Oh, yeah: Verisign sucks.

Something really needs to be done about the administration of the Net. We're at a point where an autocratic entity with no real right to the power it has levies unconscionable taxes and fines upon its "citizenry", said citizenry has no real say in what happens or even recourse after the fact, and the few powers-that-be who could effect change seem happier ignoring the problem. Well, fine. Speaking as an American, we've been here before. Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, after all; perhaps it's time the Net had a Tea Party.

Really interesting article over at O'Reilly Net about automatic backlinking in blogs. The example at Disenchanted is rather neat. I can't imagine what Google will make of this, but there's something fascinating about a medium which can make even blog conversations both transparent and traversable. Very cool stuff.

And here I thought the idiotic debate about "deep linking" was over. Apparently The Dallas News feels otherwise. (Uh-oh, that's a deep link… hope Wired doesn't come after me… :rolls eyes:)

It's already been determined by a federal court that deep links do not violate copyright laws and are not deceitful (by their nature, anyway -- theoretically it's possible to create a situation in which this is not true). Therefore TDN's only real complaint is that it's costing them the ad revenue from people failing to hit their front page.

I have two responses to this: 1. So what? Do you expect other webmasters to do your webmasters' jobs for them? If your webmasters can't figure out a way to make ad revenue from actual article pages, then they ought to be fired on the spot. 2. Can you imagine a Web without deep linking? Where either every link has to be followed by a paragraph of explanation on how to get to the actual resource the writer wanted to reference (e.g. "Go to the Washington Post home page, click on Science, look for articles from 4/23/02, it's the one titled "Hamster writes sequel to War and Peace."), or else is completely useless (e.g. This article is really interesting. Which article??)? What kind of a worthless, unnavigable Web would that be?