No SchoolSpace for MySpace

There’s a new law in congress that would require any school recieving federal funds to block acccess to any “commercially operated website that allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users.”

It’s an attempt to ban MySpace from schools, but the way it’s worded it could also include any forum or blog (including this one… which is already blocked from some schools, and Ford HQ) Just goes to show you the power of your domain’s history.

The bill also goes on to suggest blocking IM access in school too..

While I agree all of these things can be dangerous if used improperly, they can also be great learning tools.

Here’s a great idea: Instead of just banning all the sites out of paranoid fear, lets try educating our children.

After all, predators can only hurt you if you give them your personal information. Education is the problem here, not the sites.

If tradition serves though, personal responsibility has no place in our new society.

Full Article Here

October 6th, 2005

MSN, NItrogen, and Viagra

It’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve got some cool new websites coming up… stay tuned for those.

I still haven’t found a car. It seems the ones I like aren’t too easy to get a hold of within the next 7 months… which isn’t good because my Jeep is having problems.

I DID get the tires filled with nitrogen. I hope that helps.

I almost signed up for MSN adcenter until it told me that my broswer (firefox) wasn’t supported. I can’t believe microsoft is actually pulling this crap. There’s no reason any broswer shouldn’t be supported… Makes me think they did it on purpose.

It also looks like Google finally fixed the trustrank problem. If you hadn’t noticed, sites like expedia were able to show up #1 for terms like “buy viagra” simply by making some cheap spam on a subdomain of their site.

We’ve all known subdomains have power over new domains… but there’s no reason they should make unrelated spam sites catapult to #1.

On a related note, I just read the “combating web spam with TrustRank” whitepaper, and it’s got some really interesting stuff in it.

October 6th, 2005