you make it sound like Ron (the guy that runs alexaholic/statsaholic) is some little kid doing this out of his mom’s basement out of passion, as a hobby.

ron is a businessman, out to make money. bill gates is just one man too, you know.

on my personal site, i leech/steal/rip-off yahoo by screen scraping their stock’s pages. but my personal site is for me, has no ads, gets about 10 visits a day from friends. it’s not a business.

clearly you see the difference between this, don’t you?

I’m simply expressing an opinion on something that matters to me. That’s kind of what a blog is for.

I have a hard time seeing companies take free user generated content (i.e. Alexa data) and then take a hard fisted stance about what people can do with the graphs created with that data.

For the record, as a creator of content, I’ve never objected to my content showing up anywhere on the internet. I did ask a guy who was selling exclusive Thomas Hawk prints not to sell them anymore, but I have no problem with people linking to my images.

But certainly if Amazon owns the images then they don’t have to share as nicely as I do with mine.

Still, when the images are based on free user generated information I have a hard time swallowing the hard handed legal lawsuit threats from Amazon.

If Amazon didn’t want this issue addressed, then they shouldn’t have written a post lambasting the guy and threatening to sue him on their blog.

Maybe I’m wrong here but since Amazon is catering to a lot of small sites, I think many people might not feel so warm and fuzzy about an $18 billion company suing a one man operation.

I also find the legal threat over the name to be a bit much. Do you see Twitter threatening to sue twitterholic? Not that I’ve seen yet.

Flickrleech, Flickr Friend Finder, Flickrnation, Flickr Toys, Flickr Uploader, Flickr Gamma Meter.

I find the hard handed attack on Alexa’s blog a bit much. That’s my opinion. If it resonates with others I’d hardly call that a lynch mob.

For what it’s worse. I saw a lot more value in statsaholic than I do splogs.

Alexaholic is a straight up bandwidth leecher and screenscraping operation. It isn’t much better than a splog in that regard. Regardless of the fact that it uses fancy AJAX.

I guess if I created a splog network loaded with AdSense ads, it’s OK as long as I throw in some fancy AJAX.

It seems pretty disingenuous of you
to compare this to EC2 + S3. On the one hand, you have a paying customer relationship with Amazon and on the other you have a screenscraping/hotlinking service that serves ads over their content without paying them.

Now Arrington and you are creating an online lynch mob to force Amazon to allow some guy to make money off of their service without paying them. That some Don Corleone stuff right there.