Archive for October, 2007

Scare Tactics

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

My wife is busy watching the Red Sox game, so I figured I would write about the latest round of legal games being played with JobVent. I call them “games” because they are just that… games people play to try to scare me into removing some review or another. These can not really be classified as threats, because the messages I receive in these games contain no threat, only the suggestion that there may, at some point down the line, be a threat. So it is a game.

I’ll give you an example.

Message #1
There is a review on your site of XXXXX that includes a personal attack against the CEO, calling him a “greedy narcissist,” that violates your own posting rules against personal attacks and amounts to defamation of character.

I would like to request that this review be deleted. Thank you for your immediate assistance.

Sincerely,
XXXXX

My Response
Thank you for your request, but after reading the review, we’ve decided to leave it on the site. If you disagree with this assessment of the CEO, I urge you to add your own comments to the review or add your own review of the company to JobVent.com.

Message #2 in response to my message
I believe that under Florida law, this statement amounts to false light defamation and is legally actionable.
Do you have someone I could contact in your company related to legal disputes?

My Response
Hi XXXXX,

Please send any legal correspondence to me at the email address you have been using.

Thanks!

And that was the last I heard from them. This kind of behavior happens alot:
Company: “Hi JobVent, remove this review”
JobVent: “Thanks, but no.”
Company: “Perhaps we’ll sue you”
JobVent: “Please direct all legal correspondence to Venter@JobVent.com”
-complete silence-

Comanies seem to like to use the possibility of legal action as leverage. Most of these companies know that the worst thing for them to do from a PR standpoint is to sue a website that at its core is upholding free speech rights of its users and operating completely legally under the Communications Deceny Act of 1996.

Posted in Random Thoughts | 4 Comments »

JobVent.com Webservice API

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

No. There is no formal API. JobVent.com is really the only site utilizing the data in JobVent’s database. However, I did receive a request today from the founder of a site that is very similar to JobVent.com. He’d like to forward viewers of his site over to JobVent when they’re looking for a specific company that is not in his own database.

While I’m not prepared to publish a web service to access all of the data in JobVent’s database programmatically, I don’t mind if developers use some of our pre-existing functionality.

JobVent companies can be queried by using a URL formatted as follows:
http://www.jobvent.com/browse.php?searchText=COMPANYNAME&search=true&searchType=company

the above URL, when you replace COMPANYNAME with a urlencoded query string will perform a company name query and direct the user to the results on jobvent.

Alternatively, you can use our XML generator that we use for one or two AJAX calls.
http://www.jobvent.com/include/autocomplete.php?field=CompanyName&input=Verizon

The above url will generate XML which contains an id and a company name for all companies that match the urlencoded input string. It is important to leave the field=CompanyName string in the URL (do not modify this string). In this case, verizon will return two results, verizon, and verizon wireless. The id can be used to redirect to the company specific page… http://www.jobvent.com/companyBrowse.php?CompanyID=900

Posted in JobVent.com | 2 Comments »