Comment by nunomaia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nunomaia | Hacker News Reader

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1. This Week In Whatever is used all over the place both pre and post twit.tv foundation. I myself used to watch a show called this week in nascar (by all means feel free to stereotype me if its easier for you). I dont recall them crying like babies when "this week in tech" asked for donations "omg twit.tv is leveraging on TWIN sucess and our fans will be tricked by donating to a dif show".

2. Leo Laporte is a pro, has natural talent, and does his own thing surrounded by friends. He revolves his thing around his audience with which he has deep feedback (irc/forums/twitter/blog/general openness). There is a community there. TWIT.tv is a living and very active organism. He aims at a professional artisan feel. He knows where he's going (vihart, jeri ellsworth etc) and how knowledge needs to be presented. His network has SOUL. Its a real NET which WORKS. I'll skip commenting on ThisWeekIn.com because they have people getting paid for years to get right what i (or anyone that, hint, understands how products need audiences as much as audiences need products) could type in a few lines. I dont enjoy speeding up slow trainwrecks. They have a few human pearls in that train of mediocrity. Ever wished the best for something you know wont have it?

3. Leo Laporte is not a perfect human being (shocking, i know), and thus, everytime some random crosswind, specific temperature, prelunch hunger and skype-a-saurus radiation combine in rare yet periodic event, this causes spasms of accute calcanittis. This makes awesome human Leo become less awesome human Leo, ranting to his audience as if they were lemmings (dimishing your audience is a nice way to build an audience of dumb people). Fed from his frustration they spam for years anything remotely thisweekin.com related. Almost making it look as if both networks were in same championship (something only @Jason wants to believe). Counter productive.

with this being said, if you donated to @Jason TWIST show (which existed way before thisweekin.com foundation) thinking you were giving money to Leo Laporte, then "you" are a complete imbecile.

Do you really think that the average person browsing iTunes realizes that there is a difference between the TWIT brand and all of the "This Week In . . ." stuff? Largely, they don't. I've spoken with people that didn't realize they were unrelated. There's a reason for trademark law. So that someone can't come in and do the same thing you're doing in the same market with an identical branding and stir up confusion and dilute your own business brand. I suppose the audience at TWiT may generally be savvy enough to recognize there is no relation, but the network also caters to a very large audience of laymen who can no more discern the two This Week In tech-related networks than they can discern "The Internet" from "Internet Explorer".

I've dealt with this, personally, when someone produced the exact same service as I had been providing for many years. They changed two letters in the name and that was it. For years afterward, there was great confusion among the audience and I had to deal with people emailing me to complain about problems with the other group that I had nothing to do with, because they didn't realize they were different. They filed reports about me, thinking that I was the other place. They would use my service and get upset that "the site has changed", because they didn't realize that they had been visiting "the other" site this whole time.

The only reason I couldn't do anything about it is because I'm just one guy and I don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on lawyers and legal processes or, believe me, I would have.

You might also notice that "This Week In NASCAR" would, of course, be about NASCAR. There is almost no concern about brand confusion or dilution when one is about technology and the other is about racing. There is, however, potential for brand confusion when one is primarily about technology and tech culture and the other is about technology and tech culture. And when one is distributed over the internet and iTunes and the other is distributed over the internet and iTunes.

It is a naming attempt made deliberately for confusion. You can't argue that it isn't, because any reasonable person starting a project would look at the naming conventions of similar services and products and say "well, I don't want to be confused with this other one, so I want my name to be unique and very identifiable". It's skeezy, unprofessional, and the fact that the guy asked "do you mind if I name my show This Week In..." shows that he recognized it (notice he only ever said "the show" and not "an entire network").

Anyway, I'm not invested in TWIT whatsoever and normally could not care less, despite the characterization you attempt to apply. However, it certainly bears some relevance to the topic as it was posted.

I dont even think the average person DONATES for something they dont know what it is. As for the average person knowing what is what, i think the avg person doesnt even know what twitter is, much less twit.

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