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Although joining Survey Vanguard is certainly a great way to get paid in cash for taking surveys online, after a few weeks you may run into a slight problem.

Because Survey Vanguard’s program contains so many paid survey companies, if you actually follow their instructions and register with the first two or three groups of recommended companies, you may eventually discover that you are receiving more surveys than you can handle. This can lead to a condition known as paid survey burnout, which sometimes causes people to complain about not getting paid enough cash for taking online surveys based on the time that it takes to get through them all.

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If you are a new webmaster who is trying to gain good rankings in the search engines by looking into SEO strategies, then you have probably figured out that this particular area of website development can become quite complicated. In order to simplify things, I have briefly listed below ten simple strategies that you can use in order to optimize your site for Google’s search engine algorithm.

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My membership at Survey Vanguard really seems to be paying off. Earlier today, I received a check in the mail for $53 from one of my paid survey companies for several surveys that I had completed last month.

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In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the Fair Tax debate, here is a summary of what I have been able to determine are the major pros and cons of the Fair Tax (or national sales tax) as it is currently written:

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Since today is April 15, the infamous “Tax Day” here in the USA, Stephen Gordon over at the LP Blog has decided to declare an open thread for this weekend so that we could discuss various tax-related issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the debate thus far has centered around the so-called Fair Tax, a proposal to replace the current income tax scheme with a uniform national sales tax.

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This past week has seen two major acquisitions take place in the corporate world. One of these, Google’s bid to acquire DoubleClick, has possible implications for users of AdSense and/or AdWords.

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This is an essay that describes how federalism is supposed to work according to the standard “civics book” kind of definition. It is interesting to consider this, and then note how much the balance of power in the USA today has shifted in favor of the federal (or national) level of government in actual practice.

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One of the nice benefits of doing paid surveys is that in addition to getting paid for the surveys themselves, sometimes you also get to sample new products for free (and have them shipped to you free also) before they become available to the general public.

Many companies will spend a surprisingly large amount of money to have people “secretly” test their products and give them honest feedback so that the companies can determine whether or not their new product is likely to be successful in terms of actual sales. After a significant sampling of people have tried the product and answered a follow-up survey on it, the companies can use the survey results to “tweak” their product so that it is more likely to appeal to people that might be interested in buying it.

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Zero Votes Cast in City Council Election

If you have ever wondered what would happen if we had an election where no one actually voted, we will no longer need to wait for the result.

This situation became reality yesterday in the town of Missouri City, Missouri when none the 35 registered voters in Ward 3 — including the incumbent himself — bothered to go the polls and vote. Ward 3 incumbent Joe Selle, who apparently forgot that there was an election yesterday, will still be allowed to serve another term on the city council even though no one voted for him due to an archaic city charter that was originally approved by the Missouri state legislature back in 1859. According to the charter, the incumbent gets to keep his office unless “another party is successfully elected and qualified”.

Interestingly, this same charter requires that the city’s mayor be a “free white male”. However, the City Council, citing modern civil rights legislation, decided to override this requirement in 2001 when the town elected its first female mayor.

Meanwhile, Michael Hampton at Homeland Stupidity made an excellent point a few days ago about how a small party or even a single person can still make a difference when it comes to elections and politics. In this particular case, all that was required for the removal of this incumbent was for one person to write in the name of another legally qualified resident of that district. These are the kinds of situations where we Libertarians can rack up some easy victories and begin to make a real difference at the local level if we can learn to recognize these opportunities and put forth a small amount of effort.

Yet at the same time, I also wonder about the folks who see voter apathy and intentional non-voting as a viable strategy for reducing the power of the State. After all, if we have reached the point where politicians cannot even be bothered to vote for themselves, do we really need these politicians?

UPDATE 8/27/08: It seems that the original story from KMBC-TV has been deleted, rendering the original link useless. I have managed to find a truncated version of the article from Associated Press here.

Building backlinks to your website for SEO purposes is usually a good thing. However, from the perspective of search engines, not all backlinks are created equally. For example, getting a one-way link back to your site is usually treated as a higher quality link than a two-way link that is acquired through a reciprocal link exchange.

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Andre Chaperon has produced an excellent video tutorial on how to create an XML compliant Google sitemap for your site.

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