The "official" press release:
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UPTAKE COLLECTS AND ORGANIZES ONLINE WORD-OF-MOUTH FROM THOUSANDS OF TRAVEL WEBSITES

Search and Discovery Site Launches Public Beta for U.S. Hotels,

Offers Web's Most Comprehensive Search for Travel Attractions

Founded by Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel, UpTake (formerly known as Kango) brings together content from thousands of trusted web sites like Expedia, Fodors, goCityKids, Travelocity, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel, offering more than 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions. "Unlike other travel sites, we are focused on delivering the most comprehensive coverage," said Lee. "We offer the broadest and deepest information about U.S. hotels and we'll be developing similar levels of coverage for other lodging and destinations later this year."

Sixty-six percent of American leisure travelers turn exclusively to the Web to research hotels when vacation planning*. But only 14 percent of users start their planning with online travel agencies like Expedia or Travelocity. Studies show travelers are looking for more relevant information in general and consumer advice in particular. "It's easy to make poor vacation planning decisions, especially if you're going somewhere for the first time," said Yen Lee. "Bad travel decisions are painful because your vacation time is so scarce. Our goal is to deliver relevant travel information from across the Web, to help you avoid decisions that leave you feeling dissatisfied with your vacation."

In addition to being comprehensive, UpTake provides tailored recommendations based on analysis of more than 20 million travel reviews, ratings, and opinions from over a thousand web sites. For example, UpTake recommends hotels for different travel themes based on a deep understanding of the reviews in its database. The site has also added "girls getaway" and "pet friendly" themes to its current "family-friendly" and "romantic" travel search themes, providing travelers more ways to personalize the search and discovery process.

"When you know where and when you want to travel, existing travel booking sites excel. But today's booking sites don't help you shop based on why you are traveling or who you are traveling with. UpTake is designed to give you better recommendations based on these fundamental questions of "who" and "why." said Lee, UpTake president. "UpTake matches a traveler with the most useful reviews, photos, etc. for the most relevant hotels and activities through attribute and sentiment analysis of reviews and other text, analysis guided by our travel ontology to extract weighted meta-tags. More simply, we break apart and analyze reviews and articles so we can recommend the best products for you."

For example, for a user looking for a family hotel in San Diego, UpTake analyzes its San Diego hotel catalog for attributes like "pool", "babysitting", "oversized rooms", "3 and 6 year olds" and for sentiments such as "like", "love", "strongly recommend. " UpTake users looking for San Diego romantic hotels will then get different results than those looking for San Diego family hotels. UpTake also tries to understand user intentions. If a traveler is looking for a hotel that is "good for kids", UpTake interprets it to have the same intent as phrases such as "child friendly" or "family vacation." By aggregating reviews and the most comprehensive selection of products on UpTake, the site will save travelers the time of going from site to site to find the right review for the right product to make your decision.

UpTake was developed to be complementary to existing travel sites. Like Google, it only provides a relevant abstract of the information and then offers a direct link to the site to find additional information. UpTake is also supplier friendly, providing a link to hotel websites, hotel phone numbers and addresses, photos from sites such as Hotels.com, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel, as well as descriptions and reviews from other trusted online travel resources. In addition to lodging, UpTake also includes attractions like beaches, restaurants and parks.

"UpTake helps people make more informed decisions about where to stay. For independent hotels like ours, UpTake provides another way to convert our good word-of-mouth online into more hotel stays," said Andy Thomas, general manager of Catamaran Resorts.

UpTake's management team has extensive experience in travel, search and customer acquisition. Lee has more than 12 years of online travel and search entrepreneurial experience starting as a co-founder of the CitySearch San Francisco office and as general manager of travel, helped grow the overall travel category at Yahoo! to approximately $300 million in annual revenue. Co-founder Gene McKenna is UpTake's vice president of product, and was previously vice president of product at Acxiom Digital, a leading e-marketing and database marketing company. Dr. Huanjin Chen is UpTake's search architect, a role he had previously at eBay, and Dr. Boris Galitsky is UpTake's natural language scientist with more than 70 patents and publications. Elliott Ng is the company's vice president of marketing. Previously Ng founded two companies, Loyalty Matrix (sold to Responsys) and Netcentives (sold to Cendant and InfoUSA), where he launched the largest online loyalty program backed by frequent flyer miles. Ng most recently ran web marketing for Intuit QuickBooks.

UpTake recently changed its name from Kango, but the service will be available on both sites. To experience Uptake's vacation search site and take your first step to a great trip, simply go to www.uptake.com or www.kango.com.

About UpTake
Founded in 2006, UpTake has collected and organized more than 20 million traveler reviews, ratings, blogs and articles from across the web to help travelers to make better decisions about destinations, lodging and attractions. UpTake uses a travel ontology and natural language analysis to extract meta-tags from the collective intelligence it has collected and returns unbiased, personalized recommendations based on travelers' facts and feelings. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with global engineering teams in Beijing and Moscow. More information can be found at www.uptake.com.

* Source: YPB&R/Y 2007 National Leisure Travel Monitor^TM

1) Every now and then, I hear a speaker make a major factual error. (For some reason, this seems to happen a lot with keyword advertising law talks.) The most recent example: a recent speaker on Internet keyword advertising said (1) Google indexes keyword metatags (WRONG), and (2) no Internet keyword defendant has ever won on the use in commerce issue (WRONG and WRONG!). I probed the speaker offline about the latter mistake and the speaker was working from slides prepared in mid-2006 that apparently had been poorly updated. Note to conference organizers: if you're going to have someone speak on keyword advertising issues, you might make sure they aren't using 2 year old material.

Don't get me wrong; mistakes can happen to anyone, and I'm sure I've made a few in my time, but I'm not sure what to do in these circumstances:

* Should I point out the error(s) to the speaker in the Q&A (assuming there is Q&A)? It's awkward to publicly put a speaker on the spot like that, and when it comes to factual errors, there is always the risk of the Q&A degenerating into a public he-said/she-said irresolute discussion.
* Should I point out the error(s) to the speaker privately after the event? This will at least correct the speaker's misperception, but the audience walks out of the event with misinformation.
* Should I just ignore it? After all, I've got plenty to do, and I can't fix every problem.

Let me know if you have a preferred solution to this problem.

2) With some frequency, a person forwards my email without my permission to third parties who were not the intended audience. This is especially pervasive at Santa Clara University, where there appear to be absolutely no norms against forwarding private emails to non-recipients because I see it numerous times a week. Of course, this forwarding can be problematic in at least two ways. First, the non-recipient may not like the email's content, especially if it is about them. Second, I try to be pretty careful with what I say in email, but this norm creates a Panopticon phenomenon of inhibiting my ability to speak the truth. So I'm toying with the following solutions:

* adding a legend to the front of my emails saying "DO NOT FORWARD THIS EMAIL FURTHER"
* stop sending email that discusses third parties at all

If you have any thoughts about this problem, I would welcome them as well. Send them by email... :-)

I don't know much about in vitro meat, but I can see why it would be so controversial. In vitro meat reduces or eliminates the ethical/animal rights and environmental justifications for vegetarianism, which makes eating meat a more justifiable decision. On the other hand, any health concerns about eating meat would remain, plus for many existing vegetarians, our diet is so ingrained in our lifestyle that we can't fathom eating meat under any circumstance. (And, for "vegansexuals," that includes intimacy with a meat-eater).

At minimum, it's easy to see why the PETA move would be controversial among its members and employees. After all, it runs completely counter to the "meat is bad" mantra that has been thoroughly instilled into them. Personally, I have no interest in eating "in vitro meat" but I applaud PETA for taking an aggressive approach to address some of the major social ills associated with meat manufacturing.

As part of my continuing birthday celebration, yesterday I went on an organized hike to Coyote Ridge, operated by the Silicon Valley Land Conservancy. Coyote Ridge is hardly untouched wilderness; it's adjacent to a garbage dump and the 101 freeway, and it's been thoroughly invaded by exogenous plants and animals. Even so, just 20 miles from downtown San Jose, it provides habitat for all kinds of fauna, including badgers, coyote. elk and eagles, and many rare flowers that grow in its serpentine soil.

Fortunately for me, today the wildflowers were at their peak. It's hard to capture the beauty of California ablaze with wildflowers, but take a look at these Flickr photos nonetheless. As you will see, I love California poppies!

Despite the challenge, Lisa outdid herself with her version of the Slinky Cake:

See the full 4.4MB version.

"I offer a vegan discount to clients. Anyone who seeks my services is entitled to a sliding discount depending on how many days a week they pledge to adopt a vegan lifestyle....I implemented this because I hated representing people's animals, then going out to lunch with them and seeing them eat more animals."

This is the first time I've heard of a lawyer offering a vegan discount, but I respect someone who puts dollars behind her beliefs.

I think the problem is especially acute with legal-related April Fools joke. The problem is that at this point, there are so many true stories of ridiculous legal claims and other tomfoolery that it's impossible now to disbelieve anything. In this respect, I'm reminded of the Coca-Cola advertising campaign where Coke executives were thinking about suing Coke Zero for "taste infringement." This is supposed to be funny--putatively, there isn't such a thing as "taste infringement," is there?--but in fact such a claim is hardly inconceivable and, if brought, would not be all that funny for the defendant or consumers generally. More generally, it's almost impossible to create a ridiculous enough fictional legal claim as the basis of an April Fools gag when reality far outstrips our wildest imagination.

So my recommendation to bloggers: if you want to keep me as a reader, don't abuse my trust with an April Fools gag. Rather, if you want to do something humorous, entertain me and your readers with the numerous real-life stories that are even more outrageous.

March 4, 2008

Via Regular and Certified Mail

Eric Goldman
Ericgoldman.org
Santa Clara University School of Law
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053

Via E-Mail

Eric Goldman
Ericgoldman.org
egoldman@gmail.com

Re: WBG Builders

Dear Sir or Madam:

This office represents WBG Builders. Attached please find a print-out from Ericgoldman.org which references WBG Builders. We ask that you kindly remove your reference to WBG Builders in your posting. Please note that the article to which you link no longer exists and/or does not mention WBG Builders.

Very truly yours,
Nash Law Firm LLC

Alan A. Reuter, Esquire

Enc.
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See the original post in question about WBG Builders (with link fixed). Notice that this letter was sent on official law firm stationery by regular mail, certified mail and email--same content, received 3 times (all in the span of about 1 hour, as it turns out). I imagine many recipients would find repeated delivery of a letter like this intimidating and would happily comply to avoid further interactions with a lawyer.

Also interesting is that the letter requests that I fix a dead link by removing references to WBG Builders. Huh? Even if the link is dead, there's no need to change the text. And as it turns out, it was easy enough to fix the link.

Instead, this approach suggests to me that perhaps WBG Builders is trying to do some reputation management and may not want consumers to know that it might sue them for saying things it doesn't like. But absolutely consumers should know this in forming their opinions about WBG Builders, and any effort to scrub the Net of undesirable WBG Builder references is both distressing and doomed to fail.

You might call this a group hug or a Jacob sandwich, but I think that I have an armful of love.

* lowering the minimum hunting age (just like the tobacco companies
* "learn-to-hunt classes for single mothers"
* expanded state-sponsored trips for women, children under the age of 15 and disabled people
* state-sponsored youth hunting weekends
* "a 'Leave No Child Inside' initiative last year that encourages families and children to try fishing and hunting."

Did you notice a running theme? Just like the tobacco companies, states appear to be trying to hook the kids early.

Ironically, many of these states have shut down Internet hunting, which might have actually expanded the ranks of hunters. And it's hard to distinguish Internet hunting from the modern state of physical-space hunting, which as one hunter described, "the habit is to ride an all-terrain vehicle to a tree platform, pour out a bag of corn and sit waiting for the prey to show up."

1) My intellectual passion is Internet law
2) My true passion is my family
3) My secret passion is slinkies