Karlonia.com

Yesterday I received a nice little email tip from one of my big marketer guys about a potential source of traffic that most of us are probably not using. It’s called Webwire.com, an online news service that distributes press releases to major Internet media outlets such as Google News, MSN News, and the like. I’ll let the email speak for itself because it does a pretty good job of summarizing the pros and cons. Meanwhile, if you decide to use this method but aren’t sure about how to write press releases, you can check out my previous article on this topic, 10 Tips for Writing Effective Press Releases.

Marketing Tip: http://www.webwire.com

Postives: Fast indexing (2 days), on par with ezinearticles, little competition, easy to use once familiar.

Negatives: Cost $19 (which to me is actually a positive because it will keep a lot of competition away)

-Results short lived. 1 to 2 weeks. (great to use for new product launches)

Summary: Webwire is a press/news release service. This means Google, Yahoo and MSN bots visit frequently. The price keeps out the riff raff that most free sites get…and I “theorize” that Google gives it special points because of this.

To stay “clean” you need to submit a press release, which is really easy guidelines are here:

http://www.webwire.com/FormatGuidelinesOptions.asp

I do notice though…that they are not very tough on the “guidelines”.

However…I would highly recommend that you follow them because

1. You won’t have to worry about getting your release pulled.

2. My experience with press releases is that they convert very well…because it is NEWS and not a pitch.

Webwire is a great little tool to keep in your arsenal.

While most of us enjoy the convenience of withdrawing cash from an ATM when we need it, many such machines have begun charging significant fees for their use unless you happen to be a customer of their associated banks. For example, I noticed that Bank of America has recently raised their fees for each ATM transaction made by non-customers from $2 to $3. While this may not seem like much, it can add up over time and become an annoying extra expense to keep track of when trying to manage your finances.

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of banks that will reimburse such fees to your account even if you use non-affiliated ATMs. One such institution is USAA Federal Savings Bank. I have had an account with USAA for over three years now, and know from personal experience that they always rebate ATM surcharges at the end of each month regardless of which particular machine you use. The only caveat is that the rebate is limited to a maximum of 10 withdrawals or $15 per month, whichever happens first. However, I have never used ATMs frequently enough to exceed these limits, so this has never been a problem.

In this article, I will provide a list of other banks that either offer no fee ATM transactions at their machines or reimburse fees like USAA does. I will also answer some ATM-related questions that you may have, and then finish the article with a few tips on how to avoid ATM fees altogether.

What does ATM stand for?

ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine, also known as Automatic Teller Machine. It is a computerized bank terminal that is designed to accept cards with your account number and PIN (Personal Identification Number) on them, which are usually encoded with a magnetic stripe. Such machines have the ability to dispense cash, take deposits, and perform a few other basic banking functions such as transfers between accounts or information about current balances. Although the term “ATM machine” is actually redundant, I have used it a few times in this article because it appears so frequently in search queries.

What is the total number of ATM machines in the United States?

According to the American Bankers Association, there were approximately 395,000 ATMs in the United States as of 2006. In that year, they processed over 10.1 billion transactions.

Why do ATM machines eat your card?

Occasionally, ATMs have been known to “eat” cards in certain instances, which understandably frustrates their users. This usually happens for one of the following reasons:

1. Some ATMs are programmed to seize the card if the user enters the PIN incorrectly three times in a row (the dreaded “three strikes” rule).

2. In some locations, the ATM will eat your card if you do not retrieve it within a certain time period after fully completing a transaction (15 seconds for some machines, but this may vary).

3. In a few cases, cards have been eaten because the user had insufficient funds in the account or was trying to initiate a fraudulent transaction of some sort.

4. Sometimes the ATM simply malfunctions and keeps the card when it is not supposed to, in which case you can attempt to get it back by notifying the relevant bank. I read about one case where this happened and the bank personnel eventually had to pry the ATM open to get the card back, after which the renegade machine continued to eat the cards of subsequent customers.

What is an ATM PIN reversal? Is this a scam?

This is a concept that has been propagated by forwarded emails claiming that you can enter your PIN (Personal Identification Number) backwards at an ATM machine in order to secretly summon police. Supposedly this can help you in the event that you are being threatened by a robber while in the process of withdrawing cash. However, this idea was never actually implemented by any banks, although there have been a few proposed bills in state legislatures referring to the idea of such a system. While technically not a scam, it has become known as an urban legend that is not really true. Both scopes.com and scambusters.org have confirmed that emails claiming that this is true are bogus.

Read the rest of this entry »

As libertarians, one of the first challenges that we face when trying to educate people about our beautiful philosophy is that a large portion of the general public simply has no clue about what a libertarian really is. Worse yet, many people have vague or grossly inaccurate notions of what “libertarian” means because they have heard the word used in a misleading or pejorative context by politicians, uninformed educators, or biased media sources. Other people simply get confused about libertarianism by mixing it up with words that have somewhat similar spelling or with political groups that coincidentally share one or a few of our issue positions. For example, I have seen and heard people confuse libertarians with liberals, libertines, Liberians, librarians, left-wingers, right-wingers, conservatives, and independents.

In order to explain and clarify the word’s meaning, I will list several libertarian definitions below that I have accumulated from historical figures, scholarly essays, dictionaries, and other relevant sources. This is not intended to be a full-blown FAQ on libertarianism or a treatise on its various aspects; it simply answers the question, “What is a libertarian?” from different people’s perspectives. It is a list of quotes similar in format to my other compilation called Funny Quotes and Words of Wisdom. As with the previous article, if you have any other credible libertarian definitions that are not already included here, you can post these in the comment section and I will add them to the list.

libertarian (noun):
1. An advocate of the doctrine of free will.
2. One who upholds the principles of liberty; specifically, one who upholds the principles of individual liberty of thought and action.

libertarian (adjective):
1. Of or belonging to a libertarian.
2. Advocating a theory of free will.
3. Advocating or advancing liberty.
4. Based on or embodying principles of liberty. — Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged)
———-
libertarian: One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state. — American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
———-
In popular terminology, a libertarian is the opposite of an authoritarian. Strictly speaking, a libertarian is one who rejects the idea of using violence or the threat of violence (legal or illegal) to impose his will or viewpoint upon any peaceful person. Generally speaking, a libertarian is one who wants to be governed far less than he is today. — Dean Russell, Foundation for Economic Education (1955)
———-
Libertarianism is, as the name implies, the belief in liberty. Libertarians believe that each person owns his own life and property, and has the right to make his own choices as to how he lives his life as long as he simply respects the right of others to do the same. — Sharon Harris, President of Advocates for Self-Government
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past ten years or so, cell phones have become very popular communication devices because of their convenience and portability. However, along with this surge in popularity there have been many incidents of people accidentally dropping their cell phones into various bodies of water or other liquids. If this happens to you and your cell phone gets wet, you may think at first that it is damaged beyond repair and dread the cost and hassle of replacing it. But with some resourceful thinking, in many cases it is possible to save a wet cell phone if you take action quickly enough.

Once a cell phone gets wet, several methods are available for attempting to dry it out and revive it, but there a few things that you should always do first regardless of which method you choose. The most important of these is to immediately get the phone out of the water and remove the battery. This will disconnect the electrical power source, thus preventing any further possibility of short circuit damage and increasing your chances of a successful cell phone resurrection. If you have a SIM card, this should be removed also - you may be able to save your data.

The next step is to get as much water as you can out of the phone and dry off all visible liquid with a cloth or paper towel. If your cell phone has any other easily removable parts besides the sim card, these can be dried separately. Then your main task is to make sure that the internal parts of your phone are completely dry so that you do not cause a short circuit when you reconnect the phone’s power supply. This is the part that will require the most patience and thinking, as there are several methods that people have used to successfully dry out their cell phones. Here are a few that I have come across in my research:

1. Wait it out. Yes, it’s boring and will take a while, but this is probably the safest method overall. Just let the phone sit out in a dry place for at least three days while the water evaporates. A variation on this that might speed up the drying process slightly is to leave the phone on top of a low heat source such as a television or cable box.

2. Put the phone in a bowl of dry rice. Many people have had success with this one, and it makes sense because uncooked rice can absorb a lot of water. For most cell phone models, you won’t have to worry about the rice grains getting inside of the phone. The following video provides a quick one-minute demonstration of how this is done.

Read the rest of this entry »

When selecting fresh vegetables for your favorite recipes, this brief article by Katina Mooneyham provides a few common sense tips that you can use to make sure that purchased produce is not spoiled, damaged, or otherwise unusable for cooking. While most of these things will seem pretty obvious to those of us who have fully developed brains, after watching videos like these, I have learned that one should not always assume that common sense is in ample supply.

Next time you go produce shopping, watch as people start thumping melons and smelling tomatoes. Why do they start this seemingly odd behavior? It’s because they’ve learned to look and test before they buy. It’s always pleasant to get a tomato that may last a little longer than others. Here are some tips for buying fresh vegetables at a store or farmer’s market.

1. Check for obvious problems, marks or otherwise unhealthy looking vegetables. Avoid fresh produce that has scratch marks or obvious bad marks on it.

2. Give produce the smell test. Over ripe fruits and vegetables have a very strong smell to them. They are sometimes overbearing. You want the produce to smell. But you don’t want it so powerful that you can smell it from three aisles away.

3. Give melons a light thump. It’s been rumored that it isn’t a surefire way to tell if a melon is ripe but it works for many people most of the time. If the melon is ripe, it will have an echo. If it is a dull sound, then it might not be ripe. But you don’t want the melon over ripe either. Do the smell test on melons.

4. Don’t buy things that are wilting. You most likely can’t save them even by putting them in cold water.

5. Make sure the fruit you buy doesn’t have any mold. Even if one or two have some mold, you may be tempted to just discard them once you get home. But if you forget to discard the bad ones right away, the whole package will spoil within days.

Teach the kids to be watchful for bad produce too. Tell them not to pick up produce that has been on the floor and put it back with the clean food items. Just remember that if you think it’s bad, then skip over it. Trust your nose and eyes.

Although I usually prefer email for general communication, I have had a few occasions where I needed to use online chatting, usually through text messages on Yahoo. I’m probably one of a very small group of people who actually uses standard English in text messaging instead of the ubiquitous shorthand abbreviations. While it is not always necessary to write out every word, there are still some general rules of etiquette that are advisable to follow in chat situations, especially if the person at the other end is someone that you do not know very well. This article by April Aragam explains some of these guidelines that will help you to maintain a professional appearance online.

There are few people who haven’t chatted online at least once. Though it’s still fairly new, most people who have a computer with Internet access have indulged in this activity. Chat is one of the most common forms of communication these days. Unlike the phone, you can have numerous conversations at once. You can chat with friends, business colleagues, and strangers. Though chatting is so easy and carefree, there are still manners and etiquettes that need to be observed:

1. Initiating Conversation

When you initiate a conversation with anyone, a stranger or a long time friend, be sure you have something to talk about. One of the most annoying things in chat is when someone messages you to ask how you are and then has nothing else to say. You don’t need to chat with someone every single time you see them online, so when you do message them, have a question in mind or a piece of news to share. This will make your chats with anyone more interesting and seem less like a burden.

2. Use Manners

Just because you’re online and not talking face to face or voice to voice, doesn’t mean you should throw manners out the window altogether. Say “thank you” and “you’re welcome” when appropriate. When someone does ask how you are, ask the same back. Use the same manners you would if you were in person or on the telephone with anyone.

3. Avoid excessive jargon and word emoticons

There are certain abbreviations that have become commonplace in the chatting world such as “bbl,” which stands for be back later and “brb,” which stands for be right back. But sometimes you will come into contact with people who have an abbreviation for every word. There are people who will say that it makes typing faster, but in many cases the word is exactly the same length, just different letters. Unless you’re a teenager chatting to another teenager, you can type normally. If you have word emoticons (pictures that replace certain words in your chat conversations), cut them down to a minimum as they can make reading very difficult for the other person. If the emote for a word is a picture only (instead of a colorful word), don’t use it at all, as the person will have a hard time figuring out what you are trying to say. These items might look cute, but more than one or two is hard on the eyes. And if you are chatting with business colleagues always type properly. You don’t want to look unprofessional.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you wind up having to host a dinner party or plan for some other event where food will need to be prepared for multiple guests, you will probably want something that is relatively easy to prepare and that most people will like. This article by Janna Rock provides three simple party food ideas and explains their ingredients and preparation.

After reading the article, I should probably point out one important caveat: these foods are fairly high in calories and definitely NOT for vegetarians! But if your guests don’t mind some “nutritionally incorrect” cuisine, they might as well dig in…

If you have birthdays, holidays, or other special occasions coming right around the corner, the likelihood of you having to throw a party or attend a party is probably pretty high. Here are three simple but tasty party foods that are easy to prepare, relatively cheap to make, and will be enjoyed by everyone.

Sausage Balls

Sausage balls are an all time favorite party food. They are relatively fattening and most people find it difficult to eat only one! The ingredients you will need are: 1 pound of Jimmy Dean Sausage, 4 cups of your favorite cheese, (Kraft’s Crackle Barrel Extra Sharp Cheddar seems to work best), and 3 cups of Bisquick flour.

You will need to preheat your oven to 400 degrees and either grease your cookie sheet or line it with foil because this particular party food will stick to the cookie sheet! In a large bowl mix the sausage with the cheese until well blended. You can use your hands to mix and knead the sausage and cheese together. Next slowly add the flour. If you add the flour too quickly you won’t get the correct consistency. After all of your ingredients have been mixed together, you will want to form small balls, about the size of a boiled egg yolk, and place them on your cookie sheet. Bake at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. For best results, serve them while they are still fairly warm.

Read the rest of this entry »

This article by Jonathan Busch is a humorous story about the author’s encounter with one of his more difficult customers that he had to deal with while working as a cashier at Wendy’s, a well-known fast food restaurant. Many of you who have worked in the food service industry (or at other jobs that involve frequent contact with the general public) will likely be able to relate to this one.

Most of us have, at some point in our lives, worked at a job that could be successfully accomplished by a machine, chimpanzee, or kindergartener. Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride, tie your hair back, and service the drive-through window. Because most of us have shared an experience like this, you probably know just as well as I do that it is not the simplicity of the job that makes you loathe it, but rather the people you are forced to work with or around at such jobs that drives you to homicidal thoughts.

For a time, I worked at a Wendy’s. Although it is not exactly the most distinguished place of employment, it brought in paychecks…more than my fall-back plan of becoming a hobo could boast. As a new employee, I was lucky enough to be given a choice: work the fries, or work the front register. I decided to go with the job that posed me less of a threat in the form of third degree burns. In retrospect, fries might have been less painful.

Read the rest of this entry »

The original AdBux program released its newsletter for January today. It is fairly short content-wise, but it does contain some interesting tidbits about upcoming features. They are looking at adding a cash rebate shopping program to include in the already successful AdBux offers section that I reported on back in October. Also in the pipeline is support for AlertPay and MoneyBookers payment options; the program currently does payouts via PayPal.

Meanwhile, I can now confirm that the offers are crediting properly and being added to our earnings balances. I have had four such offers that have gone through the 32-day waiting period and have been successfully credited. I have also had two recent offers completed by referrals, which has added another 38 cents to my pending balance.

There never seems to be any shortage of available offers either. When I logged in this morning, there were 232 of them waiting. Not all of them were really feasible for me to do because they required credit cards or some type of hassle that would mean having to cancel memberships in order to avoid recurring billing, but there were still plenty of completely free offers there that were relatively quick and easy.

January 2008

Updates & Announcements

December was one of our biggest months, the payout is at over $40,000 with over 60,000 new registrations. The Cashback Shopping program is almost complete, we’re anticipating it will be ready by the end of this month. The AdBux team is diligently working on new methods of getting payouts on time for this year and we hope to introduce AlertPay and MoneyBookers soon. A lot of you have also asked about the status of the support ticket system and it’s slowly but surely coming. 2008 will be a great year for AdBux! Help us become the #1 “get-paid-to” site online!

December Jackpot Winners Announced

- First place goes to cootas who won 25% of the jackpot @ $199.00!
- Second place goes to pally
- Third place goes to maquessime

To find out the full list of prizes that each winner received, check out the jackpot page.

Incentrum, LLC
665 East Main Street
Lake Butler, Florida 32054

Yes, they’re at it again. The Royal Surf owners have sent out several more updates since the last one that I posted here where I managed to win the free squire upgrade. I haven’t actually posted them all because I don’t want to overdo it with any single program, and there is always plenty of news on both the Internet marketing and Libertarian fronts that deserves coverage. But it’s hard to turn down the free content that conveniently arrives in my inbox, especially since my search engine checks reveal that no one else is publishing these updates so far (thus avoiding the duplication problem) and the RoyalSurf administrators themselves probably don’t mind the free advertising that they are receiving here.

This time there was apparently some sort of error that caused the cron job to run early, resulting in an accidental reset of the jousting quest stats for the current week. The program owners are compensating for this by increasing the bonus credits links and bronze coin awards that can be found during the quests. Meanwhile, the frequent updates and program tweaks seem to be working well for them in terms of increasing membership and delivering higher quality traffic. I should probably surf this exchange more frequently because the overall advertising potential here is on a definite upward trend, especially with all of the free upgrades and bonuses being awarded to active members.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the side effects of relatively high life expectancies found in most developed countries is that there are a greater number of people who may require some form of home care assistance as they reach the end of their natural life spans. If you or an elderly relative should find yourself in such a situation, Bettercaring.com can provide information on various assisted living options ranging from home care services at your current residence to locating suitable nursing homes should the need arise. The site also provides factsheets and links to advice on relevant funding options and financial assistance issues.

From a functional standpoint, the site is fairly simple and easy to navigate. There are three convenient text buttons (labeled with a T) in the upper right corner of the home page that allow you to increase the font size of the text for better readability. The top navigation bar is color-coded and links to the main areas of the site, including care information, the search function, and a discussion section. There is also a sitewide footer bar that leads to the more business-oriented pages of the site such as the contact page, privacy policy, and a link for Bedvacs customers that resolves to bettercaring.co.uk.

Directly under the top navigation bar, there is a quick search area on the home page that will allow you to locate available care homes within a certain radius of any UK town or postcode. For a more detailed search, you can use the “care search” section to define specific criteria such as the type of care provided, weekly fee limits, and the presence of a variety of features such as gardens, lifts, or easy access to public transportation. Meanwhile, the discussion section includes a community forum, news briefs, editorial comments, and personal stories from readers.

Overall, Bettercaring.com is a good resource of information on elderly care issues. The site is poised to become more interesting and informative over time as the community forum and blog sections continue to grow and accumulate more content. The only real disadvantage that I see with the site is that the search function and much of the discussion assumes that you are interested in care home options only within the UK (this includes England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). If you are looking for elderly care options outside of the UK, the site can still serve as a decent resource hub, but you will probably need to look elsewhere for information on specific locations of elderly care homes in your area.

After reading about Ron Paul’s 10 percent returns in the Iowa caucuses today, I am beginning to see some encouraging signs that his campaign may be able to bring libertarian ideas into the American mainstream. While browsing through one of my favorite libertarian forums, someone posted a link to what is probably the best Ron Paul interview that I have seen to date.

The interview was conducted by Bill Moyers from the PBS television network and is refreshingly free of blatant bias, forced soundbytes, snide comments, and all of the other marginalizing tactics that have become commonplace in most mainstream media outlets. It runs 22 minutes long and includes a readable transcript for those of you who may not be able to hear the audio and are looking for a closed captioning option. There were a few good points brought up in the video that I am pleased to see are finally being discussed:

1. Near the beginning of the segment, Bill Moyers actually brought up the fact that Fox News excluded Ron Paul from one of the recent debates, and that Fox never gave any explanation for this. However, he is being included in the ABC debates.
2. Ron Paul was able to explain that libertarianism is inherently anti-racist because it sees people as individuals as opposed to members of a collective group. One of the defining characteristics of all forms of racism is that they attempt to categorize people into separate groups, in this case by race. Libertarianism does not categorize people by race or any other group label, but instead upholds the rights of the individual, usually in opposition to the power of the State.
3. Near the end, there was some good discussion about the problems with the two-party system, and the obvious inconsistency of the United States invading (or substantially interfering with) other countries in the name of imposing “democracy” on them, while at the same time we do not really have democracy in the U.S., as anyone who gets involved with independent candidates or third party efforts soon realizes.

Read the rest of this entry »

In order to have a successful website, it’s pretty obvious to most of us that we need significant amounts of traffic. In order to obtain this traffic, one of the most inexpensive and highly targeted ways to do it is through the search engines. But attracting visitors to your site from the search engines means that your pages need to rank well enough to be noticed, which invariably leads us to the task of getting more inbound links. Fortunately, there are many ways of getting such links, 10 of which I will explain below.

1. Set up pages on other sites

Some of the newer social networking sites such as Squidoo will allow you to make your own pages as part of your membership. This presents an opportunity for getting free inbound links to your site because you can post content to these pages and then link to your site from there. As a side note, you can also use this method to make money from affiliate marketing.

2. Participate in forums within your niche

Forums are usually a good place to get free links and traffic because most of them will allow you to put a link to your favorite site in the signature line. However, in order to be effective with this method you should make sure that your posts are relevant to the topic of the thread and do not stick out as blatant advertisements. For maximum SEO effect, try to choose forums and threads that discuss the same topics as your site.

3. Submit your best articles to social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking networks such as del.icio.us and digg.com allow users to publicly bookmark their favorite sites and share them with other members of the same network. Many such sites also allow for “tagging” of web pages as a way of categorizing them by associated words or topics. If you have a page on your site that is particularly informative and might be of interest to a larger audience, submitting it to a social bookmarking network gives you the possibility of picking up a few inbound links along with some free traffic. This process can even be automated by using tools such as Social Bookmarking Demon.

4. Slip in links from wiki pages

The original Wikipedia, an encyclopedia-themed site that allows users to contribute and edit content, has spawned a new trend of sorts in which many other information-based sites are now setting up their own “wiki” pages in order to reap the benefits of user-generated content. If you are able to contribute informative material to such pages, it is possible to slip in a link to your site. However, the editors of wiki sites tend to have little tolerance for sales or advertising tactics, so you will need to take the time to provide valuable information so that it does not appear that you’re just trying to get a free text link.

5. Blog commenting

One of my favorite ways for getting inbound links is commenting on other blogs. With a little savvy, you can set it up so that the content of the other person’s blog post matches up nicely with your own article. This will make the link look more relevant to the search engines. As with forums, it is important to see that comments are relevant and do not look like spam; otherwise, the blog owner may delete them.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have received another fundraising letter from the national Libertarian Party today. The party is hoping to make up for a slight budget shortfall (compared to their annual projections) for the year 2007 so that there will be enough money available for advertising and ballot access efforts in 2008. An unfortunate side effect of the Ron Paul “revolution” is that his campaign has probably diverted some funds from donors who might have otherwise given more time or money to other libertarian causes such as the LP. If Ron Paul does not win the Republican nomination (it is very difficult for me to believe that the GOP establishment would ever allow this), there will not be many options left for liberty lovers, so it is worth considering the idea of helping out the LP as much as we can, even if it is only for a “protest vote”.

Below is the actual text of the letter. I have placed a link to the donation page at lp.org at the bottom of the page.

Dear Fellow Libertarian,

I need your help.

I’m not usually that blunt, but right now I have no choice.

We - you and I - are looking at perhaps the greatest opportunity the Libertarian Party has ever seen.

But we are also looking at what is easily the greatest challenge we have ever seen - by far!

And whether we seize this opportunity or fail to meet this challenge will depend greatly on what you decide to do after reading this letter.

You see, thanks to the support of freedom loving Americans like you, the Libertarian Party has made some truly remarkable gains over the past year - including a growth in membership of nearly 20 percent!

And right now, the political climate in American is ripe for us to move forward with even more growth - growth that will ultimately break the two-party stranglehold that has had such a devastating impact on our country.

Read the rest of this entry »

While searching through some Internet news articles, I noticed this article from Mashable.com reporting on a disturbing move by the Australian parliament that forces Internet service providers to block pornographic sites or any other material that the government deems “inappropriate”. Fortunately for freedom lovers, individual users will be able to opt out of the government censorship and still receive unrestricted access upon request.

Although no amount of State censorship could be considered a good thing as far as I am concerned, others have pointed out that this latest insult to our liberty is still not as onerous as restrictions imposed by other countries such as China, where the censorship is so widespread that it often suppresses opposing political views. However, it still gives the government unnecessary power to determine exactly what constitutes “appropriate content” and what doesn’t, while the possibility of governments tracking opt out requests could raise privacy concerns. It also sets a bad precedent that other governments may be encouraged to follow, especially since Australia is considered by many to be relatively free and democratic.

The bottom line is this: no government should be trying to block access to the Internet, period. Things like filtering pornography from children are simply not in the government’s purview, as these issues rightfully belong in the realms of parental choice and individual responsibility. Although the apparently sheepish Australians seem oblivious, it is actually the responsibility of the people in a so-called democratic society to determine what is “appropriate content” for the government, not the other way around.

Related article: Pornography, Free Speech, and the Internet