After complaints alleged to have been filed by several states attorneys general, parents have now sued MySpace.com in Los Angeles. One of the persons interviews basically says suing MySpace over your minor child meeting a sexual predator on-line is a little like suing the phone company becuase your child talked to someone undesirable. Ultimately it would seem to me that much of the responsibility should fall with the parent. While I don’t know the particulars of this case, and thus decline to comment on it specifically, it would appear that this suit is over-reaching. You can find out more about the particulars at many sites such as this one that gives more particular details about the claims made in these cases.

If your child has access to the internet, you need to have the “don’t ever meet a stranger talk” with them. Just because you talk to someone doesn’t change their status and that is the lure or misconception I think many of us suffer from … that discussion results in someone becoming a friend.

I was sent to learn more about Gravity Branding today after seeing a note that they came up with the name wiFi. The idea of making one’s living by coming up with names seems intriguing to me. Much like hosting strategic planning meetings, I am sure there is more than meets the eye, and yet it seems like they make amazing amounts of money for work that is — well — not all that significant in some respects. I decided to look at a few of their case studies to learn more. I choose the Verizon Voice Wing Campaign. I was looking at that case study and a typo (at least I think it to be one — and yes I’m sure I have a typo in this article too somewhere, but I’m not making the big bucks) jumped out at me: assignement. I think it has one too many “e’s”.

I do see the logic to a lot of the names they feature on there. It must be amazingly difficult to come up with a name that is available and satisfies the customer, so in the end I’m sure that they really do work hard. We spent at least twenty minutes coming up with our name — and perhaps it shows too. But I think I would like to work for them and see what I can contribute.

I have to say I didn’t like their site much either, so maybe I could work with their design team on a remake of that aspect of their business. It was flash type download that required a very long download time at my connect speed. It tried using pop-ups that offended my browser and well … I just didn’t like it subjectively. Some of my subjective reasons are the lack of color on the site, the greyed out tabs are much too dark on my display. I see a large empty white space in the middle of the page (I wonder if something didn’t download that was supposed to or something?).

This is a very interesting article about Like.com. The site will allow you to find an item you would like to purchase (or see if someone is copying your protected work perhaps) and find other similiar items based on visual matching instead of descriptive terms. I’m sure over time that merchants will find ways to put this to work by intentionally copying image looks from primary competitors’ sites.

I am an Apprentice fan. I missed the first episode and so I was relieved to find out that you can catch the episodes on-line this season!

I have just three complaints really:
1. the show is broken into segements and I eventually figured out that you could jump segment to segment using the links below the play window … however, the pictures and the titles gave away the story in advance.
2. the advertisements for episode one were for exactly two movies. If replay saturation was the goal, then they achieved it … but it also bored me. I may not watch the shows just because that irritated me … or I may because I am glad to find current episodes available on tv.
3. I’m not on it. While I don’t think I want to work for The Donald (too much confusion because many call me by the same name), I would definately like to meet his daughter to see what she is like in person. While I do think I could add to the organization, I don’t think it would be conducive to a family life and I value a family.

I wish it was me living there in the tent. I would have enjoyed that more than living in the mansion because just watching the other whiners around me would have been enough fun to make it worthwhile.

I was working away on a new web page tonight, checking that my CSS mark-up was valid. Once I got the good news I became distracted and started following links on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site. I stumbled across a reference guide to Learning CSS.

I was quite surprised by the ugly hover effect assigned to links on the page; gray with a heavy red border. I was then further surprised to discover just how differently this page acts between Firefox / Opera and Internet Explorer 6. The page appears to have been written to look appealing in IE6, and appalling in FF and Opera! I would have expected the W3C to set a good example by presenting its own CSS pages using CSS code that works well in both of these browsers.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! I tried to validate the CSS on this CSS resource only to discover that the W3C’s own validator detected 3 errors and 90 warnings in the code! Furthermore, the HTML on the page suffers from 5 mark-up errors and no Doctype!

Who would have thought that the body responsible for the promotion of compliant CSS and HTML code would set such a poor example???

The exciting news from Redmond is the release of Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional Edition. Lot’s of exciting features!

(Don’t take this too seriously)

I haven’t stopped by Newsvine lately. It is an interesting concept and I was in early as a beta tester. I decided it was worth a try today as I actually felt like I had something to say as I watched the mourning for Gerald R. Ford, a man I had actually met a number of times.

I have to say I am impressed by the growth and the interactivity of the medium. It really got me thinking about some things tonight. I remember meeting Swift Lathers as a young lad. He published the Mears Newz, the smallest newspaper in the world — or so he claimed. I’m pretty sure it did not have the smallest circulation, but it was small in physical size. All of the articles about the paper claim that he once cut the circulation in half by using a pair of scissors. My father knew him and his family quite well at the time and I don’t think this story is true because he in fact had the circulation list committed to memory.

I got to thinking how many Swift Lather’s now exist. People with a message to spread and now — unlike people of his time — a cost effective way to spread it. What would someone like him be doing with today’s medium of communication? I’ll bet a lot of people would not like the answer. He was a blogger before his time.