Best Project Rant Video:

For more delightful anger, check out Project Rant.

See this IMDB page for very necessary context.

Maybe I should re-think how I’m going about trying to motivate my underlings:

My presentation from the Heritage Foundation’s 2010 Resource Bank in Miami, Florida is posted at ReadyMadeWeb.com along with audio from the rest of the panel. My co-panelists were David All and Robert Willington. The panel was moderated by Heritage’s Robert Bluey.

Get Portal, one of the best video games ever made, for the low price of $0 at Steam.

Thanks to Jonathan Larroquette for pointing out this gem:

If you’re curious, this great sword can be purchased for only $549.00 at ColdSteel.com. Other items of interest to me include the Honey Comb and Cold Steel’s two sword canes.

You can’t blame the Tea Party if they freak out about this little gem:

The computer may also be based in space, though my assumption is that it is a terrestrial computer that simply controls a high-powered, tax-collecting satellite.

My submission for the first video to be posted at DanisAngry.info:

Created using Google’s new Search Stories Creator.

You make recognize a couple of this dudes from “Fear the Boom and Bust.”

Piano Improv + Chat Roulette = Awesome

37Signals Continues to Impress

First Russ Roberts and John Papola had the rapping economists, now we have singing revolutionaries:

Check out this inspiring video by my colleague Rob Raffety about Ben Thurtchley, Congressional staffer by day, volunteer citizenship instructor by night:

Jack Hunter, a columnist I had never read before today has penned a great column on the incredible stench of hypocrisy that surrounds the dismissal of Ron Paul by America’s conservative leadership. Hunter makes the point that Ron Paul is the only voice on the right who is actually calling for a smaller, more humble government. The fact that Paul and his die-hard followers are almost despised by mainstream “conservatives” shows that their dedication to any real reduction in the scale and scope of government won’t last beyond the closing of the polls in November.

There are a few others out there looking at big-picture politics and trying to push forward policies that would represent real reform, not just the same politically-motivated, short-term thinking that has put our country in the position that it’s in today. A stand-out figure among them in Paul Ryan, of my home state of Wisconsin. He’s taken on the budget and health care in a serious and genuinely conservative way, by proposing the deep cuts to spending that are necessary for a sustainable fiscal future.  This is more than most of the supposed leadership of the right can say.

Anyone who isn’t taking on the debt in a serious, policy-reforming way is surrendering our country to a future of governing by crisis, where politicians will finally be forced to act as they’ll be facing the eminent collapse of our economy and potentially our system of government.

Reihan Salam wrote a great piece at National Review Online today that outlined how the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a group made up of the MPAA and RIAA among others, is pushing for the US Trade Representative to consider countries that use open-source software to be added to a list of countries that don’t respect intellectual property rights.

This is, of course, absurd. If someone chooses to give away their intellectual property and you elect to use that property, you’re making a perfectly legal and moral decision that in every way respects IP.

So what’s the motivation for this? Salam sums it up in a single sentence:

Basically, a handful of large corporations are trying to use the power of the US government to limit the ability of other firms, large and small, that are built around OSS business models.

So once again the policy of the United States government is being co-opted by large corporations to support their self-interest.

At the conclusion of this ppost, Salam gives out a nice shout out to me and Tim Lee of the Bottom Up blog:

To understand how and why OSS resonates with core libertarian principles, I recommend reading Tim Lee and Cord Blomquist.

I appreciate the recognition and being thought of as a defender of “core libertarian principles.”

For more on the USTR’s Special 301 watchlist, check out this post by Mike Masnick at TechDirt.

I’ve enjoyed CNBC documentary reports like “The Age of Wal-Mart,” which explored not only the business of Wal-Mart but also its effect on small business, how it saves low-income families much-needed money, and both the positive and negative effects on our culture.

Compare this to “Marijuana Inc.” This new report fails to explore the impact of marijuana use on individuals, families or communities. It also ignores the crime created by prohibition of marijuana and fails to draw the obvious parallel to alcohol prohibition.

Instead, this piece reports banal factoids, like how even “normal people” in California are learning how to grow pot because it’s very profitable. I can’t help but think that this sort of verbiage is evidence of a anti-pot bias on the part of the producers that kept them from asking hard questions or exploring some of the complexities of this issue—the very stuff that would have made this report even somewhat compelling.

I would be willing to excuse a one-sided, non-comprehensive look at the marijuana industry if it illuminated any aspects of the industry or the policy debate that I was unfamiliar with, but “Marijuana Inc.” fails on that front as well. Somehow I had already heard that California has marijuana growers and dispensaries.

In conclusion, FAIL.

My friend Seth Goldin sent me a link to an essay by John Hasnas, an Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, entitled “What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian.” The essay sums up my present feeling perfectly.

According to the site Today’s Big Thing:

An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you’ve ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.

This is priceless.

While I have my complaints about Google Webmaster Tools, I’m starting to the appreciate its beauty now that I’m face-to-face with its competitors.

I just got around to submitting the sitemap for my last project, the new Mercatus Center website, to Bing and Yahoo!  Bing’s user interface leaves a lot to be desired, but thanks Yahoo!’s website ownership verification system, I have yet to even see what their UI even looks like.  That’s right, after I downloaded their xml verification file, I was met with this:

If you have uploaded the verification file, please keep the file y_key_********.html on your site root http://mercatus.org and do not change the content (********).We will authenticate your site ownership by checking this file within 24 hours.

Because of this, the task of submitting my sitemap now takes two days instead of two minutes.  I need to remember to visit this page again, then submit the sitemap, and then visit the page again later to see if Yahoo! has any problems with any of the site’s URLs.  Why can’t Yahoo! just navigate to the address of the file, verify that it’s there, and then give me permission to submit a sitemap for the site?

I don’t claim to know much about the complexities of corporate management or what fostering a good “corporate culture” even means, but clearly Yahoo! has tremendous quality control issues. Its products aren’t even in the same league as its competitors because of the failure of engineers to simply do their jobs.

It’s a little thing, but it’s all the little things working right that’s made Google what it is today and those same things not working that’s made Yahoo! into the butt of jokes—and not just any jokes.  They’re the butt of nerd jokes.

From Dan Hayes at Reason.tv:

I have been waiting for Microsoft to release updates to Windows Media Center that would integrate Netflix and Hulu so that I could set my living room PC to boot straight into Media Center and view all of the media I want from there.  What a dream that would be for a nerd like me who loves TV and movies!  It would be great to be able to watch anything from the comfort of my couch using only a remote control.

But, of course, this is asking too much.

Last month, Microsoft incorporated Netflix into Media Center, but fell woefully short on bringing any sort of  TV-on-the-Internet to my TV.  Instead, Microsoft rolled out their “Internet TV” offering, which at first appeared to be dozens and dozens of popular shows along with a smattering of classic CBS-owned properties.  Upon further investigation, however, I found that all of the”Internet TV” offerings—with the classics being the only exception—were either promotional clips of those shows or interviews with the cast.

Grabbing whatever throw-away, nearly valueless properties that NBC and CBS had lying around isn’t the best way to roll out a new product feature, especially when Apple’s pay-per-download via iTunes and Hulu’s desktop client exist.  Microsoft new feature is 90% junk.

Despite all this, I was mildly enthused that every episode of the original Star Trek series was included in the roll-out.  This could have made up for my disappointment in the lack of Hulu support in Media Center if it weren’t for Microsoft’s method of delivering commercials.  Microsoft only shows three ads during the 42 minutes of program time an average episode takes up, however, those ads are over twice the volume of the programming.  So watching Kirk and Bones engage in gladiatorial combat is interrupted by booming ads for the Cadillac CTS, making the viewing experience incredibly annoying for me, and nearly totally intolerable for my poor girlfriend.

So, despite the fact that Windows runs on somewhere around 90% of U.S. computers and the XBOX 360—a potential media center— is attached to over 31 mllion televisions, Microsoft will almost certainly lose the battle for the living room.  Hulu, Apple, or some other dark horse competitor will capture this market push the cable operators off their perches as near-monopoly providers of television programming.  Why?  Because even thought Microsoft has such a strong advantage, they are incapable of offering their customers a quality experience in all but a few product categories.

Instead of offering full-length episodes and funny clips of shows like Hulu, Microsoft offers mostly promotional materials that bury the good content.  Instead of making commercial more tolerable by making them brief and infrequent, Microsoft has made them a booming distraction that makes their television offering close to unwatchable.  How anyone at Microsoft could have approved this deeply flawed product is beyond me.

While companies like Apple are redefining what it means to offer a quality customer experience, Microsoft continues churn out unpolished mediocrity.  I feel like a teacher who repeatedly gets essays from a student who simply refuses to read his own writing—typos and flagrant erros abound.  All the market share in the world (which Microsoft nearly has) can’t make up for that.

UPS is trying to foist bad regulation on FedEx. Why? Because FedEx isn’t subject to the same labor regulations as UPS, which means that UPS pays a lot more for labor than FedEx. So instead of working to repeal the bad labor laws that are hurting its business, UPS wants to spread those laws to FedEx, screwing us all in the process.

Working in the non-profit world means I deal with a small budget for new media promotion, but I still have big expectations placed on me for getting our research work out to as many people as possible.  I’ve found that Twitter has been a great promotions tool because it allows you to find people interested in the topics you write about as well as folks interested in people or groups similar to you.  Twitter makes it easy to find your audience and to do it quickly.

But to get thousands of quality followers who are really interested in what you’re saying, you’re best off staying away from the dozens of “gurus” out there.  Instead, you can use the simple and nearly free solutions available that can save you time and expose your tweets to a larger and larger audience.

Twitter is a very new phenomenon, so there doesn’t seem to be a single service out there that does everything I need to grow my Twitter accounts.  So, I use this group of tools to automate my tweets, track the traffic I get from Twitter, and grow my follower numbers:

HootSuite (Free)

This service allows us to schedule tweets, which is crucial as you’re never going to be able to create a routine around tweeting every couple of hours.  Instead, figure out what you want to promote, then site down once a day to schedule your tweets so they’ll trickle out throughout the day.  This spacing out of tweets throughout the day is crucial as most Twitter users check their feeds frequently—maybe a handful of time a day.  So, scheduling your Tweets allows  you to always be among the few dozen more recent tweets in most users feeds.

Hootsuite will also allow you to enter in an RSS feed, so new blog posts and other new publications are posted automatically along with a shortened URL link to the post, saving you more time.

I should note, however, that while RSS-to-Twitter tools are a time saver, they may not be the best strategy.  Making your tweets conversational and making sure they highlight the most relevant items of the day is the bare minimum for sustaining an audience—this isn’t likely to happen by dumping your RSS feeds into your account.  Instead, consider offering accounts that are solely RSS-to-Twitter powered for those who use Twitter as a substitute for RSS (useful for individual blogs or podcasts, for example) and maintain a hand-crafted account for users who have a general interest in your organization.

As I mentioned above, Hoot Suite also offers URL shortening.  This URL shortening—HootSuite uses ow.ly (get it?) as its shortening service—also allows Hootsuite to track all the folks clicking on the links you tweet out into the Twitter community.  This is also critical as website traffic tools like Google Analytics will see any incoming traffic from a cell phone or desktop Twitter client as direct traffic, not traffic from Twitter.com.  This means you could be grossly under estimating how frequently your tweets are converted into traffic for your website because programs TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop along with applications running on the BlackBerry or iPhone don’t register on your tracking software.  I found the Mercatus Center had more than 5 times the conversion rate previously estimated after switching to HootSuite.

TwitterMass ($24-$99 per month)

Once you’ve got a regular stream of quality tweets flowing, you need to let people know you’re talking about things they care about.  Thankfully, Twitter allows you to do this on-mass by following people.  This is powerful because when you follow someone, Twitter sends them a message, usually in the form of an email, letting them know that you’re following them.  This results in many of the folks checking out your profile and past tweets, and sometimes following you back.

TwitterMass allows you to follow folks in swaths of up to 50 people at a time.  You can do this one of three ways:

1. Follow people who are tweeting about a specific word or phrase like “Regulation” or “Federal Reserve”
2. Follow people who are tweeting about a specific word or phrase, but only if they’re in your local area (this works only for folks geo-tagging their tweets).
3. Follow people who are following another Twitter user.

The last item on this list may not be as intuitive as the first two, but it makes perfect sense.  If you’re trying to build an audience for a certain issue, following the folks who are already interested in another individual or group talking about that issue is the perfect place to start building your audience.  Someone out there has already built the audience you’re looking to reach, so why bother reassembling that crowd?

TwitterMass also lets you quickly drop folks you’ve followed, but who haven’t followed you back.  This is especially important as Twitter does limit the number of folks you follow based on the number of folks following you.  So, dropping those people who didn’t return the favor is the only way to keep growing your account.

Social Oomph (Free)

A few months ago, this was my tool of choice for scheduling tweets, but since HootSuite has integrated that feature and tracks the traffic resulting from those tweets, I’ve found that Social Oomph has lost a lot of its utility.  However, it still has a couple of feature worth looking into.  First, you can set this service to auto-follow anyone who follows you.  This is just plain polite in the world of Twitter and allows you to watch what everyone who’s following you is talking about.

Additionally, you can use Social Oomph to automatically send folks who follow you a Direct Message (visible only to them) that thanks them for the follow and maybe even refers them to a web page you’re trying to promote.  Right now, the Mercatus Center is asking its new followers to also check out our Facebook page, for example.

So, don’t trust the gurus when they say you need their expertise to be effective on Twitter.  You just need the right tools, a little setup time, and a consistent program of tweeting and following new people.

Happy tweeting!

For anyone looking to become a social media guru, I have to recommend this website that is simply chock-full of useful tips such as:

• Tip #425: Always include “Social Media Guru” in your Twitter bio. They won’t know unless you tell them!
• Tip #527: Always use a picture of a really hot model as your Twitter avatar. Everyone trusts attractive people!
• Tip #619: NEVER tweet about anything other than your affiliate marketing and how to get more Twitter followers. They wouldn’t be following you if they didn’t care about that stuff!

Here’s a YouTubings of a girl making a very silly MMMBOP lip-snych video in an Apple store. I like how cool that Apple Store employees are with her doing her hair-tossing dance in the middle of the store. Best Buy security would likely have removed her 30 seconds into the song.

This sort of super creepo cult of personality BS should not be taking place in America. The president is an elected official, not god-head of the union.

Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is some sort of high-concept art piece that’s attempting to show what it would be like if American culture had the same view of the presidency as North Korea?

After taking CNET’s recommendation, I installed Avira’s anti-virus package.  Now, after having the program pop-up ads (that beg me to buy the full version) crash other programs several times, I’m uninstalling the software.  This little annoyance isn’t just a small design flaw, it’s a critical mistake on the part of Avira.  Why?  Because their freebie has now alienated me from their product rather than enticing me to buy it—it’s probably going to be impossible for them to convince me to reinstall.

Additionally, I’m also a bit soured on CNET reviews after this, but I understand if the reviewer didn’t have the software installed long enough to see how bad the ads are.

If you want to be popular on the interwebs, you should have gotten started quite a while ago.  The folks at Pingdom plotted the top 50 most popular site online today against the years they were launched.  The trend isn’t exactly an affirmation of Web 2.o.  In fact, 15 out of the 50 were launched in either 1995 or 1996.

This proves one of the 22 “immutable laws of marketing” put forward by Al Reis and Jack Trout.  Essentially Reis and Trout assert that to be the market leader, you have to be first to establish yourself in a new market.

Google is the obvious exception to this, but perhaps they occupy a different market, at least of sorts, from a site like Yahoo!  Google is plain, simple search.  Yahoo! is all sorts of stuff jumbled together in an omni-portal.

Regardless, the list is worth looking at and worth considering as we all try to carve out our own niches online.

Kudos to Adam Karas for making the only comprehensible guide I could find on how to style DISQUS with CSS.

Karas makes this very easy, but I thought I would add a note for anyone using DIY Theme’s Thesis framework. Thesis will jive with this very easily, so long as you paste the header code into the “Header Scripts” box on the Thesis Options page under Appearance in the WordPress backend. Then, simply create a disqus-form.css file in the Custom folder where your custom.css and custom-functions.php file reside.

You’re done!

My first fan site! Check out CordisaBear.info

Thanks to Dan & Jerry.

My comments on the new Microsoft/Yahoo ad deal appears below. Please ignore the date.

Cross-posted at TechLiberation.com

I’ve been watching a lot of clips of Matt Berry, a popular British comedic actor, on YouTube lately.  Here’s a clip from Snuff Box that takes on the Mac vs. PC contraversy:

If you’re like me and you’re frustrated by having to switch between personal and business accounts when using tools like GMail or Google Analytics, the Cookie Swap add-on for Firefox is the solution. This is simply awesome as up until this point I’ve been using separate browsers for separate tasks, but I don’t like using anything other than Firefox. Now I don’t have to!

Next on my list of musical instruments to pick up: melodica and ukulele.

This is just plain awesome—everything about it.

I was cited along with Max Blecher, a top antitrust litigator with the firm of Blecher & Collins, and Paul Sweeting of themediawonk.com in a recent Reuters story on Hollywood and antitrust regulation.  You can check out the piece that was cited at TechLiberation.com.  The same piece was also cited by Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog.

I’m non-partisan—in the sense that I don’t know which party to dislike the most—but I do like competition and I especially like to see well-made websites. Enter NetBoots, a new political website service from the folks that brought you the “Ron Paul Revolution.”

It’s about time someone started offering off-the-shelf solutions for political sites. National campaigns regularly pay well into the five figures for sites that are essentially glorified blogs. Hopefully services like NetBoots will put an end to that and provide voters with better information.

Now we just need a political system that isn’t utterly broken.

Cameron English cited some work I did at my old gig over at CEI:

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Cord Blomquist somberly reminds us, “with video games as a precedent, other forms of ‘politically incorrect’ media could be next.”

This isn’t really about “hackers” per se, but about government transparency—the mission of the Sunlight Foundation. Elin’s presentation also full of great jokes at the expense of our highly broken government.

I think the best tidbit of knowledge from this is that Michael Jackson got the idea for the moonwalk from watching Marcel Marceau.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints that Drupal sites aren’t as pretty as WordPress sites, and I think these complaints are based on the fact that a lot of Drupal themes really are ugly.  But it occurs to me that this may be because there isn’t as large of a market for off-the-shelf premium Drupal themes.  Instead, there is a small pool of a few dozen commonly used themes for Drupal—most of which are hideous, blocky-looking monstrosities—and then there are custom-themed sites that look great that you don’t realize are Drupal sites.

Moral of the story, good Drupal sites don’t look like Drupal sites, because a well-done CMS theme shouldn’t contain clunky elements that tip off the user as to what CMS is being used.

Here are some Drupal sites that are definitely not ugly:

• Ubuntu
• Fox Searchlight
• Amnesty International
• MTV UK

Also, 43 Folders used to have a wonderful theme for Drupal implemented, but has since been sadly stripped down.  See its former glory:

Update 07/02/2009: Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian political group, just sent me an email about their new site, which happens to be built in Drupal and also not ugly.   In fact, it’s rather awesome looking.

Google is trying to speed up the web.  How?  By giving you a tool to see why your web pages are so damned slow.  Google penalizes you for slow load times already, so there’s already incentive to be as quick as possible, now it’s just gotten easier to get the speed you need.

So, check out PageSpeed, a Firefox addon.  It requires FireBug, which you should already have in your toolkit—it’s indespensible for bug fixing and for reverse-engineering someone else’s code, like a WordPress theme.  Anyway, good luck with the SEO gaming!

Increasingly I’m seeing having a bad website as a measure of an organization’s ability to recognize and deal with problems effectively.  By the looks of it, the Virginia Chamber doesn’t have the ability to deal with problems, or recognize that the teal and yellow monstrosity that is its public face to the world is a design and usability nightmare.  I’m interested in starting a business in the state of Virginia, but that sort of thing is nowhere to be found on this site.  But then again, neither is anything else.

Thankfully, my current employer recognizes the value on giving those with the greatest expertise on a subject the ability to make changes, which is why Mercatus.org will soon be a much better site.  If you haven’t seen my work at the Mercatus Center, check out Neighborhood Effects, Economic Recovery Digest, or the site for Tyler Cowen’s new book, Create Your Own Economy.  They’re not perfect sites, but they present information in an straightforward way while avoiding visual clutter and features for the sake of having features.  I think that’s something that others, like the VA Chamber, haven’t accomplished.

There are reports buzzing around the Internets that Microsoft’s new no-controller game system struggles to see darker-skinned folks. Apparently this has to do with the infrared technology not working well with skin that contains a lot of melanin, the pigmentation chemical in human skin.  This is interesting from a purely scientific point of view, but horrible for Microsoft PR.

But, it turns out that many of the report are over-blown.  Here’s a write-up from Gamezine.co.uk that shows that the problem isn’t as bad as others are making it out to be.  In fact, here’s proof-positive that the system is pretty color blind:

The system also work well with extremely white people, like Jimmy Falon.

This has to be one of the coolest projects I’ve seen with retro tech in a while, partly because of my affinity for the PCjr (pictured in the header cause it was my first computer), but also because this is a useful application of old tech. Using a PCjr to run Twitter could actually be practical, if one cares to run a power-hungry 25-year-old machine to use Twitter, that is.

Check out how Alex Grant breathed new life into his PCjr at Grantovich.net.

I blogged about the possibility that Hulu could be investigated for antitrust violation by the Obama administration at TLF in a post entitled “Should Hulu Brace for Antitrust Action?” and now I’m big in Hollywood. That is to say that S.T. Karnick at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood” blog linked to me.

Karnick states the case a little more strongly than I did in my original post:

Blomquist is right. As always, the overwhelming desire of socialists is for unlimited power. When socialists find a successful enterprise, their first instinct is to tame it—and if they fail at that, they will surely destroy it.

Whether or not “socialists” are wielding it, antitrust power is a dangerous regulatory tool that is overused and often abused.

Update services are used by search engines to keep their directories up to date.  By telling WordPress which update services it should be talking to—often referred to as “pinging”—you’ll ensure that search engines are aware of updates to your blog the instant they happen—or perhaps with a few millisecond delay.

You’ll find this under Writing in the Settings menu in the back-end of WordPress.  Once there, you’ll notice this service is already in the Update Services box:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

You can leave pingomatic in place, but you should add my full list of services, listed below.

UPDATE: Since I first published this post in February, I’ve updated my master list of update services—some of which are unverified.  But, there’s no harm in using them, so you have nothing to lose.  Drop these into the Update Services box and watch your traffic double:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://cullect.com/feed/ping

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://ping.blogg.de/

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.imblogs.net/ping/

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.mw.net.tw/RPC2

http://blog.with2.net/ping.php

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogoole.com/ping

http://blogoon.net/ping

http://blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://blogsdominicanos.com/ping

http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/pingRPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

http://blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://blogsnow.com/ping

http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://catapings.com/ping.php

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php

http://focuslook.com/ping

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping

http://imblogs.net/ping

http://j-ranking.com/ping.cgi

http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc

http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.amagle.com

http://ping.blogg.de

http://ping.blogoon.net/

http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://ping.fc2.com/

http://ping.gpost.info/xmlrpc

http://ping.kutsulog.net/

http://ping.namaan.net/rpc

http://ping.speenee.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.weblogs.se

http://ping.wordblog.de

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://pinger.onejavastreet.com

http://pingqueue.com/rpc

http://queerfilter.com/ping

http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rpc.britblog.com

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

http://rpc.newsgator.com

http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php

http://rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api

http://serenebach.net/rep.cgi

http://snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://wasalive.com/ping

http://weblogalot.com/ping

http://weblogues.com/RPC

http://xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://blogupdate.org/sverige/ping/

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/

http://pingoat.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://zing.zingfast.com

http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://www.weblogues.com

http://www.snipsnap.org

http://www.popdex.com

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://www.lasermemory.com

http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://www.catapings.com/ping.php

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.blogroots.com

http://www.blogpeople.net

http://www.a2b.cc

http://weblogues.com/RPC/

http://weblogues.com/ping/

http://wasalive.com/ping/

http://topicexchange.com

http://syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.twingly.com

http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping

http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/

http://rcs.datashed.net

http://popdex.com/addsite.php

http://ping.wordblog.de/

http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2

http://packetmonster.net/xmlrpc.php

http://newsblog.jungleboots.org/ping.php

http://mod-pubsub.org

http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://imblogs.net/ping/

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://hamo-search.com/ping.php

http://bulkfeeds.net

http://blogupdate.org/ping/

http://blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://blogpeople.net/ping

http://blogoon.net/ping/

http://blogoole.com/ping/

http://blogdb.jp

http://blog.goo.ne.jp

http://bitacoras.net/ping/

http://bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoles.net/notificacio.php

http://bblog.comping.php

http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

http://blog.youdao.com/ping/RP2

WordPress keeps a fairly good list of these service at the Codex, which is the technical lexicon for all things WP.  You can also find a link to this page on the Settings/Writing page within WordPress.

Using Smart Update Pinger plugin will ping these services only when you post the article not when you edit it—saving your server processing time.  This plugin also allows you to check its “smart-update-pinger.log” file in the wp-content folder to see if any services are refusing ping requests from your site.  You can remove these services as another way to save on processing time.

I have to acknowledge that much of what I’ve learned about content promotion on the web is thanks to Mr. James Dellinger.  Cranking up the update services, getting Quantified, using FeedBurner as an update service engine, and all sorts of other useful advice has come out of our conversations via Google Talk and over burritos at Chipotle (though I believe he had the crunchy tacos).

I don’t want it to appear that I’ve learned all of what I know from my own trial and error process—though much can be accounted for that way.

He is the Jedi Master and I am but a Padawan.

So you think you’ve got a site that’s optimized for search engines?  That might be true, but getting a second opinion is always a good idea.  You can find a second and even a third opinion using Web CEO and GoDaddy Traffic Blazer.

Web CEO provides all sorts of services.  The basic edition of the software is free and will give you information on keywords, seach engine submission, your current search engine rankings, the popularity of your links, and can even provide a fairly comprehensive audit of your site.

Traffic Blazer from GoDaddy does much of the same, but costs a bit of money.  I dropped the $50 for the middle-of-the-road plan and I’ve found it’s been worth it.  Many critics will argue the information at Traffic Blazer can be found elsewhere for free, but they fail to acknowledge the tools GoDaddy gives you as well as the fact that it’s quite difficult to find a lot of the information that GoDaddy has gathered together for you here.  There are a lot of blog search engine and general search engine submission lists, but most are outdate or incomplete.  GoDaddy’s is rock solid.

Here’s a great list of blog directories and RSS submission sites.  These are old-school, Yahoo!-style directories, but even old tricks drive traffic both through people using the directory and by putting more links out there on popular sites that point back to you.  Remember, search engines judge you by the number of links you have coming your way—often called “inbound links.”

Getting your blog listed on these sites can be time consuming, so if you work at a place with interns, grab them and get them going on this sort of project.  If they collect links of the results of their work, you can verify that your blog has been listed—it’s important to keep tabs on interns.

Tagging your posts online is vital.  Your post contains lots of keywords—words that people might be searching for—but may not contain every term relevant to the content you’ve produced.  Tags help you include more terms with your post and cue search engines to which terms in the post are most important, helping people who really want your content to find it.

Say, for example, that you’re writing a blog post about a new policy to come out of the White House, but you never actually mentioned President Obama within the text of the post.  Including “Obama,” “President Obama,” “Barack Obama,” and even “Barack Hussein Obama” could help you grab extra eyeballs who want to read about the latest news to come from the administration.

That said, how do you make this process quick, easy, and ensure you’re using the best tags for your post?  It’s simple with Simple Tags.  This plugin provides a set of menus that will drop into your posts, allowing you to click tags you’ve already used—referred to as “Local Tags”—as well as tags recommended by Yahoo! and Tag The Net.  By clicking on the tags you think are appropriate, Simple Tags will fill in the Tags box in WordPress quickly.

Also consider any popular mispellings of the terms in the content of your post.  Just like you should buy mispellings of your domain name and redirect them to the correctly spelled version, you should throw in mispelling of keywords for those who are spelling-challenged.  Google corrects spelling errors, but you’ll notice the best sites will appear in search results for even gross mispellings of keywords.

If you’re rocking a WordPress blog, it’s key that you change the permalink structure so that your URLs display both the date of the your blog posts as well as the title—search engines like new content and they want to identify that content.

The importance of this can’t be underestimated.  As seodesignsolutions.com says:

The value of a great title for SEO purposes is invaluable. The title is the first thing a search engine sees to determine (what is this page about) and how does it relate to the sites theme and the keywords contained within the page.

To use this sort of structure in WordPress, go to the Settings menu, select permalinks, and then select “Day and name” as your permalink structure.  Now just click “Save Changes” and you’re done.

I recommend sticking with simple solutions when they work, which is why I think selecting “Day and name” for your permalink structure is the way to go.  It’s one click, you’re getting about all you can expect to get from search engines, and it takes about 3 minutes to complete.

However, if you’re up for something for adventurous, you can read more about integrating categories and tags into your permalinks, be sure to consult the WordPress Codex and verify that your webserver is capable enough to handle what you’re throwing at it.

You may very well squeeze more traffic out of this by including, for example, category titles that are particularly well-trafficed key words.  However, if your titles are already accurate and complete descriptions of your content, this permalink complication can be avoided without any noticeable effect on your traffic numbers.

Here’s what I’m using for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on WordPress.  I’m hoping for comments on what I could be doing differently or in addition to these plugins to boost my PageRank and other search engine ranks.

All-In-One SEO Pack
This prevents search engines from indexing the same post twice, which harms your ranking.  The plugin stops Google and other engines from crawling through tags, categories, and author archives and instead has it simply crawl through posts in simple chronological order.

Google XML Sitemaps
This does what is says.  It builds a “site map” of your wordpress blog, which gives search engines, namely Google, a clear road map of your site and how it is structured.

Simple Tags
This is a great plugin that is actually more focused on Yahoo! than Google.  This allows users to quickly add tags to posts by suggesting what tags might be related to your post.  Tags are words that are related to your post, but may not appear in the text of the post.  So, if you’re writing about the stimulus package, it may suggest America “Recovery and Reinvestment Act” as a tag.  The tags it generates come from three sources: tags you’ve already used on your site, tags being used at Yahoo!, and “tag the net” another source for commonly used tags and keywords.

I welcome your comments and suggestions on this.

Google News Archive Search is a cool new feature my friend Steve Bice clued me in on today. The search tool allows you to look at a time-line for any search term.  Some random and amusing examples:

• George Washington
• Alexander the Great
• Prohibition
• Tyrannosaurus Rex
• Steve Wozniak

The time-line function is very intuitive.  Just click on a section to zoom-in.  Enjoy!

Brooke, my older sisters, tends to freak out about local news people—she freaks out like she’s seeing Clint Eastwood or Al Pacino.  Well, today the folks on the local news in La Crosse, Wisconsin showed by niece and nephews in a segment called “Mugshot of the Day,” which features pictures of people with mugs from what I can tell.  Check it out:

I blogged about the Sirius XM bankruptcy at TLF in a post entitled “Sirius XM Bankruptcy: Thank Washington for the Delay” and I’m happy to see that Mr. Masnick at TechDirt has linked to me.

Though many forces were acting against the success and sustainability of Sirius XM Masnick acknowledges that the federal government’s actions didn’t make matters any better:

The 18 months it took federal regulators to approve the merger between XM and Sirius, combined with the ridiculous restrictions that were put on the combined company significantly contributed to satellite radio’s troubles.

Well put. Thanks again for the props Mr. Masnick.

Chris Moody of the illustrious Cato Institute has some good advice on how to get the new media masses blogging, twittering, digging, stumbling and otherwise blabbering about your campaign.

Cato turned what would have been an old-media splash into a new media compaign by leveraging print ads with new media promotion and functionality.  Get the scoop on how they did it at K Street Cafe.

Oftentimes in working with WordPress I find that I don’t want things to be as automatic as they are by default. Or, more precisely, I want things to be automatic in a very custom way to fit my theme and design.

Excerpts have long annoyed me, but now I’ve found Advanced Excerpt by Bas van Doren.

If you’re running a site that uses a magazine-style grid layout I’ve found this plug-in to be especially useful.  I’m using Gazette Edition by Woo Themes, but I’ve modified it to make the pictures on the front page run the entire width of the previes boxes for each post.  But, when I did this I found that those posts without photos would be much shorter than those with photos and consequently look very silly.  I solved this with the Advanced Excerpt plugin-in.

After uploading and activating the plugin, the fix is fairly easy.  By creating an if/else statement in PHP, I was able to call up two different excerpt lengths.  If there is a photo, the excerpt is only 20 words.  But, if there isn’t a photo, the excerpt will be 100 words, which just about perfectly matches a post with a photo and 20 words of excerpt.

The calls look like this:

<?php echo strip_tags(the_advanced_excerpt(‘length=20&use_words=1&no_custom=1&ellipsis=%26hellip;&exclude_tags=img,p,strong,font’), ‘<a><strong>’); ?>

<?php echo strip_tags(the_advanced_excerpt(‘length=100&use_words=1&no_custom=1&ellipsis=%26hellip;&exclude_tags=img,p,strong,font’), ‘<a><strong>’); ?>

Both are part of larger statments, but you get the idea.  On my theme specifically I found that I had to repeat much of the code.  In my case this looked like this:

If photo, then get the photo, the date, and a short excerpt.

If no photo, the get the date, and get a long excerpt.

In your specific case you may have to repeat other things like calling the author name or the title.

If you have questions about the plug-in, feel free to contact me or its author.

I recently exported a MySQL database for a WordPress blog from GoDaddy and uploaded it to MediaTemple.  It was a pretty straight-forward process, but I noticed a few days after the import that many weird symbols start cropping up such as

”
“
•

If this happens to you, fear not!  You can simply access your MyPHPAdmin panel, click on the SQL tab, and run a very simple find and replace command.  Here are the commands I used for my WordPress site:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,’•’,'&#8211;’)

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,’“’,'&#8210;’)

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,’”’,'&#8221;’)

The command can also be expressed more generically as the following formula:

update [table_name] set [field_name] = replace([field_name],’[string_to_find]‘,’[string_to_replace]‘);

Thanks to Julian Sanchez at ArsTechnia for linking to my TechLiberation.com post “Eric Holder and Tech Policy,” which discusses President-elect Obama’s pick for Attorney General.

Julian linked to me as part of “When You Sleep,” a round-up of tech news stories.

I also loved Julian’s post “Can we get some better telecom shills please?” which covered a study I talked about yesterday at TechLiberation.com and was picked up by TechDirt.com.

Julian’s criticism of the “study” is very well thought out and unlike some of the commenters, I thought his shipping analogy was quite good.

Thanks to Mike Masnick at TechDirt for linking to my post on TechLiberation.com and quoting me in his post “Is Google Really Using 21x The Bandwidth It Pays For?”

In the post, I explain how a recent study put out by Precursor LLC claims to have calculated Google’s total bandwidth use declaring “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”

I point out that this claim true of any site on the web.  That’s why consumers pay for bandwidth too, along with all the peering arrangments that connect networks to other networks.  That’s why it’s called Internet.

Thanks to Declan McCullagh at CNET News for citing me in his piece about Obama’s AG Pick, Eric Holder.

Declan does a great run down of many of Holder’s stances on tech policy in “Obama’s attorney general pick: Good on privacy?”

I did a follow-up post talking about Holder’s stances on tech policy and why there may or may not be reason to hope he’ll be a step up from Ashcroft or Gonzales.  Check it out here or at TechLiberation.com.

My grandfather, Robert Blomquist, used to work in the ice house in his home town of New Albin, Iowa.  Some readers might remember that before refrigeration, ice was cut from lakes or rivers and packed into ice houses, essentially barns filled will sawdust or another such insulator, and later uncovered during the hot summer months.  These ice blocks were delivered to nearby homes to cool food stored in ice chests.

Whole industries relied on the harvesting, storage, transportation, and further storage of blocks of ice.  Ice saws were made and delivered, saw mills found markets for their otherwise useless dust, auto makers built insulated trucks to haul ice, and ice box makers lived a good life making insulted boxes will special trays for huge ice blocks.

Somehow, we let this industry fail, despite all of these jobs and other industries relying on the moving around big blocks of ice.  Yet, we didn’t see an ice-block-bankruptcy-fueled recession.

Today, the big three auto manufactures claims that if they fail, America will fail with them.  They claim that our GDP will drop precipitously, and we’ll be wishing that we had forked over the $25 billion to save ourselves from the auto-bankruptcy-fueled depression.

I don’t buy it.  Delaying the changes that come with advances in technology, process, methods and new competition doesn’t erase the fact that any of those changes happened, it only delays the adaption to those changes.

Just as I don’t pine for the days of blocks of ice, I don’t wax nostalgic about the glory days of Detroit.

America will adapt.  Just as the delivery men, ice cutters, saw mills, ice box makers, and others found ways to adapt to the changes that refrigeration brought, so too will American workers and manufacturers.  And we’ll be better off for it.

Google decided to change its Analytics software in several annoying ways.  Now when I login instead of being presented with all of the sites I regular check for CEI, I have a menu of choices that includes CEI, my personal sites, and techliberation.com (another blog for which I write).  Add a click to my journey to the information I want.

Once I’ve entered one of these accounts I see a menue of the sites there, but only five at a time.  There is a handy preview of many of the key stats, but that doesn’t offset how annoying it is to look at the menu of sites I manage for work (11 of them in total).  Confusingly, you have to select to see 35 lines at a time to see all 11 sites, because each site occupies two lines.  Previewing 10 lines doesn’t work, neither does 20, so I have to pick the next choice, which is 35.

Now I’m three or four clicks in and I’m just getting to the stats.  This would all be fine if I could simply bookmark this portion of my Analytics account and then jump to it right away, but the URL doesn’t contain information like how many sites you’d like to see at once, etc.  So, I’m left only with the option of doing lots of clicks and being needlessly annoyed.

Here, in the stats, is where you find the postive changes.  Finally they’ve added custom reports beyond the glorified bookmarking of the older method of “saving” reports.  These custom reports will be a big time saver to me and I’m sure to other managers of online properties who regularly report on performance.

So, thanks for the custom reports Google, this is a big improvement, but changing the menu navigation without giving users any options for customizing their view just doesn’t make sense.  The time I will now spend loading and clicking through pages would be better spent doing something else, like analyzing my traffic.

I faced a Window similar to this today after swapping out my motherboard, processor, and RAM from my old computer.

I dreaded the notion of having to call Microsoft and go through the registration process, but I have to say it wasn’t nearly as painful as I had thought.  I was routed to a call center after speaking in 9 groups of 6 digits into the phone.  This was tedious, but I turned it into a personal challenge of diction and accuracy and passed with flying colors.  After MS again told me my number was not valid (I had just been told by MS on the Internets) I was routed to a human.

The woman who helped me was very pleasant, and a very fast 10-key typist.  I rattled off the 54 digit code to her and she rattled one back to me in pretty short order.  I typed in the key code (again, flawless on the first try) and I was genuine again.  Oh what a feeling!

As mundain as this all sounds, it’s worth noting when a company’s DRM strategy isn’t as horrible as it may seem.  Sure, letting me installing Windows XP left and right without a verification would have removed this 10 minute hurdle from my day, but I have to respect that MS needs to get paid.  I have to respect someone making the coin.  It was only 10 minutes and its worth it to know that MS gets what’s due to them.

BTW, I’ll be posting pictures here when my new media center PC is done.  It’s going to look much more rad when I pair it up with a Samsung 46″ HDTV.

I got this email from Google last Thursday:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Seems like more advertising should go to Google as a its a more trackable and more valuable buy during these hard times.  Certainly ad spending will shrink, but one would think the shift of dollars toward online buys would make up for the pie being a bit smaller.  It’ll be interesting to see if Google has to do its first layoff during this recession.

Carl Cameron of Fox News reports that Sarah Palin lacked even the most basic knowledge of government, geography, or history. This could be McCain staff backbiting and blaming, but based on her abysmal interview performances I’m inclined to believe it’s true.

Unless Republicans have gaps in their knowledge, this woman will not be the future of their party.

Google is said to have monopoly power in search, but even if that were the case it wouldn’t affect the real market they are competiting in—advertising.  New video sites like Hulu along with giants like Facebook and MySpace represent real competitors for ad dollars.  Google may dominate in search, but it’s one of many in the realm of advertising.

Thanks to Heartland for the interview!

Has anyone else experienced the problem of your feedburner subscribers vanishing one day and then reappearing the next?  I not only find this annoying, but it’s also embarassing when the number of readers displayed on OpenMarket.org drops from 340 to 200 in one day.  For regular readers, it looks like we’ve just offended a third of our audience.  This has happened two days in a row for me now, both on Tuesdays.

Is there an alternative to FeedBurner that’s better about keeping good stats and that won’t report bunk numbers like this?

As if Linden Labs didn’t already get more press than it deserves, I’ve become part of the hype.  Linden introduced zoning laws into Second Life recently and Aleks Karnick was kind enough to quote me.

Read the full story at the Heartland Institute’s Infotech & Telecom News.

Bureaucrash, the activist arm of CEI, has started a new social network called, you guess it, Bureaucrash Social.  After only 30 hours we have nearly 250 members, which isn’t a bad start.  Facebook wasn’t built in a day and what some members are already calling “Libertarian Facebook” will continue to grow over the coming weeks.  I hope anyone who is interested in limited government and individual freedom joins today.

Lately the good folks at Bureaucrash have really been giving us a lot of cool tech related podcasts. Last week they brought us an interview with Cory Doctorow. This week a guide to online privacy. Topics include:

• Email Encryption
• The Onion Router (TOR)
• KeePassX
• TrueCrypt
• Pidgin & OTR Plugin for Pidgin
• Adium
• Incognito

Listen to it at Bureaucrash.com.

Thanks to Stefanie Olsen at CNET’s News.com for giving me a shout out in her piece about McCain’s pick for VP, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  Little is known now about Palin’s track record on tech and she has no record on many national tech policy issues.  However, as I told Stefanie, we do know that Palin came out again Real ID, a policy that would sacrific our privacy in order to gain a false sense of security.

I hate to burst a theory, but Adam is wrong to say that PC gaming is on the decline. But I understand how appearances can be deceiving. Walk into your average GameStop or Best Buy and you’ll see row after row of console games placed front and center. You’ll usually find the PC games stuck in a corner with routers and external hard discs.

Retail numbers also support the theory that PC games are on the decline. NPD Group says that while North Americans spent $18.8 billion on game software in retail stores last year, just $910 million went to PC games, down from $970 million the year before. So, PC games are roughly 5% of retail sales. It sounds a lot like a death nil.

But retails isn’t the only place games are sold these days. Just like iTunes and its online component—the cleverly named iTunes Store—have revolutionized the way music is sold, so too have PC game makers revolutionized software sales in recent years.

My most recent gaming experience has been barreling through Half-Life 2 and Portal as I make my way through the Orange Box. When I installed the Orange Box, a package of 5 games by Valve Software, I wasn’t just installing games, but also a game-buying service. I’m now a proud registered user of Steam, one of the largest online game buying services. The Boston Globe recently published a story covering the rise of Steam:

Today Steam sells more than 250 games by Valve and other PC game publishers. The service has 15 million registered users, and posted 2007 sales growth of 158 percent. Valve cofounder Gabe Newell recently said he expects Steam sales will soon surpass Valve’s retail store revenues.

Even with services like Steam around, aren’t the consoles swimming in dough after the release of mega-hits like Grand Theft Auto IV? Not when you factor in the subscription fees being forked over on a monthly basis by those who have given over countless hours of their lives to massive multi-player online games (MMOs).

GTA IV sold 8 million copies in its first month, but that’s nothing compared to the 10 million people who pay $15 to Blizzard Entertainment each month to player World of Warcraft. Blizzard has been enjoying GTA-level sales every month for years. Last year Blizzard made a very cool $1.2 billion—with a “B.”

The Boston Globe piece also points out another source of income for the PC gaming industry, cubicle escapism:

Then there are the easy-to-play “casual games” like Scrabble or Bejeweled. Distributed on the Internet, such games turn up on the computers of bored office workers around the world. Casual gaming on personal computers generated $1.7 billion in revenue last year, up 20 percent from 2006, according to the Casual Games Association. Despite the games’ simplicity, players find them irresistible, with many playing for seven or more hours per week.

The piece goes on to quote Kristen Salvatore, editor in chief at PC Gamer magazine, who says “Casual gamers are people that don’t know yet that they’re hardcore gamers.”

Between retail, online distribution, subscriptions, and casual gaming the PC game software industry grew to $11.3 billion in total sales—21.5% more than $9.3 billion in 2006. Consoles grew as well and they grew more, from $9.4 billion to $14.1 billion, a jump of %50. So, while it’s true that consoles are pulling ahead of PCs, but both markets are healthy and growing. Pirates be damned!

The rights of homeowners to form associations is under attack in Maryland, where some residents believe that the state should forbid homeowners associations HOAs from enforcing some community guidelines.

The Post Express and the Washington Examiner both published an AP story last week outlining the frustrations that some Maryland residents have over not being able to hang their laundry outside—an action that’s forbidden by their HOAs.

One homeowner and clothesline enthusiast can’t let this injustice (to her) stand. Wei Wang, was cited in the AP piece saying that Maryland should pass a law “that forbids HOAs from preventing people from hanging laundry outside as soon as possible.”

Though I sympathize with Wang’s frustrations, this complaint shouldn’t be brought to the state. HOAs are private, voluntary organizations that residents become a part of in order to ensure that their community adheres to certain guidelines. Though these guidelines can sometimes be cumbersome, they can also prevent eyesores like perpetually uncut lawns or bright pink siding on the neighbor’s house—things that I would find amusing, but others may find distasteful.

Voluntary rules and restrictions are a part of life in a free society. We agree to wipe down equipment at the gym after each use, we consent to wearing stuffy clothes to the office, and we sign long-term contracts for everything from cell phone plans to car leases. When we don’t like the terms, we can renegotiate or seek a competitor—inviting in the authority of the state only serves to undermine our most basic right to private contract.

It seems that Wang tried renegotiation, but failed.

Wang originally protested the rule of her HOA recounting that she “Wrote them a letter and explained to them that hanging laundry outside is a good way to save energy.” A good appeal to reason, but her HOA decided it valued laundry-less backyards more than helping the nation grapple with high energy prices.

Thankfully for Wang she lives in a society where freedom allows for competition, even among HOAs. Other communities don’t have rules forbidding outdoor clotheslines, leaving her with other options. She could also consider hanging clothes indoors, something my mother did for years with the aide of a very affordable wall-mounted retractable clothesline. These options would allow Wang to get what she wants without asking the State of Maryland to take away the right of other people to agree on community standards.

Perhaps Wang will regret her statement when her neighbor lobbies for a law striking down her HOA’s restrictions on keeping venomous snakes as pets or installing large, outdoor speakers in order to enjoy Pantera in the front lawn. Hanging clothes inside may then seem like a reasonable restriction.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that the best test of truth “is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market…” But today many are turning away from this theory, calling for greater government intervention in media ownership and the perceived lack of fairness in the press.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), a vocal critic of the free market for ideas, recently stated, “We really do literally have five or six major corporations in this country that determine for the most part what Americans see, hear and read every day.”

Unfortunately for the Senator, we really don’t. According to Ben Compaine, author of Who Owns the Media?, from 1985 to 1995 the top ten media companies went from raking in 38 percent of media revenue to 41 percent—not exactly the kind of mass consolidation the pundits would have you fear.

But revenues — the traditional means for measuring media market diversity—are not the best way to gauge the diversity of opinions in the American marketplace of ideas. With the advent of the Internet and the new national pastime, blogging, media revenue models are being completely redrawn.

Arianna Huffington’s aptly named Huffington Post claims to draw in 4.7 million unique users a month (Nielson estimates show about 1.5 million). Fortune has quoted an unnamed source estimating that Huffington can expect her team of less than 50 staffers to haul in $7.5 million this year.

Compare that to the other post—the Washington Post. The Washington Post Company reported that in 2007 the Post took in a comparatively whopping $496.2 million in advertising revenue. Yet its average daily circulation totaled 649,700, half of Nielson’s conservative estimate of Huffington’s reach.

Lean, web-based companies—which have much lower operating costs and use far fewer dead trees to disseminate their ideas—are left underrepresented in current media market measurement for no other reason than their relative efficiency. If we substituted eyeballs reached for dollars spent the already robust picture of the media market would show even less evidence for concern.

STILL, MANY BELIEVE there is need for regulation because Americans still receive the bulk of their news over the airwaves. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin has said that broadcasters should be required to give both sides of political issues to listeners, while Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has said she plans to look into reviving the “Fairness Doctrine.”

The doctrine, abandoned in 1985, placed political speech by broadcasters under the scrutiny of the Federal Communications Commission. FCC regulators mandated broadcasters “make reasonable judgments in good faith” on how best to present all sides of controversial issues.

Conservatives on Capitol Hill have banded together to oppose such a revival of the doctrine while pundits and free speech advocates have railed against the reinstatement of rule, citing the 1984 Supreme Court decision that noted that the Fairness Doctrine had a “chilling effect” on speech.

While it’s true that the Fairness Doctrine did result in many broadcasters shying away from political speech altogether, few have been quick to point out the obvious flaw in Durbin and Feinstein’s thinking. Replacing the marketplace of ideas with a board of overseers doesn’t do anything to rid the world of bias. It only empowers the bias of the overseers.

Economist James Buchanan clinched the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his keen observation that human beings don’t check their self-interested ways at the door when entering the halls of Congress or the offices of any of Washington’s many bureaucracies. Instead, commissioners and congressman alike act to advance their position, accrue more power, and expand the mission of their respective offices.

This is especially true of the FCC. The commission, created 80 years ago to regulate the fledgling radio industry, now regulates nearly all electronically disseminated media to some degree. But the recent explosion of choice in the media marketplace has left the commission grasping at straw men.

Worse yet, its most recent round of regulations seek to solve its own bad rules with additional layers of rules. Rather than freeing the airwaves from restriction after restriction, and thereby increasing broadcast competition, it seeks to dictate what can be said and who can say it. Instead of opening up the Internet to more service providers, it seeks micromanage the global network.

Most recently it has attacked cable providers’ ability to make private contracts and now seeks to make termination fees for violating any communication service contract illegal. The commission isn’t just seeking to regulate wireless and wired transmissions, but the fundamentals of the marketplace itself.

Were the FCC given the power to police political speech for any lack of fairness, it’s safe to assume that violations would be found in droves, because that’s the whole point of the agency.

WITH A DEMOCRATICALLY controlled Senate and potential Democratic White House in 2009, current commissioner Michael Copps may soon hold the title of chairman, giving the FCC a 3-2 Democratic majority.

This should be pleasant news for Senator Dorgan, whom Copps said has, “Struck a blow for localism and diversity in a media environment crying out for more of both.”

Copps is right—in at least one sense. Consumers are crying out for diversity and local content are getting more of both in spite of government regulations.

A Chairman Copps is the last thing the American media market needs. Instead, it needs an Alfred Kahn for the digital age. Kahn dismantled the corrupt and anti-consumer Civil Aeronautics Board, earning him a coveted place in history as the final chairman of an unnecessary agency.

Channeling Justice Holmes, Kahn once remarked when speaking about his victories at the CAB that “The key point is that the market decides, not a bunch of know-it-alls in Washington.” That’s true for airlines and doubly true for free speech.

This article originally appeared at the American Spectator.

The All Things D blog at AlllThingsD.com cited my post at TechLiberation.com:

As Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google rolls forward, it’s worth asking if any outcome of the suit will change the situation for Viacom. In fact, were the impossible to happen, like a judge shutting down YouTube altogether, Viacom may be worse off.

See the quote at AllThingsD.com or read the full post at TechLiberation.com.

The Comcast Center, Pennsylvania’s tallest skyscraper, is a monument to the success of one of Philadelphia’s largest companies. Comcast employs nearly two thousand Philadelphians and its foundation has given over $30 million to charities in Philadelphia and across the country. Despite Comcast’s ascendancy, the cable provider remains vulnerable – yet its greatest threat is not from Baby-Bell competitors but from lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

Comcast has come into politicians’ crosshairs because of its efforts to slow customers’ peer-to-peer file sharing. On Jan. 8, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced Comcast is under federal investigation, facing millions of dollars in fines.

“Network neutrality” supporters are in a frenzy, calling for congressional action. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is on the verge of introducing legislation imposing neutrality on all Internet service providers. But net neutrality laws threaten to hobble the Internet as we know it.

Net neutrality would make Comcast’s actions illegal – but non-neutral practices, like slowing down peer-to-peer traffic, are perfectly reasonable ways to manage networks. Comcast targets the popular file sharing program Bittorrent, speeding up overall traffic by making networks smarter and more efficient.

Though Bittorrent is a hotbed for swapping pirated media, it’s beginning to be used for legitimate commercial purposes. But that doesn’t mean every Internet Service Provider should be required to give customers all-you-can-eat Bittorrent access. Besides, Comcast’s user contract expressly bans file sharing. Why should Congress force companies to let customers break voluntary agreements?

Upgrades are desperately needed to expand broadband pipelines, and Comcast is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to do just that. Until the overhaul is completed, curbing some transfers helps relieve congestion so customers can browse the Web smoothly.

Still, many broadband customers are angry that Comcast is limiting Bittorrent and refusing to explain its techniques. But revealing these details would fuel the arms race with pirates, who have already taken to encryption and other techniques to get around file sharing restrictions.

Instead of more regulation, Congress should give us genuine Internet choice. Disgruntled Comcast customers could simply switch providers, but Americans have too few ISP choices thanks to laws protecting existing providers and FCC regulations blocking new wireless technologies.

Adding neutrality proposals to this already skewed market makes for a one-two punch to consumers. While existing regulations bar new information “pipes” from reaching homes and businesses, neutrality regulations ignore that the existing pipes are only so big and can’t always feed the file sharers’ appetite. When peer-to-peer programs cause Web surfing to crawl during peak hours, network management lets ISPs make sure customers don’t have to face slowdowns. Without smart management, today’s occasional Internet hiccups will swell into full-blown traffic jams – the online equivalent of a rush-hour pileup.

Speaking of traffic, asking ISPs to treat all data the same is akin to forcing ambulances to wait in traffic during emergencies. Life-saving technologies like remote surgery must communicate using network “expressways” so information gets to its destination swiftly and reliably. Likewise, digital voice and online gaming traffic needs to traverse networks rapidly.

Net neutrality is a death sentence for these popular Internet activities. It prevents ISPs from letting time-sensitive information jump ahead of Web surfing, where an extra millisecond goes unnoticed.

In coming years, gigabytes will give way to terabytes, and then exabytes of data. Providers will have to spend billions preparing for this “bandwidth crunch.” But consumers don’t have to foot the whole bill; video services like YouTube or iTunes could share the cost. These media-rich Web sites push lots of data through the tubes, earning lots of money from ad revenues and fees. Such sites have good reason to work out priority pipelines with Internet providers so viewers can watch their videos without jitters or long load times.

Under net neutrality, however, such creative arrangements would be illegal, and the cost of new upgrades would fall squarely on customers’ shoulders. Neutrality proponents purport to care about consumers, but higher Internet bills benefit no one.

In a free market, consumers choose their online provider, and businesses select which services to offer. Americans want faster Internet access, but Internet providers will shun investment if they can’t even control their own networks.

Global interconnectivity has been a boon for economic growth and free expression – but if net neutrality is legislated, technological progress will slow, undermining these tremendous benefits. The Internet’s future should rest in the hands of innovators, not Washington bureaucrats.

Originally Published in the Philadelphia Bulletin, written with Ryan Radia

In less than a decade, Google has grown from a Ph.D. research project to be the indispensable tool of the information economy. With the objective of making all information instantly and universally accessible, Google now controls the principal index to the internet and the email traffic of millions, while adding new features such as maps replete with street-level photos cataloging the non-virtual world.

How should governments around the world treat this data? Is it a great new resource for national security and law enforcement, or should we protect it from the prying eyes of bureaucrats? Should private companies be reigned in by regulation, or will government action only serve to undermine the modicum of privacy we maintain in the information age?

On January 16th Americas Future Foundation (AFF) will be hosting a roundtable to discuss these and other questions.

The panelists:

• Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
• Amber Taylor of O’Melveny & Myers LLP
• Jim Harper of the Cato Institute
• Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (me)

The event will take place at the Fund for American Studies, 1706 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, near Dupont Circle. Drinks at 6:30; Roundtable begins at 7:00. Roundtables are free for AFF members, $5 for non-members. So join today! Please RSVP to Cindy Cerquitella at cindy@americasfuture.org.

Hopefully we’ll see some TLF fanboys at the event!

It’s been ten years since then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton published a book on government policy and children with a title that soon became her catch phrase: “It Takes a Village.” When she used this saying in the book and related speeches, it was clear that by “village,” she meant a plethora of government programs and mandates to make sure parents were raising their kids correctly.

Today, Clinton’s political title has changed, and she doesn’t use the phrase much anymore. But one of her recent big-government crusades shows that her fundamental distrust of both parents and the private sector remains the same.

Over the past two years, Clinton has become a sort of “cultural warrior” against video games she deems too violent. While barely saying a critical word about the politically powerful sectors of movies, television and music, she has blamed violence in video games for a host of society’s ills and supported legislation cracking down on video game makers and retailers.“We know that violent video games have an impact on children,” Clinton said in an interview with CBSNews.com. She added that “a 7 year old should not be able to walk into Wal-Mart and buy” a violent video game.

The distrust of both parents and the private sector in these statements is breathtaking, and also displays the ignorance of Clinton and other politicos of how video games and American families work. What family do you know that lets their seven-year-old go shopping at Wal-Mart alone?

And many parents utilize a private ratings system developed by the video game industry called the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to determine what is appropriate for their children. According to a survey by the Hart Research polling firm, 85 percent of parents whose children play video games use the ESRB regularly to monitor their children’s games. And 90 percent are satisfied with the ratings system.

But unfortunately, Clinton isn’t the only politician who wants to substitute her judgment for that of American parents. Some on the right have joined the New York Senator in her “it takes a village” approach to families and video games. In November, GOP Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia joined Clinton and Democrat Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana in a letter to the ESRB griping about “ultra-violent” games and implicitly threatening government action.

Clinton and others have supported new legislation — on top of general anti-obscenity laws already on the books — that would single out video game retailers for punishment and result in government control over the ratings system.

To be sure, there are some games that feature gratuitous violence, and the video game ratings aren’t foolproof. Just as there are some “PG” movies that arguably should be rated “R”, there are some games with mature elements that may get a lesser rating than “M” — the rating that means that games have mature elements and may not be appropriate for children under 17. Parents should monitor their kids’ video game selections just as they should scrutinize all media their children are exposed to.

And conservatives — who are rightly skeptical of government’s ability to make things better — should be wary of increased government intervention in this area, particularly the involvement of the federal government. Many of the video game bills range from impractical to counterproductive. Moreover, depending on who is in charge of Congress or the presidency, government intervention in the private ratings system could result in the blackballing of games deemed to be “politically incorrect.”

A bill sponsored by Clinton and Bayh, for instance, would subject retailers of video games to big fines for selling M-rated games to children younger than 17, even if an employee made an honest mistake. Meanwhile, other venues that make inappropriate material available to minors, such as movie theaters that let kids into R-rated movies, would not be subject to these fines.

Under bills like these, the word “violence” could be defined so broadly that it could hinder the development of the growing number of video games celebrating the heroic deeds of the American military. In fact, the very vagueness of terms like “graphic violence” has caused federal judges to strike down several state and city laws similar to Clinton’s bill as infringements of the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

A recent campaign by liberals against games based on a popular Christian adventure series should serve as a cautionary tale about increased government involvement. Based on the best-selling Left Behind series of novels co-authored by social conservative activist Tim LaHaye, Left Behind: Eternal Forces has players join a paramilitary Christian organization to fight the Global Community Peacekeepers and convert bystanders along the way.

The game’s plot line inspired howls of protest from liberal groups. They demanded that stores like Wal-Mart not carry the game, and also pushed for an M rating because of what they claimed was excessive violence motivated by religion. “It pushes a message of religious intolerance,” said one critic leading the campaign against the game.

The game was eventually rated “T” for “teen,” a less severe rating than M, by the ESRB. But imagine if the government interfered with the ratings system and critics of the game were ultimately in charge.

Even among the M-rated games, there are selections that parents might think would be suitable and even valuable for older kids. The World War II-themed Company of Heroes and World War II Combat: Road to Berlin are violent and bloody, because war itself is violent and bloody. But just as parents might take their teenagers to see the R-rated “Saving Private Ryan,” they might let their kids play these M-rated games for the same reason: to teach them about the bravery of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers serving in the U.S. military, and that sometimes freedom has to be fought for.

Reagan-appointed federal appeals court judge Richard A Posner had some words to chew on in striking down an Indianapolis ordinance restricting youth access to games that contained “graphic violence.” Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Posner declared, “To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

But if Hillary Clinton and other politicians get involved –and somehow the laws are upheld as constitutional — we could see history cleansed of violence by a new bureaucracy enforcing a code of political correctness. The sacrifices of average American men and women would be replaced by political elites “negotiating” wars — a virtual Yalta conference.

And with video games as a precedent, other forms of “politically incorrect” media could be next. Instead of reviving the “Fairness Doctrine,” opponents of conservative talk radio could conceivably say a program should be banned because “violent” topics are sometimes covered, and it is broadcast at times when children can listen.

That’s why we should oppose proposals creating a federal “village” to control video games, and realize that to guide children through all forms of media, it ultimately takes a family.

This Op-Ed originally appeared in Human Events.

When they select video games, comic books, movies, music, radio programs, and television shows for their children to experience, parents have a wealth of information available to them. Through government content codes, private ratings systems, and a variety of other measures, parents have a broad universe of choices between ratings systems. This paper explores the nature of ratings systems for movies, comic books, television, radio, and video games.

We find that, while no media ratings system can or will ever achieve perfection, the best rating systems have three attributes: They attempt to describe, rather than prescribe, what entertainment media should contain; they are particularly suited to their particular media forms; and they were created with little or no direct input from government. We also find that ratings systems collapse, it simply results in the creation of better ratings systems.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board system for evaluating computer games works better than most. It consists of five basic ratings ranging from Early Childhood—largely educational programs for kindergarteners—to Adults Only games with serious violent or sexual content. Descriptive, easy-to-understand phrases—from “comic mischief” to “strong sexual content”—accompany the ratings. Parents can tell, at a glance, exactly what they might find objectionable in a video game. Congress has held hearings on the video game industry and threatened to regulate content, but the system emerged almost entirely as a result of voluntary private action, and has worked well for parents, children, and software producers.

On the other hand, in the radio market, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposes vague but sweeping content guidelines over almost all broadcasts. The threat of FCC-imposed fines has done nothing to give parents greater control over their children’s radio listening habits—they have virtually no way to protect their children from adult material like explicitly sexual “shock jocks” and violent hip-hop lyrics. Heavy regulation and the absence of a private ratings system have made radio worse for parenting.

Comic books publishers long subjected themselves to an industry “code” that specified exactly what they could and could not publish. While officially a voluntary industry standard, the comics code came into existence following a series of hearings that made it clear that Congress would impose a code if the industry did not write one. The resulting code became so incredibly specific that it once forbade comics from featuring werewolves, vampires, and zombies. The Comics Code collapsed during the 1990s as a relic of a more prudish era, but the two largest comics publishers, Marvel and D.C., adopted informative, multi-tiered ratings systems, on their own, that provide parents more information about content than the Comics Code ever did.

Radio content regulation and the Comics Code fail because they provide very little information—none at all in the case of radio—and attempt to set particular limits over media that, by their very nature, should facilitate a wide range of different types of experiences for a wide range of different types of audiences. Neither takes the nature of the medium into account.

To work, however, industry ratings systems do not always need the complexity that characterizes the video game system. The music industry’s Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics sticker and similar “Explicit” warnings on Internet music downloads are good examples of a simple rating system that works well. Because songs tend to be short, and artists’ bodies of work easy to investigate, parents can often simply listen to songs themselves if they have any concerns. While the system is simple, it works pretty well. And it originated largely as a result of voluntary industry action.

Ultimately, ratings systems cannot influence the content of what gets produced in the long run. Even the highly prescriptive Comics Code did nothing to stop the emergence of graphic novels with adult themes and situations. Those who want to “clean up” media without unconstitutional government censorship will likely do best to simply avoid buying cultural products they dislike.

Well thought-out ratings systems, particularly those shaped through market forces rather than government mandates, can prove a valuable tool for parents, but they are just that—tools. No ratings system can replace good parenting.

This Study is Available In-Full at CEI.org

California resident Timothy Smith has sued Apple and AT&T over the iPhone, accusing them of illegal monopolistic behavior. The iPhone is locked to the AT&T cell network and Apple is accused of writing software rendering hacked iPhones inoperable. If we want innovators to create the next revolutionary device, frivolous lawsuits like this must be stopped in their tracks.

Usually, companies accused of monopolistic behavior have a high market share, like Microsoft or Google. But AT&T has less than a third of the U.S. mobile market, and the iPhone marks Apple’s first attempt at manufacturing a phone.

The suit claims that locking phones to networks is a monopolistic business practice. But how is designing a phone to work with a network monopolistic? Apple chose AT&T as its carrier partner, so iPhone software is coded to operate with the AT&T network. Some phone manufacturers sell an unlocked version of their cell phones, but Apple elected to keep the iPhone connected to AT&T. Just as it would be unreasonable to demand that Windows software run on a Mac, it is equally unreasonable to demand a universal iPhone.

If providers are not allowed to customize phones to networks, consumers lose. Visual voice-mail, one of the iPhone’s most innovative features is exclusive to the AT&T network—an example of “unique collaboration” between AT&T and Apple.

Mandating unlocked phones and hoping they will benefit consumers is a pipe dream. In theory, consumers benefit; but in practice, the hindrance of creativity and the suppression of pioneers far outweigh the positive aspects of open standards. For companies to take big risks, there must be equally big rewards. Developing the iPhone took a huge team of programmers and engineers and hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development costs.

Many iPhone users have used unofficial hacks to unlock their phone to work with compatible networks. A recent software update from Apple resulted in many hacked iPhones being “bricked,” making them unusable unless the device is reset. The lawsuit claims Apple intentionally released the software upgrade to disable modified phones in retaliation for unlocking.

Regardless of Apple’s intent, people who modified their phones deserve no legal recourse. People entered into a voluntary contract by purchasing the iPhone and accepted the user agreement prohibiting modification of the “software in any manner or form.” Consumers who violate an agreement and void the warranty do so at their own risk. Apple’s only obligation to iPhone owners is fulfilling the terms of its license agreement—and its software updates work fine with unaltered iPhones.

Owners of the iPhone can do whatever they want to the iPhone, with the caveat that certain actions may void the warranty. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act carves out an exemption for phone unlocking, even when reverse engineering is involved. So while the iPhone can be unlocked legally, Apple doesn’t have to support phones running modified software. This is one area where copyright laws have succeeded in striking a balance between the rights of consumers and businesses.

If Apple intentionally disabled iPhones to punish unlockers, shame on them. But if so, the market, not government, should punish Apple. Heavy-handed tactics cause an exodus of customers, which sends a stronger message than any civil fine.

In a free market economy, companies can decide the terms of the products they sell, just as consumers can decide which products they buy. Companies should not be subject to civil penalties if they place limitations on warranty support. Businesses cannot anticipate what sort of other uses or alterations consumers will make—so they do not provide support for these modifications. Should Apple be required to employ hundreds of developers to test every third-party modification to make sure every software update is compatible?

If these lawsuits succeed—or worse yet, a law is passed by Congress to the same effect—an unreasonable burden will be placed on companies, chilling innovation and increasing costs for consumers. When companies are forced to foresee the unforeseeable, they are likely to stand still.

This article originally appeared at TCS Daily

Back when Saturday Night Live was still funny, Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine, the ill-mannered telephone operator, deftly parodied all that was wrong with the old phone system when she proclaimed the phone company’s motto: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.” Today, Ernestine may seem like a relic from the days of Ma Bell’s monopoly. But if some Wi-Fi companies have their way, they soon won’t care either because they won’t have to.

Consider Google and Earthlink’s plans to create city-wide Wi-Fi for San Francisco. As the city prepares to put the issue to a vote in a referendum, Earthlink CEO Rolla Huff is acting as though the future of the project is a foregone conclusion, adopting a new strategy for dealing with critics: the silent treatment. But Huff isn’t just miffed; his company is facing a serious financial meltdown in San Francisco and potentially many other wireless projects. But wasn’t municipal Wi-Fi the wave of the future?

Whatever happened to the dream of editing Wikipedia in the car or live-blogging people watching at the neighborhood park? It turns out that few people actually share those dreams. As Business Week recently pointed out, initial forecasts for municipal Wi-Fi subscriptions were exceedingly high, predicting 15 to 30 percent of the population of cities signing up. Actual subscriber rates are far below this level—a mere one to two percent—making investors interested in ROI sadly SOL.

We’ve gone from the dominance of dial-up to deep market penetration by cable, DSL, wireless, cellular, and satellite. Does a market as varied and competitive as this really need municipal Wi-Fi?

In an attempt to stave off disaster, Huff has put the heat on cities involved in municipal Wi-Fi rollouts. In a recent interview with Dow Jones, he declared, “We’re going to look for municipal governments to step up and become a meaningful anchor tenant.” Translation: Cities need to sign long-term contracts so that vendors like EarthLink are guaranteed at least a minimum return.

Not all cities are facing difficulties in their municipal Wi-Fi projects—dozens of cities around the country are moving forward with similar partnerships. But even if these ventures are financially viable, are they good for the marketplace?

That’s worth asking because in recent years broadband has spread across America at a rapid pace. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study found that DSL rates have dropped by 15 percent in the last two years, while the consultancy JupiterResearch estimates that falling broadband prices will result in 80 percent of the country logging on at high speeds by 2010. In a little less than a decade, we’ve gone from the dominance of dial-up to deep market penetration by cable and DSL carriers, with wireless, cellular, satellite, and even broadband over power line joining the mix. Does a market as rich, varied, and competitive as this really need municipal Wi-Fi?

More competition is generally a good thing for the marketplace. But that doesn’t necessarily apply to hybrid public-private partnerships, since these arrangements tend to take on the anti-competitive traits of government without the dynamism of business. The result can be a poison pill for the connectivity marketplace.

Companies that enter into public-private partnerships enjoy favorable treatment. Special access to city or county rights of way, shelter from liability, and the backing of a public partner with the power to tax makes Wi-Fi firms that enter into municipal deals formidable foes. Potential competitors may find these advantages too much to overcome, thus driving them out of the marketplace. With potential competitive rivals driven out, we are soon left with an ossifying public utility disguised as a private enterprise.

As municipal Wi-Fi companies become entrenched, we can expect them to not only demand that cities be anchor tenants, but that they help make up for the shortfalls that will inevitably result when new technologies supplant Wi-Fi. Worse, seeking to put off that day of reckoning, they may well ask for regulations stacking the deck in their favor, slowing the spread of the latest and greatest tech.

Limited access rules and special privileges are what brought us Ernestine in the first place. Technological solutions have opened up markets to more players recently, but government can truly open the competition floodgates by liberalizing markets, which would help lower prices and bring broadband to the masses. It’s time to stop playing favorites and give Ernestine the pink slip.

This op-ed originally appeared at American.com

The Recording Industry Association of America has sent out waves of letters telling college administrators that some of their students are pirates. No, not the kind played by Johnny Depp, but the kind who visit the seedy back alleys of the Internet to traffic in illegally copied music, movies and software.

The “pre-litigation letters” identify students not by their names, but by their IP addresses, numbers associated with their Internet activity. It is up to the universities, which own the networks, to match the IP addresses with students’ names and forward the letters on to the students. The letters offer settlements, reportedly around $3,000, for students to pay along with agreeing to ditch their pirated tracks and live life free of illegal downloading.

In the past, the Recording Industry Association of America has had similar encounters with campuses, but it has sent subpoenas, not letters. While some universities believe that the association is attempting to turn them into copyright cops, this is really just a case of voluntary, private enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Granted, the association cannot enforce its property rights without information from the universities, but this doesn’t turn the universities into de facto enforcers for the music industry.

The Recording Industry Association’s piracy investigations aren’t the only example of private enforcement. Many retail stores employ “secret shoppers,” and private investigators are more than just fixtures on cheesy television shows.

Unlike “Magnum, P.I.,” however, the Recording Industry Association goes in for a hamfisted approach. A notorious example involves the Penn State University Astronomy Department, which received a letter demanding it remove songs by the hip-hop artist Usher from its server.

The server contained no Usher tracks, but it did reference professor emeritus Peter Usher, and it contained MP3s, which attracted the Recording Industry Association’s Internet searchbot crew. The MP3s in question were recordings of an a cappella performance by astronomers about a gamma ray satellite.

The Recording Industry Association later apologized for the threatening letter, but this is not the only case of a threat based on automation and incomplete evidence. It’s likely that many who receive the latest letters from the association will have downloaded MP3s (audio files) illegally, but that charge might not be supported by the association’s “evidence.”

Using threats and offering out-of-court settlements to make up for a lack of evidence may seem like good strategy on “Law & Order,” but in the real world, these tactics resemble an extortion racket. Private enforcement relies on the goodwill of many individuals and organizations. Unfortunately for the Recording Industry Association, its tactics have only antagonized and alienated people.

But universities shouldn’t be too quick to spurn the association’s request. Forwarding letters demanding thousands of dollars from students may put universities in a public relations pickle. But a California bill banning pretexting, the practice of posing as someone you are not to collect information, may prove to be a larger threat to universities.

In most cases, we do not want individuals posing as people they’re not. But it is already illegal to pose as an institution, such as a bank, to snag private data. The new law won’t stop these imposters, who are already breaking state and federal laws, but it would stop the Recording Industry Association from exercising its main anti-piracy tactic: posing as pirates.

Association investigators frequently masquerade as criminals to collect evidence against the real bandits of the Internet. Some critics charge that this could ensnare some innocent people, but people who aren’t pirating aren’t going to be out there to offer up information.

Innovative technologies from entrepreneurs have helped overcome much of the difficulty in protecting the huge volume of copyrighted material on the Internet.

Universities, as purveyors of mounds of copyrighted material and troves of patents, have an interest in protecting intellectual property and should be concerned about this erosion of the ability to privately protect their copyrights. State law enforcement alone, with its already stretched-thin budgets, will make for shoddy intellectual-property-rights enforcement.

So, while universities may not want to stand hand-in-hand with the Recording Industry Association, they should respect its right to defend its members’ intellectual property. Now if only the association could work on being a bit nicer.

This Op-Ed Originally Appeared in The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)