tylercarbone

Thanks for all the suggestions; I'll take a look at them.

I second that. I think the best/easiest way to learn CSS is just to have a project that needs to be accomplished and get started. You'll be really slow, but you'll learn what you need as you go.

So, copyright law doesn't care whether you scraped the data or acquired in some other way. That is, either you can use the information under copyright law, or you can't. If you can't use it, then getting it through some method other than scraping won't help you -- and if you can use it, then scraping won't change the legality.

So you need to make sure there isn't a copyright violation, which is going to depend on the specific information you're looking at.

There's still a potential problem, though, unrelated to copyright. After eBay v. Bidder's Edge, it can be trespass to chattels to scrape data in violation of a site's TOS. In the eBay case, the court held that it was in violation of trespass law because the eBay TOS prohibited robots... so it would have been fine if Bidder's Edge had taken the data manually.

Basically, you need to make sure the data isn't copyrighted, and you need to make sure that scraping the data isn't in violation of the site's TOS.

I really enjoyed "The Goal" as an audiobook. It makes a good audiobook because it's structured as a novel. Definitely one of my favorite business books.

(it's nominally about running a manufacturing plant, but I think a lot of the takeaways apply just as well to startups)

Interesting point. Seth Godin also had a post not long ago getting at something similar (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/why-download...).

I wonder if they'll let you develop your product while in bed.

Very nice. A few thoughts:

1. Interface. Is there any way to rewrite it so that the user can just add tags naturally, and then let the program make suggestions? It's a bit frustrating to wait, after each term, for the program to search for the corresponding tag. If you could input your own tags, and then it could list an official suggestion beside each typed term, I think that might increase usability.

2. Very minor point, but the demo video should be easier to find. I could be alone in this, but I always try to poke around for one as the easiest way to quickly grasp a web app, and the link was buried at the bottom of the page.

Seems like a great app, though; the complete lack of structure for Delicious tags was always one of the things that stressed me about it.

The problem there is that, even if it were possible, most people do not have the same astigmatism in both eyes... so which eye would you calibrate the monitor to correct for?

Arrington posted about one of the Twitter developers leaving, directing negative comments at the developer personally.

Sounds very cool, actually; nice idea.

Gruber posted an apt response to this on Daring Fireball, I thought. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/april#thu-24-mcintyre

Any thoughts on that?

Even if true, the call to action is obscure at best.

"Go forth and complain!"