

How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO - minalecs
http://spiers.tumblr.com/post/3943409431/how-not-to-interact-with-the-media-101-courtesy

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ramanujan
The funny thing is that I've now heard of Hashable. It's also the kind of
service where any publicity really _is_ good publicity. Would not be surprised
to now see them posting record hits.

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brown9-2
The original article sounds quite juvenile, even if you think their idea is
silly or not: <http://www.betabeat.com/2011/03/17/hashable-is-worthless/>

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acgourley
I like how it claims hashable is useless because it is useful to insecure
people. As if that were a small market, or something people don't care deeply
about.

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JanezStupar
Considering my current impression of Hashable, which is derived from this and
the original article. The original article seems to be dead on.

An insecure founder formed a company that builds product for other insecure
people who then gather and cherish their fears together.

I think thats awesome!

What better way is there than to market such a product than through Streisand
effect?

On a side note, what do you think of possibility that the original
manifestation Streisand effect, was in fact just a signal from Barbra to her
fans, that she is still as insecure as any of them?

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mayukh
Just wasted five minutes : 1> Journalist trashes Hashable in satirically laced
'opinion' piece 2> Hashable CEO fails to see anything funny and calls
journalist/s liar(s) 3> Journalist posts sections of CEO's emails in a follow-
up article 4> CEO gets upset and ... the loop shall continue

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FreshCode
I like the part about how "“pivot” is start-up talk for “try to make something
that’s at least a little less stupid than what you originally made”."

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Silhouette
Hang on a minute. This is about an "op-ed" article that included quotes (as
in, contained in quotation marks) that don't appear to accurate, investment
advice (allegedly comical or otherwise), and outright derogatory comments
(without any justification given). Moreover, the follow-up article republished
private correspondence without permission, and is trying to justify its trash
article based on some sort of journalistic high ground argument.

Frankly, while I wouldn't have put things the same way, I think the guys from
Hashable have every right to be upset, and the web site that upset them is
lucky not to be discovering the hard way why serious newspapers have a full
time legal department. Their posts have been, IMNSHO, about one step in
maturity about the five-year-old in the playground who says something really
hurtful to another child, and then tries to make things better by saying "But
I was only joking!".

Oh, and the blog post about the whole sorry affair seems to think that
communications with journalists are somehow exempt from the usual rules
regarding privacy, IP rights and, frankly, common courtesy. I suspect this is
not a position that either responsible journalists or lawyers would agree with
(as the former would have checked if they were on the record in a case of
doubt, and the latter wouldn't assume their personal view trumped what the law
actually says).

Does the person who wrote the linked blogpost (on spiers.tumblr.com) have any
connection to the betabeat.com site that started this whole mess?

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brown9-2
I agree about some of your points, but I don't believe that you have any
reasonable expectation of privacy when emailing a person you have never
communicated with before or that they won't republish your emails without
first gaining your permission (IANAL).

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ig1
I don't know about in the US but in the UK it's certainly the case that
there's a default expectation of privacy.

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Silhouette
As much as I'd like to think that's true (being in the UK and a privacy
advocate myself) I've never seen anything that would "certainly" describe the
legal position in this case, such as a precedent from a case in one of the
higher courts. Are you just talking about something like the general privacy
right under the ECHR, or something more specific to e-mail?

I've found various opinions on-line from UK-based commentators suggesting that
if an e-mail isn't explicitly marked or otherwise understood to be
confidential, and it didn't contain any sort of privileged information or
information that would normally be expected to remain private, then it
wouldn't automatically attract protection under any privacy law. Most of these
related to an individual republishing messages send on behalf of a corporate
body rather than the other way around, though.

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ig1
There's nothing email specific, although a company couldn't republish an email
from an individual without breaching the data protection act.

If the information in an email has no indication (explicit or implicit) that
it should remain private, then I agree there's no legal reason why the
recipient can't disclose the information from the email

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plovs
Compare _that_ to _this_ : <http://bit.ly/gdmYw6> how 37signals responded to a
complaint

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noelsequeira
From a comment at the end of the follow-up article put up by the blog in
question.

 _I guess there will always be kids that want to build the sandcastles and the
kids that just want to knock them over._

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mef
While it seems hard to believe anyone could take the quoted “Sorry bro, you’re
not Hashable enough” as being an actual attributed quote, to avoid confusion
the writer should probably have just italicized it.

