being used off of their sites. They did release a list of fairly widespread bots, and suggested that if you wanted to keep SEOmoz from scraping your sites via robots.txt, well, then, you’re just going to have to block Google, Yahoo, and MSN as well. They also came up with their lame assed version of a “solution” to people’s concerns, and stated that people could also add an SEOmoz meta tag to their pages to keep them from being indexed (which would not, however, keep them from being crawled in the first place). Despite the fact that many webmasters made it clear that this was unacceptable, to date nothing about that situation has changed. They still do not offer a clear concise way to allow webmasters to instruct SEOmoz to not spider their site, or give people an option to keep information about their site from showing in the Linkscape data.

The thread on Sphinn went where it did, and the next day one of the admin’s decided to close the discussion, even though it was far from being resolved. No more comments were allowed. Period. End of story.

I moved on.

Fast forward 15 months. I get an email from SEOmoz, touting their new tool, which is apparently powered from the Linkscape index. So, I trot on over and take a look. There, on the front page, are their same outrageous claims… only more so. The graphic stats that in the past 45 days, they have crawled 700 Billion Links, 55 Billion URLs, and 63 Million Root Domains:

Now, I and others, when this first happened, put Rand to task for trying to interchange “crawling” with “indexing”. Therefore, when he states in that graphic that they “crawled” 700 billion links in 45 days it’s not because he’s too stupid to know the difference. The SEOmoz employees know very well that they while they may have “found” an huge amount of links in their index, they did not crawl them. This is actually aside from whether or not it was them who did the actual crawling. Of course, they do try and set toss in some confusion there, just in case someone calls them on their bullshit again, by stating that they crawled 55 billion urls at the same time, as if there is some sort of relevant distinction between a url and a link… which, for crawling purposes, there isn’t. The only real way there would be a difference is if they were trying to say that 645 billion of the links they found were mailto: or javascript: links, but even if that were the case, you wouldn’t “crawl” those anyways.

So, upon seeing this I of course get irked all over again. I went back and revisited the unresolved Sphinn thread that had gotten locked, just to refresh my memory of how the conversation went. I got to the end of the conversation, and I saw something that struck me as just a teensy bit odd:

Wtf? Apparently Scott Willoughby (note: please see update below), an employee of SEOmoz, contacted an admin or mod on Sphinn a little over 5 months ago, 9 months after the conversation ended, and had them unlock the thread, all so he could post this way out of left field comment calling me a liar, and then had them lock it again. I mean, seriously. Why the hell would someone do that? A little over 5 months ago… hm… what happened 5 months ago… wait! Wasn’t that when 80legs.com went live? I wonder…

So, off I went to look at the list of “sources” that SEOmoz had listed on Linkscape. Lo and behold, there it was:

So it seems that what happened is that in the summer of 2009 SEOmoz learned that there was a new service about to go live, one that had it existed way back when Linkscape launched would have provided an alibi to moz’s claims, one that would at least put them in the realm of feasibility. Therefore they went through the effort of having the thread re-opened, just so that someone could post one more claim that yes, they actually did crawl their own data. Of course, this still doesn’t explain a damn thing about what user agent they were (or are, for that matter) using, or how to keep those bots from hitting your site. Apparently someone in the organization felt strongly enough that it is possible to have future technology retroactively bolster bullshit claims that they actually went down the path of trying to cover their tracks that way.

I sent some messages to Sebastian about all this, since I knew he’d get a kick out of them yet again trying to confuse people about spidering vs. crawling, and that prompted him to blog about the whole thing again.

On a side note, I do want to address a recurring theme that keeps coming up in the comments throughout this whole issue. Some people are asking, if the tool is useful, who cares if they lie to promote it? Without getting into the whole argument over whether or not link intelligence is worth $800/year when the majority of it is available for free, there are both ethical as well as legal ramifications about what SEOmoz is doing. One of the biggest selling points for this is that this data is presented with SEOmoz’s own metric, something that they have dubbed as mozRank (mR). This metric is exclusive to SEOmoz, and only holds value if it’s not more made up bullshit. If they do indeed get exposed for selling snake oil, then anything sold under the pretext of “we’re experts… trust us!’ becomes worthless.

Additionally, they are still gathering this data without full disclosure on how to keep their alleged bots off of our servers, and therefore doing so without our permission. According to the Revised Code of Washington 9A.52.110 (SEOmoz is headquartered in WA), Computer trespass in the first degree:

(1) A person is guilty of computer trespass in the first degree if the person, without authorization, intentionally gains access to a computer system or electronic database of another; and

  (a) The access is made with the intent to commit another crime; or

  (b) The violation involves a computer or database maintained by a government agency.

(2) Computer trespass in the first degree is a class C felony.

So, it’s only a crime to deliberately scrape people’s content if your are doing so in conjunction with committing a crime. According to RCW 9.04.050 False, misleading, deceptive advertising:

It shall be unlawful for any person to publish, disseminate or display, or cause directly or indirectly, to be published, disseminated or displayed in any manner or by any means, including solicitation or dissemination by mail, telephone, electronic communication, or door-to-door contacts, any false, deceptive or misleading advertising, with knowledge of the facts which render the advertising false, deceptive or misleading, for any business, trade or commercial purpose or for the purpose of inducing, or which is likely to induce, directly or indirectly, the public to purchase, consume, lease, dispose of, utilize or sell any property or service, or to enter into any obligation or transaction relating thereto: PROVIDED, That nothing in this section shall apply to any radio or television broadcasting station which broadcasts, or to any publisher, printer or distributor of any newspaper, magazine, billboard or other advertising medium who publishes, prints or distributes, such advertising in good faith without knowledge of its false, deceptive or misleading character.

While many of us may take it in stride that we will get lied to when people try and sell us things, trust me, it still does not make it acceptable, and there is law that backs that up.

Update: Apparently there was a glitch in Sphinn when they migrated to new software. The comment that I accused Scott Willoughby of making 9 months after the conversation had been closed (which would have required the involvement of a Sphinn employee) was in fact a Desphinn that he made at the time the post was first submitted. This glitched caused that and 1,530 other Desphinns to all incorrectly get imported as comments… and all with the exact same timestamp, ie. 7/14/2009. Whoops.

Thank you to Michelle Robbins, Third Door Media’s Director of Technology, for discovering how that actually happened. It does prove that not all conspiracy theories are true. I do, however, stand by the rest of the post.

The sites in question will occasionally give out warnings or advice to their users about not entering in their passwords except when actually on their sites, which is of course what you are supposed to make sure you are doing. The problem, however, is that the warnings hardly ever go into detail about what they actually mean by that. Most of us in the IT field, or people who use the internet frequently and have been doing so for a long time, just assume that everyone we say that to knows exactly what we are talking about. However, multiple conversations I have had with friends on the phone in the past, where I was trying to walk them through installing anti-virus (for Windows users I recommend Avast, by the way) clued me in to the fact that for many people simply saying “Make sure you are on the site you think you are” won’t be enough:

Me: Ok, type this into the address box: a – v – a – s – t – dot com. Then hit Enter.
Friend Ok, done.
Me: Good. Do you see the download link…?
Friend: No. I see… (at this point they start reciting what sounds suspiciously like search results)
Me: Wait… are you in Google? Did you type what I said into the search box?
Friend: Yeah, isn’t that what you said?
Me: No, I need you to type it into the address box, so that you don’t accidentilly click on an ad for a different product.
Friend: Oh, ok. (pause)
Friend: Where is that?

After this happening more than once I decided that a visual tutorial on how not to get hacked on Facebook might be needed.

It’s only a Facebook account, why should I care about security?

Glad you asked. While it is true that sites like Myspace and Facebook are more for entertainment and socializing than for business, and you usually aren’t doing anything extremely sensitive (like banking or dealing with medical records) on them, there are still some very solid reasons to keep your information secure:

1. Stolen Passwords mean stolen identity

While it is true that most scammers who steal your password do so in order to send out spam, there really is nothing stopping them from using it for more devious reasons instead. True, you usually don’t store your credit card info on your Facebook account, but disguising themselves as you could still be used to scam people who trust you (Your favorite grandson sent you a message on Facebook: “Grandma? I’m stuck in Houston and my phone is dead. Can you wire me some money please?”).

2. Many people re-use their passwords everywhere

This is not a good idea, but it is a reality. Most of these sites use your email address as your login. If you happen to use the same password for your email as you do for your social media accounts, then this gives the hackers access to all other accounts that you happen to have used that email for, even if you used a different password, since all they have to do is hit the Lost Password link and then log in to your email to get the new one. As a side note, the password generator I built can help with this, since it is generates easy to remember passwords, making it easier to maintain different passwords for different accounts. At the very least your email password should be unique and hard to guess, since that is in essence a master password for all of your other accounts.

3. More personal information is collected every day than many people realize

Recently there has been a fuss about the new Facebook privacy settings, and what you can and cannot make private. It is the belief that their information is private that lured many people into giving away more info than they probably had intended. If someone gains your password then it of course won’t matter what your privacy settings are, they can just browse your account (and private messages) at their leisure.

Here are some visual cues to let you know whether or not the link you clicked on is really what it seemed to be.

Look at the actual address bar to see what website you are really on.

An easy way to know where to look when looking at a web page address is to remember that the address bar is not located on the actual webpage. It is part of the browser window (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.) itself. It’s located at the top, in the section that has the exact same layout and look and feel regardless of which webpage you are visiting. It is usually above any toolbars you might have installed. It is also distinct from any search boxes that a toolbar or browser may have:

(click to enlarge)

In Internet Explorer 8 the address bar looks like this:

Look at the address again… closely.

A url (or webpage address) is composed of multiple parts. The first section of the url is known as the “domain”. This section is always located between the “http://” at the beginning, and the very next forward slash (”/”) that you see. For instance, the domain you want to be on when logging into Facebook is “www.facebook.com”. The “www” portion may change, but if you see anything between the “.com” (or “.net” or “.org”, etc.) and the next slash, then the site is not what it is pretending to be:

Some other quick visual cues that might help:

Does the message really sound like your friend?

In most cases when an automated message is sent from a hacked account it is either the same message sent to everyone, or it is a small set of short messages pulled from a library. The most common are probably messages asking “is this you?” and referencing a picture or video that has supposedly been posted to the internet. In a setup like Facebook’s, where you not only see what messages are sent to you but can also view your friends other publicly posted messages, you can often tell that someone’s account has been hacked because they will start sending a series of odd or repeated messages, all containing links:

If the link was in an email from the website, does the sender’s address look right?

Not all phishing attempts are going to come from people on your friends list. Sometimes scammers will send out mass emails pretending to be from the social websites themselves. While the actual From field in an email can be faked, often times in these cases they are not forged properly. Any emails from Facebook, for instance, should actually have “@facebook.com” in the email address, and not random characters or be from Hotmail:

Are there any mistakes on the login page?

It is of course possible to make an exact perfect copy of a login page for any given site, but not all hackers bother to do so. Take a quick glance at the page before logging in. For instance, you might see an extra less-than sign, like in this fake Twitter login page, which is usually a sign of broken html somewhere:

And major social media websites are never hosted on free hosting accounts, which usually add in their own text or ads to every webpage:

And lastly, one of the biggest clues that a login page is fake…

Were you logged in before you clicked on the link?

Except in households where more than one person has an account on a particular social medial site, or in cases where you are logging in from a public (or work) computer, most people simply never bother logging out of the site. If you are reading a message someone sent you on Facebook itself, then you have to be logged into Facebook in order to read it. If the message asks you to click on a link, and the page it takes you to asks you to log into Facebook again, then something is wrong.

Hopefully these simple tips will help some of you from giving away your accounts, even temporarily, to people you would rather not give them to.

According to Science Daily’s summary of the research done by the University of Oklahoma,

Wii bowling and beginner level DDR elicited a 2-fold increase in energy expenditure compared to television watching. Overall, the energy expenditure during active video game play was comparable to moderate-intensity walking. Thus, for children who spend considerable time playing electronic screen games for entertainment, OU researchers found that substituting that time with physically active games can be a safe, fun and valuable means of promoting energy expenditure.

Let me give you a little of my own research.

Test 1: Sit on my derriere for 10 minutes watching TV. Am I tired? Nope. Not even a little.

Test 2: Play a Wii game like bowling or boxing or even yoga for 10 minutes. Am I tired? Nope. I’m EXHAUSTED.

Still not convinced? Would pictures make a difference?

Research Test 1:

Research Test 2:

I’m not sure what kind of research our universities are conducting these days, but I’m pretty sure this is the kind that does NOT need to be undertaken.

Go get your kids a Wii, let them play some physically active games, and know in your inner soul that they are expending energy. Really, you don’t need any scientific research to tell you that. It’s a Duh moment.

Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.

Now, while Microsoft may be hoping that people will associate the name of their revamped search engine, Bing, with “the ringing of a bell that signals the ‘aha’ moment when a search leads to an answer”, I would venture to guess that CNN chose to use Bing as the search-engine-as-a-verb, instead of one of the other two major search engines, for entirely different reasons.

Let’s face it, Googling or Yahooing Miss Biel doesn’t exactly inspire any sexual connotations whatsoever, whereas I know there are plenty of people who wanted to “Bing Jessica Biel” long before Microsoft grabbed the name.

Subtle, CNN. Very subtle.

I decided to go through the affiliate operating agreement myself to see if I could understand why they were doing this. I realized after I read it that they were not in fact saying any such thing. I wrote them to see what was up, and what the specific issues were.

It took 4 emails to them, with the first 3 coming back with the same answer, that they were not allowed because you are not allowed to use redirects. The problem is that the language of the agreement only mentions redirects in conjunction with either ppc traffic (you cannot link a ppc ad directly to Amazon, or via a redirect, it requires a click from your site to be valid), and with hijacking someone else’s traffic (no redirecting or interfering with someone else participating in the program). Eventually, however, I got someone who understood what I was saying and they agreed that it is indeed acceptable to do so. Here is there final reply:

Dear Michael,

Thank you for writing back to us and I sincerely apologize for the delay in responding to your message. I have carefully reviewed your correspondence with us. As you mention, you would not be permitted to use a shortened URL to an Amazon.com page as the destination URL for paid search advertisements because Associates are not permitted to engage in keyword bidding or other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks, to send traffic to our site.

However, you can use shortened URLs on your Facebook or Twitter accounts. You may be asked to provide the specific sites on which the shortened URLs are posted, which would mean that your Facebook and Twitter profiles would need to be publicly accessible for review if you used the URLs on those sites.

I apologize for the misunderstanding regarding your inquiry and I hope this information is helpful to you. If you have further questions, please use the Contact Us form available on Associates Central or by following this link:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact

Thank you for your participation in the Associates Program.

Best regards,

Richard – Associates Account Specialist
http://www.amazon.com

Note that he did state that the specific sites where you intended to post the links needed to be provided, so if you are an Amazon affiliate and think you might possibly post a link on either Twitter or Facebook, you should probably submit those profiles to Amazon asap and go ahead and get them listed in your Amazon account. One of the other emails from them gave me these instructions for doing so:

If you would like to add another website or multiple websites to your existing Associates account, we first need to view and approve the sites content before it can be added.

Please send us the URLs for the sites, and we will review them and let you know our decision. Once approved, we will send you instructions on how to add the URLs to your account. You can contact us back by using the secure form at the following specialized link:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact/

Keep in mind that if your Facebook page is set on private we will be unable to approve its addition to your account because we need to be able to view your site at any given time to make sure you are in compliance with our guidelines.

I have gone ahead and provided the entire conversation thread with Amazon here. I hope this helps anyone who might have had issues with this.

I ran a search today. It was a real search. In other words, this search wasn’t something I was researching as a search professional. This wasn’t a search for one of the high keyword value phrases. This was just me … being an ordinary user … wanting to find some information. And what I discovered was that Google failed me, big time, with absolutely nothing in the first ten results that was of any relevance to my query.

Now at first, I assumed *I* was the problem. After all, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if you don’t give us the answers we are looking for, then we must have asked the wrong question. And just as I was about to figure out how to rephrase my query, I decided to do something else first.

I decided to run the same query in both Yahoo and Bing.

And guess what happened?

I received relevant results!

Now, to be fair, the results weren’t perfect, and they didn’t fully answer my question, but both Yahoo and Bing proved that they at least had a basic understanding of what it was I was looking for! You, Google, on the other hand, seemed utterly clueless.

So what was this question of mine? Well, I was daydreaming about moving to some exotic locale in which one could live quite well for relatively little money. And I was wondering where such locales might be. So I entered in this long-tail query:

[countries where one can live well with little money]

Go ahead. Tell me it’s my fault and please educate me on how I could have worded that query in such a way as to help you understand what I want. In the meantime, I’ll take a second and third look at Yahoo and Bing more often. (If you want to compare, here is that same query in Yahoo and Bing.)

Oh, and just so you don’t feel too badly, Google. You should know that before I even tried this query on your search engine, I first tried to get the information from Wolfram|Alpha. I thought that since it involved currency, countries, and numbers, it would have great answers. Unfortunately, like everything else I’ve tried to get out of Wolfram|Alpha (which is a terrible name, btw, but that’s another topic for another day), I got nothing but the same old message, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” So, to your credit, Google, at least you guessed … even if your guesses were painfully wrong.

Sincerely,

A frustrated search user

WTF? A poop-free chicken waterer? What??? Wait, I don’t even want to know.

I mean, seriously… wtf??

Today I receive this email from someone by the name of Joel Drapper:

Hey,

I’ve got a little problem.

The other day, I had this great idea to make a single PHP file that downloads, and extracts WordPress to make installing it much easier, and faster. So after I coded it, I asked a few of my friends for suggestions on a name. Most of them said EasyWP which sounded pretty good so I went ahead with it.

That evening, I put together the website (http://easywp.9milesMedia.com), but wasn’t going to launch it till the next morning when I decided what I was going to licence it under, etc. and was tweeting through this process. Then @smashingmag asked me if I could send it to them. I DMed them a link to the website that I’d set up, telling them that I wasn’t launching it quite yet, but they could see it early.

Moments later, my friends told me that he just Googled EasyWP and someone else (you) had made a similar file. I decided that it was probably a good idea to go ahead with my version anyway as I wanted to do a lot more with it then I could see you had done (I wanted to do an ftp version, etc. too in future update), but was going to change the name to something else because you had already used it for your file.

Unfortunately before I could do this, @smashingmag had tweeted a link to my version, and that link has now been retweeted over 100 times. It also ended up getting over 100 delicious bookmarks, and multiple blogs writing about.

I have a method of informing users of updates to the script, and I can set up 301 redirects, etc. but it’s going to be really hard now as it’s so well branded as EasyWP. I was just wondering if maybe you would allow me to keep the name? As I said, I can change it if you really want me to, but I’d rather come to some kind of agreement on this.

I’m sorry for not checking that the name was free earlier.

Thanks for taking the time to read this email.

I look forward to hearing form you.

Have a great day!

The script this guy wrote, at least in it’s current version, is slightly inferior to mine, does the exact same thing, came out a year after mine, and he gave it the same name. The only difference is that he got lucky enough to have @smashingmag to tweet the link for him. As a result, his script is getting a ton of attention. Despite that fact that he discovered that his script, including the name, was basically a direct rippoff of mine, he decides to continue to promote the script:

Since he did state that the whole situation was an accident, I suggested to him what I felt would be the right thing for him to do at this point:

Joel,

Ok, for starters, please stop promoting/tweeting your product until we have hashed this out. Your claims of this being an honest mistake seem much less sincere the more you promote this using the EasyWP name. Honestly, the fact that you didn’t issue a public apology for not researching the concept and the name the moment you discovered that you were plagiarizing, even though you claim it was accidental, surprises me a little. 19 minutes after tweeting that you discovered that the script had already been done and the name used for that exact purpose, you start promoting your script using that name, and you never stopped.

You said that you planned to go further with your script that I did mine, but as it stands currently not only is your script not really any kind of improvement over mine, but additionally it is lacking a couple of features that mine already has built in (such as checking permissions or allowing the user to upload their own version of wp, should they not want to go with the current one). Seeing as that is the case, and seeing as I released mine almost a year ago, this is what I think should happen from here:

1) I think that you should write an apology post for not doing any research before releasing your product, explain how the name was already being used for a near identical script, and how the original script actually has features yours does not. I think you should include in your apology your reasoning, whatever it was, for not letting people know right away and why you instead continued to promote your product without even mentioning mine.

2) Since my script does in fact offer things that yours doesn’t, I think you should simply 301 your current download page to mine.

3) You should ask Smashing Magazine help you get the word out about the original script, seeing as if you actuality did tell them that it was a sneak preview for their eyes only then they should not have tweeted it.

4) In the future if you do write a script with more/better features than mine then yes, I do hope that you use a different name.

Now Joel, obviously I cannot make you do anything, and you will of course do whatever you want. Only your own personal set of ethics will dictate what happens hereon out with this. It’s up to you.

Peace.

-Michael

Joel, however, is unwilling to give up the attention that comes with getting a mention from someone with the prestige of Smashing Magazine’s Twitter account, and all of the subsequent blogging that results from that. He claims he will give it another name, and come clean about what happened, in a few days after he updates the script. I asked him why he wouldn’t fess up now, but he really couldn’t give a good answer for that one, so he just replied that they were “taking this seriously and are actively coding updates, and sorting out the hosting”.

Do I know for a fact that Joel didn’t find my script and decide that passing off a similar one as his own was a good idea? Nope. No way to know those kinds of things. I do know that it took him almost 24 hours to contact me, and that he only did so after the script started to get tons of attention on Twitter. I also know that he refuses to make it right while there is still a large amount of buzz about it. I think that most responsible adults with any concept of business ethics would immediately own up to what happened, drop the script, and find some other idea to develop.

The problem is, Joel Drapper isn’t a responsible adult… he’s a 16 year old kid that is part of a group of 9 other kids aged 13 – 16:

9miles Media is a small, unique graphic & web design group comprised of nine creative teenage entrepreneurs (age 13-16) from all over the world. We adore what we do, and you’ll adore what we can do for you.

So, what do you do in a situation like this? Give them a pass because of their age? Trust their word that it really was an accident, despite their refusal to make it right? Having a hard time figuring this one out myself.