Comments on: AboutUs.org gets $1 million funding – excuse me?

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

weird – works for me…

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Welp – 2 emails and a voicemail – no reply as of yet. So I am still trying to get an interview with "Ray King" – will update if he responds. :)

By: till

till — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Ray! Tell us a little bit about how you got funding. ;)

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

FYI, I have asked "Ray King" for an interview today. I have yet to hear back from him.

By: Ray King

Ray King — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hello Allen,

I understand your concerns and am happy to chat, let’s set a time – Ray.

ray@aboutus.org
503.888.8808

By: Matt Harwood

Matt Harwood — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I also personally cannot see a need, nor want for such a service – and the funding adds to my baffled opinion on AboutUs. The point you make, Allen, are justified in my opinion and were ones I hadn’t considered.

Web 2.0 gets stranger by the day – I desperately try to ignore my thoughts that include the word “bubble” – but it’s getting harder and harder. I love the creativity and promotion of the individual in 2.0 so much that it scares me to compare this kind of venture to pet sites from 2.0, but it must be done.

Fun while it lasted.

By: molly

molly — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cheers to that! Awesome review.

By: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I edited the TechCrunch page on AboutUs only to ad that I am the handsomest man in the world and that our research stud Nick Gonzales has a fetish for Gnomes. Both of those changes were removed within hours! I demand some serious reconsideration!

By: XboxCheats.com

XboxCheats.com — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Looks like their site is down. Maybe the funding ran out?

Here is what I get from the main page:

A database error has occurred
Query: BEGIN
Function: Database::begin
Error: 2013 Lost connection to MySQL server during query (10.10.10.200)

Backtrace:

GlobalFunctions.php line 602 calls wfBacktrace()
Database.php line 473 calls wfDebugDieBacktrace()
Database.php line 419 calls DatabaseMysql::reportQueryError()
Database.php line 1546 calls DatabaseMysql::query()
Database.php line 1516 calls DatabaseMysql::immediateBegin()
Database.php line 393 calls DatabaseMysql::begin()
Database.php line 310 calls DatabaseMysql::query()
Database.php line 228 calls DatabaseMysql::open()
LoadBalancer.php line 441 calls DatabaseMysql::Database()
LoadBalancer.php line 390 calls LoadBalancer::reallyOpenConnection()
LoadBalancer.php line 628 calls LoadBalancer::openConnection()
LoadBalancer.php line 125 calls LoadBalancer::getLagTimes()
LoadBalancer.php line 185 calls LoadBalancer::getRandomNonLagged()
LoadBalancer.php line 355 calls LoadBalancer::getReaderIndex()
DatabaseFunctions.php line 52 calls LoadBalancer::getConnection()
PermissionOverride.php line 56 calls wfGetDB()
Setup.php line 211 calls wfReadPermissions()
Setup.php line 211 calls call_user_func()
index.php line 80 calls require_once()

By: Tim McAlpin

Tim McAlpin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

where is the money and development going to head into and whats planned with this site for the future? i don’t think it#s an overly horrible idea: it’s a webcatalog/listing (wiki in this case) of sites. “The free directory about every domain in the world that anyone can edit” as in illegal websites, porn as well?

i must admit though, my excitement level has been higher before.

By: Ray King "Rathbone"

Ray King "Rathbone" — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

"Sorry I haven't returned your calls, sugar. I've been busy stroking my rathbone." OK, I obviously wrote that to make a point. The potential for vandalism on aboutus is very real, and *very* dangerous to the business welfare of millions of bona fide websites. If the huge traffic numbers are any indication, they'll be unable to scale the human reviews necessary to keep the vandalism down to a dull roar. All good points above, and thanks for the original thoughtful post.

I coouldn't agree more than this Ray King guy (see Rathbone's full ego exposed on www.raysworld.com) has defrauded his investors, violated more copyrights in one fell swoop than anyone in history, and caused what will undoubtedly be millions of unproductive hours to be spent by webmasters (like me) who'd rather not have to monitor this and fix the damage every vandal imposes on my sites. We need less spam in this world, not more.

King has basically enabled vandals, so I hope his engineers built good enough defenses to keep the uberhackers from doing damage to millions of site descriptions en masse. Right now I'm guess this putz is laughing all the way to the bank, imagining that all PR is good PR, and that the traffic will translate to a youtube kind of valuation. Only who in their right mind would pay six pennies for a site that comes with this much legal baggage?

Anyone want to buy stock in another Napster? Alexa's wayback machine is an example of *fair* use. They don't try to monetize the traffic from the Alexa pages. What King is doing is more like fax spam, costing the recipient resourcs/time to read through and deal with his crap.

It is intended to be monetized, clearly, through the theft of millions of web sites' copyrighted material. If you ask me this guy should be jailed, and his investors should have their checkbooks taken away permanently. They've crossed the line of business ethics, shrouded behind a completely lame legal argument that aboutus constitutes "fair use". The attorney who advised them as such should be disbarred for doing so. Anyone interested in a class action suit?? There's $1M in the bank but I've heard this Ray King guy and his investors are worth hundreds of millions.

Some of his advisors are board members of SnapNames, like King. King was replaced as CEO of that company a year or two ago, maybe so he could start this debacle. Let's see... Steve Babson, a private equity guy and former chairman of law firm Stoel Rives - you'd think he'd know better than to put his ass on the liability line with this legal lightning rod. Keith Teare... the Edgio guy, and former RealNames guy (there's a deal that lost >$100M in venture capital so at least King's getting expert advice on how to lose investors' monies!) but you'd think he'd be smarter than to get involved with this Ray King profiteering, defrauding, egomaniacal sleazeball. Maybe we're all wrong and like the direct marketers who spam our mailboxes these guys WILL laugh all the way to the bank.

But I hate them. I really and truly hate their entire concept, and how they've moved the line for the next guy to come along and further violate our rights, privacies, and peace.

By: Anonymous Linux Guy

Anonymous Linux Guy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vindicated. That’s all I’m going to say.

By: trabob

trabob — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have read some of the posts on aboutus.org and I agree with all that I read but, the one comment I hoped to read I did not see, and that is: apparently their bot extracts all or many of the pages from your site and places them in link pages with 1,000 + other links making it near impossible to find the link, but that link page is picked up by google (maybe others but haven’t found them) so that when you do a search on google by site name it brings up all the link pages on aboutus.org with a link to your site, what this means is it can double the number of listings in search for your site with half of the links going to aboutus link pages and nowere near your site unless people take the time to read the address after the linking. Example: I have a page on one of my sites named Animals and there is a link listed for Animals-about us going to their site link page(s) for those having 100 pages on their site in time they will have 200 pages and one half of them going to aboutus.org I have contacted google and waiting for a response as I consider this whole thing a fraud and a damage to every website listed in search’s. I would hope google has enough money that they do not stoop to that level to turn people away from the legitamite sites on the web, if not my intent is to contact the prosecuters in their home states as I consider this fraud and we will see if I am right.
Thanks for allowing me to add my 2 cents worth, also check you searchs in google to see if you have been victimized by this
Trabob

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

$1 million sounds like a lot — but from a dozen investors? That means less than $100,000 per investor. So this is a typical doctors-and-dentists thing, with a couple of self-style “angel investors,” i.e., wannabes.

By: Micheal

Micheal — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You run a Pro-Pediphile site and expect AboutUs to not give you a hassle.