“Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

“The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.”

The pinhead politician says he made this proposal to cut down on online bullying. But, I think its effect would be to stifle discussion on the Internet. Online bullying, for example, would probably just move from websites to eMail.

I, for example, am not an online bully nor a predator or any kind of threat to anyone online. Maybe an occasional annoyance, but that’s about it. But, I do not like giving my real name and address to many sites online, and having to do so would certainly cut down on the number of blogs I comment on. Who knows what some website or blog owners might do with your personal information?

It’s unclear, but perhaps this would be a law that would only be applicable in Kentucky. In that case, it would certainly kill many blogs hosted in Kentucky. I’m reasonably sure many people would be resistant to the idea of registering their real name and address just to leave a comment on a blog. There are other blogs out there, so it would just be easier to go elsewhere, much to the detriment of Kentucky website and blog owners.

Most people that leave comments anonymously, or pseudo-anonymously, are not bullies. I don’t know the solution to online bullying, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve restricting the rights of the innocent.

On top of that, couldn’t this just make bullying worse? Doesn’t this open up the possibility that the bully will obtain the victim’s real name and physical address? Conceivably, a bully could start a blog or website that appeals to the victim. The victim registers, and now the online bully can become a physical bully. Brilliant.

You see, this is why it is best that the powers of government are limited. Too many politicians are idiots.

Five years ago (maybe earlier–just going by the last revision date to get five years), I was working on a comprehensive mission statement for my company. I think it has some things of interest to bloggers, and I welcome your feedback. What follows here is a truncated version of the introduction.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
–Margaret Mead

The greatest of all human endeavors is not the buildings we build, the inventions we invent, or the monuments we create. Instead, it is the communities we build.

We build giant skyscrapers, but then we fill them with communities–communities of entrepreneurs, communities of apartment dwellers, communities of co-workers. Without those communities, the buildings would be of little use.

We invent great things, but then build communities around them–communities of users, communities of fellow inventors, communities of enthusiasts. Without these communities, these great inventions would rust away with hardly a footnote.

We create great monuments, but monuments have a prerequisite of community. Without communities sharing a common hero, a common ideology or a common will, few monuments would ever be built.

Whereever we go, whatever we do, we build communities.

Rich or poor, warrior or philosopher, homesteader or wanderer, we all build or join communities. No matter our faith or lack thereof, no matter our ideology, no matter our race, no matter our color, no matter our age, no matter our sex, no matter our condition, no matter the place, no matter the time, the universal human trait is to build communities.

Make no mistake about it–the Internet represents another effort at community building. It is another step in our evolution and understanding of what it is to be a community. For, even with all our experience in community building, we still haven’t quite gotten it right. Communities are our greatest asset and a great peril. They can serve to unite us, or to divide us. While most build communities to support us, to sustain us, to unite us, others build communities to divide and destroy.

The Internet is no trivial pursuit. It is more than just amusements, more than just shopping carts, more than just instant messaging and chatrooms. The Internet represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of what defines a community. We have learned, but not yet fully grasped, the important lesson that community transcends neighborhoods and nations, churches and ideologies, buildings and distances. We learn that someone just across town shares our concerns and interests–someone who we may never have met any other way–and we feel connected to them. We learn that someone halfway around the world from us shares similar concerns and lifegoals to our own, and we feel connected to them.

One day, the sun that provides us all with light and warmth will die, and the earth, our home, will die out with it. All our buildings, all our inventions, all our monuments will die with it as burnt cinders encircling a dead star. Only by understanding that the things of this world are transitory, and that only positive communities can endure, can we hope that our civilization will not die with it.

If you have a slow Internet connection, or dial-up, or just aren’t connected all the time, you might want to download the entire Internet to your hard drive.

That way, you can browse the web at your leisure, even when you’re not connected. Or, print it all out and you can still read your favorite blogs when the power’s out.

Download the Internet Here

Don’t forget to make a back-up!

Seriously, though, I don’t know how long that’s been around, but it’s fun to pass along to your unsuspecting friends.

You might also want to let them know about the last page on the Internet.

And, after reading the last page, remind them to shutdown the Internet.

According to my spam, I am now rich! Woohoo!

I am removing the Short Term Goal of a new computer and software from my sidebar. I’ll just get that out of my $300,000 when I earn that.

Instead, I am going to replace that with my Money from Spam counter, where I will track how much “money” I have made thanks to spam.

I figure this may be more interesting than counting down to a new computer and software.

Today, I received in my spam, an offer from a law firm who will pay me $54,020.00 for referring a sufficient number of people to them in a year’s time. Good as gold, right? So, that goes into the count.

Also, I am pleased to announce that I have won the European Email ID Lottery with a prize of $1,000,000 Euros. According to a currency exchange calculator I used minutes ago, that is $1,346,196.84 dollars. Gotta love that exchange rate!

I am up to $1,400,216.84 just for reading my eMail. Cool, eh?

On top of that, I have been approved for a loan of $243,000.00.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Sorry for the lack of posts today. My Internet provider is having problems this evening, and I can only reach about half the sites I try to reach.

Curiously, I can reach sites where I can spend money, but not the sites where I can check to see if I’ve made any money. Conspiracy?

Nah. Probably something to do with the thunderstorms this evening. They didn’t hit us, but they affected the surrounding areas. And, if I could actually check the weather websites, I might have a better idea as to what areas were hit. At this point, I’m guessing perhaps that the storms had some effect on the Internet service.

Or, it could be coincidence.

At any rate, hard to do much online when you can’t browse many websites!

“CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits”

I’m sure they limited their changes to simply correcting statistical information, right?

The CIA responded, but the FBI hadn’t.

Google doesn’t matter any more. A lot of people haven’t figured that out yet. There are experts talking about search engine optimization (SEO): designing your web site to make it easier for the search engines to index and find you. Reading different websites, forums and blogs specializing in SEO will teach you a number of tricks, tips and techniques to get your web site listed in the top search engine results.

The search engines have played into this game as well, giving webmasters instructions as to how to layout their pages and code their sites to fit what the search engines want.

All this has resulted in a lot of poor quality sites reaching the top positions in the search engines. It gets increasingly difficult to find the content you are looking for. And, with constant updates and changes, the site you found yesterday at #1 will be nowhere to be found today. You should have bookmarked it!

Before the Search Engines

Some of today’s Internet users may not even remember a time before search engines, but there was such a time. In those “ancient” days, we used Archie to search FTP sites or Veronica to search on Gopher. If we couldn’t find something, we’d ask on USENET, on our local FreeNet or on an area BBS.

Frequently we would have to rely on the advice of other people in finding the content we were seeking.

The Rise of the Search Engines

Later, we had search engines like WebCrawler, AltaVista, Lycos and Infoseek and directories like Yahoo! Then there was HotBot, AskJeeves, Northern Light and Google.

While people began using directories and search engines to find what they were looking for, during this time people still relied on recommendations from friends and other Internet users. Often, too, people would maintain their own lists of useful sites on their web sites. Some webmasters had better resource sites listed than some of the search engines and directories.

But, as the search engines–most notably Google–improved, people began relying on them more and more. Yahoo! was a longtime leader in organizing content, but Google relatively quickly pulled the rug out from under them.

Since then, Google has been quite aggressive in staying at the top and expanding its offerings and capabilities. People worry about the next update, and how it will affect their search engine positions. They worry about PageRank. They add NOFOLLOW tags to their sites to discourage Google from following links to sites to which they link. It really has gotten crazy.

As people have concentrated on getting well positioned in Google’s search engine results, they have neglected content. Google too seems to have neglected content. Quite frequently, and despite their routine “cleansings” and such, the top sites in the results are not the sites with the best and most useful content, but rather the sites with the best SEO. That’s good in the short term for those webmasters, but bad in the long term for users searching for quality content.

The Irrelevance of Google

For a company that claims a philosophy of “Don’t be evil,” they seem to practice a philosophy of selective blindness to the questionable things they do. Their efforts to digitize the world’s books–without the permission of their authors–has resulted in copyright disputes. There are concerns about the security risks posed by Google Earth. Google has faced criticism from both advertisers and publishers regarding how they handle click fraud. Not to mention accusations of censorship in Google’s appeasement of the government of China. Even the New York Times has suggested Google has lost its do no evil philosophy.

In the midst of all this, Google has been losing relevance. As people learn how difficult it is to find useful information in the search engines, they have turned once again to a more reliable resource: other people.

Post-Google

We are now seeing the beginning of the post-Google world. It is a world where Google will no longer matter. I’ll say it again, Google will no longer matter. I’m sure people will disagree with this, but there it is. The next “Google” is already in its prepubescent stages, just waiting for its next growth spurt to take the lead over its peers.

Here are the contenders:

del.icio.us is a bookmarking website where users can store and share bookmarks to websites or web pages they like. It is a part of Yahoo!

Digg is a community website where users “digg” stories they like. If a story gets enough “diggs,” it gets listed on the front page. While Digg currently is primarily focused on science and technology, it has been expanding into other categories.

reddit is a community website where users post links to web content. Users can rate the links, causing them to move up or down on reddit’s home page.

StumbleUpon is a browser plugin where users can find and rate content. StumbleUpon was purchased by eBay at the end of May 2007.

Technorati is a search engine for blogs with some community features.

There are also a number of less popular community-oriented websites similar to those listed above. Any of these sites have the potential to become the next Google.

No More Games?

While webmasters will no doubt continue to have to find a variety of ways to build an audience for their content, the next wave of Internet search has already begun. It’s becoming clearer now than it ever was: content is king. In the near future, success on the Internet will be less dependent on search engine results and more dependent on creating quality content that people will recommend to their friends and peers. Gone will be the days of mysterious algorithms, bad neighborhoods, linking penalties, supplemental pages and other terms that currently get SEO experts in a titter.

Google is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet. Long live the people!