"Quite a few of these hijackings were my properties so I wanted to leave a few thoughts. This is not unusual activity, especially in the affiliate space, it simply got press this time. This has been happening for quite some time, albeit at a smaller scale. I will even go as far as to say it is the same group of affiliates. RoomsToBook is affiliated with RoomWhiz(z) which was an offending affiliate less than 2 months ago.
Yeah, I had the same experience, but in my case it was pretty negative actually. My fiancé went to the mac store with me looking to buy a mbp and while i was perusing accessories etc... mostly wandering around the store, she struck up a conversation with a sales guy. The sales guy's read was "this girl needs much less than she thinks" and he proceeded to try to downsell her to an air. Now I'm sure the air works just fine, but in her case, she's a web dev and works with video editing in her spare time. Not absurd to want a mbp. Anyway, the guy just thought GIRL = Macbook Air. No further analysis needed. Only when I showed up and talked to the guy did he back off... We talked about how strange it was that we needed to strong arm a salesman into paying more. Truly hard selling us on less. It was downright offensive for him to read her so poorly on account of her gender and it put us off. Not that it's changed my fan-boi status...
We're interested in implementing d3.js visualizations over large drink data sets... This is just a weak "proof" we have the data. We'll be pouring a lot more into this in the weeks ahead