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Comment by ynniv | Hacker News Reader

Does TechCrunch add anything to this story? Seems like we could have just linked to Woot.com instead of a page of quotes and a quip that TC doesn't talk about the AP.

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I can't help but feel that TC has become the ebaumsworld of tech blog. Nothing interesting, intellectual, relevant; just grab whatever you find on the internet, copy paste 90% of the contents and BAM you have a blog post.

I think TC suffers from the same disease as Gizmodo, where the "authors" are encouraged to do whatever they want as long as it brings in traffic. They get bonus on traffic, who cares if its silly even for high-school standard.

This is totally false. We don't get a bonus based on traffic, and we never have (and hopefully never will).

Are you defending TC or Gizmodo?

I assumed he was defending TC since he states that he is a writer in his profile here on HN.

You call out TC for adding nothing interesting or relevant, and go ahead to say the same thing that 12 other people say at every TC post on HN. As well as adding a false statement about their process.

We get it, a lot of people don't like TC.

Yes, Linking the TechCrunch article here was unnecessary. Saying they are unnecessary, though? People follow them because of the stories they bring in, wether interesting commentary was added or not. How else would someone who doesn't read the Woot blog on a regular basis find out about this?

It brings the story to attention, just like HN does. TC does it with link + headline + text + discussion. HN does link + headline + discussion. I don't see a problem with that.

Edit: Why the down-votes?

Probably because you can say the same thing about all blog spam.

Not really. TechCrunch is in my Rss reader; Woot is not. Most blogspam is on little unheard-of blogs to make a few bucks on ad revenue from that particular post; TechCrunch serves as an aggregator, kind of like HN.

The difference to me is that HN doesn't reproduce the content of the source - interesting discussion here tends to drive me to the source site, giving them the benefit. TC gives enough info and commentary in their summary that I rarely go to the source, robbing them (in a way of speaking) of my eyes.

Sometimes they quote/summarize too much rather than directing you to the source, I'll grant you that, but as a website TC still has its place. If I want information about who's getting funded/doing what, that's where I go. I don't think it should cease to exist.

But I agree with you that aggregators shouldn't link to sites like TC, but rather the original source.

They're a news aggregator; there's no reason to post this article here. If they had additional commentary, then there might be. Like the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) say, "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter".

The link will still point to this story tomorrow.

Honest question, do you know if each blurb on the front page of Woot has a permalink?

http://www.woot.com/Blog/

ok, then yes, it may have been a better idea to link to http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13420

That is an ugly permalink. Why aren't they running WordPress with more SEO friendly permalinks?

Because their blogging platform (and their site) runs on ASP.net?

Haven't worked with ASP.net in years, but afaik it's hard to do custom URL routing in it.

(Basically, ASP.net doesn't let you do things you can shoot yourself in the foot with, but that doesn't keep you from shooting yourself in the foot in the language: I remember running into an issue a back-end developer I was working with had with returning JSON from a webservice. We ended up wrapping the JSON in an XML document to make ASP.net happy)

It's not hard. With a tool like UrlRewriter.Net or similar, custom URL schemes are quite easy. And I believe the MVC framework for .Net has custom routes built in.

Good to know - I haven't done any .net development in ~3 years.

IIS7 and above have URL Redirection built in... No longer need to do 3rd party custom stuff anymore.

It would also look nicer if the script was in default.aspx instead of ViewEntry.aspx and the url was written like this:

http://www.woot.com/Blog/?Id=13420

It would look nicer still if it was lower case and they got rid of the dub-dub-dub:

http://woot.com/blog/?id=13420

I dunno, maybe they got sick of being rooted if they forget to patch their install twice a week.

Well they DID casually mention they did this same stunt years ago...

and it’s actually similar to something we did a couple years ago, trying to charge the AP $12.50 for their usage of quotes from us.

Anything that keeps MG Siegler from writing another post about Apple, Foursquare or Twitter for even a few minutes is a huge win in my book.

I actually visited woot.com today, saw the headphones and moved on. It wasn't until the techcrunch article pointed me back to it that I read the whole thing. The TC points you to the right bit.

Although I suppose that could have been done with a clever title.

It's TechCrunch.

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