By the way, you can add me here.

This morning I woke up and started searching for information about the Wyoming GOP Caucus. I started with regular search, but the results were old, outdated, and some what irrelevant. Clearly the wonderful live search results I experienced Thursday night during the Iowa Caucus were not running things this morning. I then jumped to Google Blog Search and sorted the results by date.

Here is what I was met with.

In my opinion, it couldn’t be more clear these blogs are spam just by viewing the results. And there were tons of these results flooded the results for the past 45 minutes in the “sort by date” SERP’s.

Just for kicks, I clicked on a few to see what they were all about. Much to my surprise, these sploggers are stealing YouTube screenshots for profit. This is what one of the Splogs looked like.

Looks like a normal video post, right? Wrong. The video in the post is actually just an image that links to another page ripping YouTube’s design. None of the links work, and once again, if you click play on the video it just sends you to another page.

Notice the URL of this “YouTube” page.
http://gift-vip.net/videos/?name=wyoming+caucus

Once you click the video, you’re taken to a page that tries to force a file on you. My Linux Ubuntu system wouldn’t have any of it, but some other poor Windows user might not be so lucky.

Now, you might say these splogs aren’t really that many in number… well, apart from the obvious swarm of them hitting the results for Wyoming GOP Caucus, all one needs to do is look at the user profile for the splog mentioned above.

My question is… when you have a blogger profile that has MANY domains that look like this:
http://nhpollnlz65.blogspot.com/2008/01/wyoming-caucus.html
http://drzhivlsb26.blogspot.com/2008/01/wyoming-caucus.html

Wouldn’t it be easy to have some sort of red flag go up? I mean, if that isn’t obvious then I don’t know what is.

Come on Google, if you want the user experience to be solid, then get rid of this junk. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

4th Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now watch this video and prepare to be angry. VERY angry.

Recently Rachael posted an invite on her MySpace site for a house party at her place while her mom was away. Instead of the handful of friends she had intended on showing up, she landed several hundred people who completely trashed and ruined her house.

More than 200 young people from as far afield as London and Liverpool, converged on the £230,000 detached house in a respectable culdesac in Houghton-le-Spring and destroyed it after seven hours of drink and drug-fuelled mayhem.

Education isn’t free.

This Youtube video gives a good percpective of why to be very careful with what you post online.

Now MySpace has entered the game. Welcome to MySpace Impact.

Thoughts?

As a campaign consultant and internet activist I can attest to the direction political campaigns are heading and a LOT of it is shifting to the Internet. Political campaigns such as John McCain’s (by the way I met with his blogger, Patrick Hynes, in DC last week and he admitted that the McCain website was launched with a lot of bugs and was not ready to be public) have fully embraced the power of social networking and the online community, and most other campaigns are beginning to do the same thing.

Digg.com is getting in on the action as well. Digg recently added a 2008 Elections category and it quickly became a happening place. Wikia has also added a political section that in just a matter of days was getting Dugg and mentioned on big sites like Little Green Footballs.

YouTube must be seeing dollar signs in this as well. The video sharing giant recently launched “YouChoose“, a sub-site for political campaign related videos to be published and viewed.

When you have Hillary Clinton announcing her Presidency via a YouTube video, you know it’s a powerful tool.

Even the group I work with as a private contractor, Citizen Outreach, is getting ready to publish a YouTube channel that will display news related to Nevada politics and other tidbits. It’s some thing we feel is too important to pass up.

While YouTube is taking hits on the copyright front, it is still growing and I think Google is pulling the right strings by adding this new YouChoose section.

Only time will tell if it’s successful though…

The blogosphere is a great example. Bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Patrick Hynes, Erick Erickson, Scott Johnson, Chuck Muth, LGF, and others had success on a proportionate scale soon after the Blogosphere was given life. LGF, for example, can has in excess of 70,000+ visitors in a single day. No doubt, Conservatives know how to communicate opinions, articulate issues, and network together to inform others will relative ease.

Indeed, web 2.0 is now a part of the “Conservasphere”. Web 2.0, for those of you who may not know, is a step above blogs in general. The technology used in Web 2.0 is almost 100% interactive. The idea is simple really. The mindset behind Web 2.0 is that the community has full control over the content, interface, moderation, and operation of a website.

Quoted from Wikipedia:

Alluding to the version-numbers that commonly designate software upgrades, the phrase “Web 2.0″ hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web; and advocates suggest that technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, Web APIs, Web standards and online Web services imply a significant change in web usage.

So what is this “ConservaWeb 2.0″ all about? First, let’s examine some of the regular 2.0 mega sites to get an idea of what Web 2.0 really is. The following is a list of top sites that run on a Web 2.0 platform.

-Digg.com
While the system at Digg is currently being disputed as slightly flawed in a way that allows a group to manipulate results and push out certain users, Digg is the pioneer for community driven news. When a story is voted to the front page it can result in literally tens of thousands of visitors.
-YouTube
YouTube quickly became a power house for social networking, allowing users to upload videos, comment and vote on videos, and completely interact with the entire community.
-Google and Gmail
Google went Web 2.0 some time ago, allowing users to customize the search page and combining all services and tools to one simple user interface. Google’s Gmail also uses Web 2.0 technology, allowing certain parts of the page to reload without having to reload the entire site. This makes each part of the page interactive and the user has a lot more control over what is happening when logged into the site.

Conservative entrepreneurs, including myself, have taken this concept and moved it into reality within our own level of standards and ideas. The most recent example of this is ConservaPedia. Like Wikipedia, Conservapedia aims to hand over all content authority to users and the general web community. The site is new, but I predict it will be a hot spot for Conservative communities and networks within a years time.

Politics.Wikia is a Digg like platform that while not exclusively Conservative, has categories that allow users of all ideologues to fairly participate in voting up stories and news.

Another Digg like site is one owned by yours truly, Political Dip. Political Dip is brand new and will take a bit of time to populate, but I have no doubts that it will begin to flourish in due time.

I think Web 2.0 will take the Conservative realm to the level it needs to be able to keep up with the pack. I see political campaigns using YouTube, offering free blogs, hiring bloggers and blog consultants, and allowing users to have more control over their web spaces. I also see Independent Conservatives stepping out and making big plays on the web, something that I believe is very healthy for the future of Internet Conservatism and Netroots on the Conservative side of the isle.

Want to know more about Web 2.0? Check out this great video.

With the global spread of high-speed Internet connections and the relative anonymity afforded by the world’s biggest and busiest sites, extremists have found a new theater to display violence and anti-American propaganda.

My feelings are very mixed on this issue. I really haven’t decided how I feel about YouTube allowing this kind of tripe, but I think I’ll eventually have to admit that it should not be censored.

Why? Well, first of all, how the heck is YouTube going to stop it anyway? The site is free, and the day we demand that every video published be instantly reviewed or edited by humans is the day it will no longer be free. Besides, right now there is a user powered system that does knock out a lot of these videos. It just takes time.

The gentleman who was being interviewed on the Fox News Video was defending YouTube, which at first kind of bothered me, but the more I thought about it the more I understood his viewpoint. The problem with us wanting YouTube to censor this stuff is knowing how and where to draw the line.

I agree that it’s terrible to see this junk on the web, but at least YouTube allows US the chance to get it taken down.

Thoughts?

For the last two days EVERY cable news network has been playing HOUR after HOUR of Anna Nicole Smith headlines. Her death last week was indeed interesting, but only for a few minutes. And it is tragic that her daughter will have to grow up without a mother. The whole thing was very unfortunate, but that’s life. If you think the story is sad, then what about the other people who passed away in that time period? Families lost children and parents due to drunk driving, murder, accidents, etc. It happens virtually every minute of every day. So why is this story so important?

I could be early in saying something like this, but I find it rather sickening that a woman who made her fame from getting naked in front of a camera is idolized by millions across the globe when she passes away. Are our standards as a society really dipping this low?

When Paris Hilton releases a porn video the world goes wild. Bill O’Reilly starts drooling on himself (we all know he loves these kinds of stories), YouTube traffic triples, and the headlines are extremely predictable.

Britney Spears spreads her legs in front of the cameras and again, the crowd goes wild.

Is this healthy for the younger generations of our world? We should cradle, idolize, worship, throw many at, feel sorry for, these people? Is that what we want to believe?

Maybe I’m alone on this, but I want my news back. I want to know what’s going on with the War in Iraq. I want to know what the weather doing, who’s running for President and why. Fox News has been terrible over the last few days and I’m having a tough time believing it’s the Fox viewers who want to see it.

Is anyone with me?