You're looking at it way too absolutely. The author's point wasn't to say you need to spend every waking minute creating and all other time is wasted. They/we should consider the ratio of time spent creating(and doing -- not all doing is creating), vs passively consuming. In the modern technological world, there are more ways to fill your entire existence with consumption than ever before. The point was to be conscious of that and achieve a balance, because creation/doing tends to have more lasting personal value.
The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".
+1, Excellent post. You should have a blog or something...
I've noticed this too when examining what I view to be problem spaces. Often there is truly room for technical innovation alone - a better way to do something - but it is only when this technical innovation actually addresses a pain-point that you end up with something great.
For example I've been looking at some ideas in the personal debt-reduction space lately. It's easy to dream up technically better tools that could help people visualize and track how they can pay off their debts and build wealth, but that would require the assumption that the tools alone are people's only pain point. Paying down debt isn't fun. It takes a long commitment with no short term reward. It's not sexy. Work from these assumptions and somehow address them and you've helped solve a pain-point. Work from the assumption that we can build a better tool with feature x, and you ignore the real problem, and your real opportunity to address it.
If you're just looking to prove out a concept and see if there could be any interest/traction for it, I would feel comfortable going ahead and scraping (but be smart about it). To me that means: know your target (big corporate sites vs JimBob's autos), throttle your requests (both the frequency with which you scrape and how rapidly you fetch pages), and how obvious it will be where you got your data.
But from your Q's it seems like you're looking at whether or not this is a longer-term viable idea. Hopefully some smart people will comment with experiences/facts on the legal subject.
All that legality may not matter so much if you can position yourself as a clearinghouse where these other parties just have to have a presence to survive, instead of a competitor?
Google has a ton of decent into, search for "oracle vs mysql".
Both have their respected places, but Oracle is in general "more". More complicated, more difficult to install and configure, more flexible, more powerful, more money. If you don't need "more", then MySQL is quite capable.
Thank you for the kind words. I guess that means the years of hardwork are paying off, even if the direct time investment was a few hours.
HA! I can't believe somebody registered that domain name. Too funny, it didn't even cross my mind. Snowday2011.com was my backup - I really wanted snowpocalypse.com!
The site design alone really is a superb lesson in simple effective good-looking usability. As someone else pointed out: one click ordering, brilliantly-worded concise text, good design, immediately understandable purpose and call to action. These things all instill confidence, and are no accident. Anyone who's ever tried should know how difficult it is to make something "simple"... so yes I'd say your years of hard work have paid off.
This is one of those questions where people tend to reply with semi-snarky advice like "as much as you can get" or "it's relative". And they are right in a sense.
Still, based only on my own past experience (assuming your review is a positive one) I'd say 4%-5% is fair... more than that seems like a clear reward and message that "we need to keep this person", and less than that seems like "eh, here's something".
EDIT: As to your second q: knowing what similar people in your industry and area are being paid might be a good figure to know (and if you can do it tactfully, bring up) - but being able to point out some of your accomplishments in the past year that the reviewer may not remember or be aware of will probably get you farther.
Very strong idea, and it is apparent that a lot of thought and work has went into this already. Functionally, the reports and questions etc seem great! In general, it feels a little bit overwhelming at first (a lot of info on each page, but some of this feeling may just be minor design cues like font choice, size, colors, margins, padding, etc). It was difficult to know where to start or what to look at first on some pages.
A few constructive comments on the marketing side of the site. The product itself looks well-thought-out in a good market niche.
- General look and feel
It's professional but a little lacking in whitespace, especially since you've chosen such heavily saturated colours.
- Home page
The three key points at the top aren't as eyecatching as they ought to be. Oddly, they work better in IE without the drop shadow (which appears to shift the block visually upwards away from the dynamic content and into the header). shifting it ~10-20px down the page might help a bit, as might rollovers if you want most users to click to learn more.
My attention gets drawn away from the text on the left. Possibly a box (with curved edges and ideally vertical dimensions to match the slides might help) and/or a pastel background colour might help here.
The animated slides are effective, but possibly a slightly reduced size would give you the scope to make other changes
(most of the graphs would still be clear at much smaller resolutions)
I'd revise the "Secure" text - developers might be interested in knowing that passwords are securely hashed, but Joe Manager just wants to know that it's "password protected and private" and even more importantly "you decide who can see what level of feedback". Customer permissions sound like they could be an important feature depending on the level of openness within the company. Some companies might be comfortable with everyone knowing exactly how each colleague voted for each peer, whilst others might want to anonymise all the votes even to management analysing the results.
Minor point, but there should be an apostrophe in the possessive "each other's" (there seems to be some consensus amongst pedants that each others' is incorrect as both "each" and "other" are singular")
- About Peerleaf page.
Text is a little overwhelming. Stick "Security", "Requirements" and "Privacy" at the bottom of the sidebar (or on a separate FAQ page) to keep the flow of the page about the core benefits and use cases of the product. Your flowchart looks better above the fold too
The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".