Every four years, much is made about fringe presidential candidates who are perceived as having no real chance of winning. Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Wesley Clark, John McCain - the list includes some high-profile names and, if you actually ask around, some pretty popular choices. Yet, when it comes down to voting, the candidates with the most exposure and the most cash ultimately get the prize.

With that in mind, consider Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, who famously tried to end the draft during the Vietnam War. Some have described him as too progressive to lead the United States; others simply think he’s crazy. But he has a growing, loyal fanbase of followers who love his no-nonsense, straight-talking approach to politics. He’s a politician who is far enough removed from the political machine, they say, that he can see the forest for the carbon-cutting trees.

But, as tends to be the case in American politics, Gravel isn’t polling well. Is he truly unpopular, or just unheard? Read the rest of this entry »

The Life and Times of Forrester blog has done some digging and come up with the 100 oldest registered domains on the Internet, dating back to March 1985. The list is a good mix of obscure personal sites and forward-thinking corporate giants.

Who are you expecting to be in the Top 10? Microsoft? Maybe Steve Jobs and his early Apple brand? The answers may surprise you. Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet is a veritable smorgasbord of information, leading many small businesses to wonder how they can protect their image online.

The statistics are startling: only 1 in 10 disgruntled customers actually takes the time to complain about their experience to management. But what that doesn’t tell you is that the other 90% are telling all of their friends, family and blogroll about their less-than-perfect experience. These results show up in search engines, sometimes prominently, and can tarnish a small business’s image. Right? Not quite. Read the rest of this entry »

Individuals? Media? Or something else? A government agency finally recognises bloggers as media entities - almost.

The Federal Election Commission ruled on Tuesday that political blogs are considered media entities by law and thus cannot be regulated as a political committee, which would make them subject to campaign finance laws. The case centred on the DailyKos - a popular, ad-supported blog that receives over three million page views every weekday - and whether or not their liberal-slanted blogging amounted to “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services” to their favoured candidates. Read the rest of this entry »

Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner may well revolutionise how we Wiki… or at least teach us that media manipulation works better from the privacy of our own homes.

Wikipedia was launched a scant six years ago, and during that time it has spawned more than 8 million encyclopedia articles in over 250 languages (not to mention entering the term “wiki” into our modern lexicon, alongside “Google”). But the openness of Wikipedia - an encyclopedia created, edited, and moderated entirely by the Internet community - also created a grand opportunity for abuse of the system. As the site grew, often landing at the top of search engine rankings even for difficult keywords and company names, it seemed inevitable that companies would turn to creating and editing their own Wikipedia entries as a 21st century PR move.

Enter Virgil Griffith. Noting that Wikipedia’s database contained over 34 million anonymous edits, he set out to create a piece of software that would collate, catalog, and attempt to identify the IP addresses of those anonymous users. Using the ip2location database, Griffith was able to match up the previously anonymous editors against an international database of corporate and government IP addresses, thereby removing the shroud of anonymity from the Wikipedia editing process. Read the rest of this entry »