What kind of legitimate uses are there for something like this? This is not a sarcastic question. It seems like an obvious spam magnet, but if people are using it legitimately wouldn't their sources already be providing an API or RSS key?
I've my own use case for it and it will probably mirror other sites. I run my own blog and thus have ads and affiliate links there. The thing is, as good as Google Adsense is, it's shitty for my site and my topic (Web Dev).
What am I left with? Great affiliates like Team Treehouse, Lynda.com, framework themes, and Udemy. The problem is that none of those offer any kind of a good API. All they have is a link and possibly an image that they provide.
By using Kimono, I can scrape (but I don't) all of Udemy's programs, categorize them with custom categories, build a full-text search engine around it and serve relevant ads per post. For instance, my "Best Bootstrap Themes" post would yield "Learn bootstrap" udemy course and an on-the-fly-but-cached image for it thus serving relevant ads to my users.
Same goes for Lynda. If someone lands on "Why C# is a great language to learn" (one of my unreleased articles), my custom API built on top of scraped data could serve them with a "ASP.NET Essentials" course.
So why use something like this for framework themes? Take Wrapbootstrap.com, they have a great affiliate program. Using Kimono, you can easily get daily refreshes of their main page which usually has: sales priced themes, featured themes, and new rising themes. This way, you can serve users with an ad that has up-to-date prices and themes that are hot right now.
What about non-ad uses? You can create custom search, weighted according to YOUR metrics and build your own marketplace front and aggregate several sources in order to serve users with better content.
We use scraping to gather product prices from online shops for a price comparison site. I have permission from the sites who are not bothered to provide us with a price list other than their public website. Legal and necessary - so there is a market for this I believe, I am not sure about its size though.
Doing something like http://openstates.org/ is a perfect example. State government data is shitty most of the time and doesn't have a public api you can query so open states runs 50+ scrapers to get the data and normalize it.
I would think that's a really hard thing to pin down with numbers. I'm guessing if my wife of 17 years is any indication, it is rather difficult for people to get past a certain point because of the high energy and then anxiety that comes up. But there will always be a core group of friends that will stick through the ups and downs because of how empathic and caring the person is.
When I first saw this headline I thought oh no, have we created another "syndrome"? But after reading it I realize this is probably what my wife has.
in the last 17 years I've noticed all of these traits over and over. She's extremely nice, friendly and approachable to the point where she's not only vulnerable but people have said it's "annoying". She is constantly reaching out, talking and being extremely friendly with people everywhere despite having HUGE issues with anxiety.
She has some learning disabilities and issues and works in healthcare where she is in a unique position because of her personality. She's unable to learn or retain certain things beyond a base knowledge developed over the last 10 years or so. She struggles with charts and paperwork and hasn't been able to move up beyond a certain level. She rarely makes mistakes but also doesn't take any risks with patients and doesn't do a lot of critical care.
But the reason she hasn't been fired is quite simply because there would probably be a revolt where she works. She is absolutely LOVED by the residents of the facility, her coworkers and even management. She's a "ray of light" that comes in and cheers everyone up no matter what and I honestly think if it came down to it they'd pay her just to come in talk to people if they had to.
It's one of the things I fell in love with so long ago that makes the downsides (frequent anxiety, OCD, over engagement etc) so much much worth it. It's very hard to be in a bad mood around her.
I'm glad to have found this article and it even inspired me to create an account just to post about this. It was eerie reading this article describing my wife... even the "buzzing bee" thing. Absolutely intolerable to her. Clicks, noises, things like that create great anxiety. But get her into a crowd of people and she'll be talking, relating and stealing the show.
I'm definitely going to do some more research into this.
Williams syndrome is a CHROMOSOMAL disorder which has PROFOUND effects, not just on personality but on physical appearance. It isn't all that common.
Please don't diagnose your wife with chromosomal disorders based on her being friendly and anxious and bad at charts. Perhaps she has a learning disability, like tons of other people.
It is a spectrum disorder where individuals with small deletions can be regarded as normal. Fibetera's wife may well have a mild version - the only way to know is to do a DNA test.
I would never diagnose her with anything, I am a software developer not a doctor. It just points me in the way of some research for possible things we could talk to a doctor about.
A close friend of mine has Turner's syndrome, also a chromosomal disorder with potentially severe physical effects (such as "neck webbing").
Fortunately for her, she doesn't exhibit the gross physical abnormalities. So while I do endorse the basic sentiment of your comment, you're not on 100% solid ground.
Is she a music fan? Unusually good at pitch, rhythm, instruments, or memory for music and lyrics?
Williams Syndrome is associated with unusual aptitude for music (or perhaps just unusual compared to the other more serious learning difficulties). There are even music-focused summer camps specifically for kids and adults with Williams Syndrome.
These aren't necessarily in conflict. Imagine a system,
x = A + B
y = A - B
If, typically, we see large ranges of A and small ranges of B, we'd say x and y tend to move together. But that doesn't preclude someone with a highly unusual B.
> When I first saw this headline I thought oh no, have we created another "syndrome"? But after reading it I realize this is probably what my wife has.
The first sentence seems to convey an annoyance with people's propensity to hastily self-diagnose/make amateur diagnosis. And then you do the same thing in the next sentence...
