Friday, November 30, 2007

GOP debate good, but where is the conservative outcry?

The Grand Ole Party debated on CNN and YouTube Wednesday night (full downloads are available on both sites). While the Republicans barbed with one another, I personally thought the debate was missing some much needed conservative rhetoric. Even ultra-libertarian Ron Paul was too focused (again) on foreign policy isolationism, obfuscating his message of reduced federal impingement on society.

As an example, one question Wednesday night dealt with the issue of NASA funding and a possible trip to Mars in 2020. Responses given by Governor Huckabee and Congressman Tancredo were too focused on Federal spending for my taste (Huckabee for it and Tancredo against it). Rather, as a conservative, I would have liked the answer to be restricted privatization of the entire federal program. We all know that NASA has been hemorrhaging dollars and I argue that it suffers from a lack of “creative destruction.” I say that NASA as a whole is too much of a state program and needs to be put into the hands of society and the marketplace itself.

By allowing NASA (or multiple derivatives thereof) to operate privately with obvious restrictions and allotments for national security (much like the current port systems or critical infrastructure base in this country), we will be able to allow market forces to drive technological advances in space exploration and discovery. Living in an Internet age, all of us should be able to identify the power of such forces. Can you image if the Internet were truly invented by life-long liberal politician Al Gore? We would all be on dial-up, chatting to one another and paying a tax to the National Organization for Telecommunications and Media Emissions (NOTME).

Seriously, we need to be focusing on more ways to pull power back from the state, which has been creating net after net of social programs aimed to pull power and responsibility away from society. Another direct example brought up Wednesday from a viewer in Pittsburgh was our government’s response to lead in toys.

I would love to hear Albert J. Nock’s response to this. Clearly, Nock would point to the involvement of the state in federal oversight commissions over the last 75 years as taking away from the responsibility of resellers and distributors to be held accountable for the safety of toys on their shelves. Ask yourself, living in a world of a thousand federal commissions and the FDA, whom do you blame? Not Wal-Mart, not Tyco. No, it’s the government’s fault. Well my friends, as Nock would say, if we were not so reliant in 2007 on our government to protect us, maybe we would have already protected ourselves by creating an environment where resellers of goods that were unsafe would be facing the very real possibility of going out of business and thus would have instituted measures and safeguards long ago to privately account for the safety of their products.

To conclude, I will offer this final point for thought. In today’s “flat” world, we (society) need to learn to take back responsibility. I say this because our federal government cannot control the whole of the world (no matter how much we try). Therefore, as consumers, as explorers, as a civilization, we need to regain control of our societal power and bear the responsibilities of such a society. That was the essence of the conservative movement when Nock penned “Our Enemy the State” in 1934, and I argue it is as important, if not more so, in 2007.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Understanding your web presence's presence…

In today’s Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 migration, companies should become cognizant not only of their web presence, but also of the users who find their site relevant. I’m not actually talking about expensive web-monitoring software or Google’s ad-click data, but rather free information available to anyone at anytime.....del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us offers a unique marketing analysis and reflection tool to ensure that your site is getting the right information to the right type of viewers. Although Delicious users are a subset of the entire market, they are an active subset. If your page is saved to Delicious, you know you have an active browser (someone who has taken the time to view your site and save it as RELEVANT). Add to that, users will place tags to categorize web-pages which in and of themselves serve as mini-reviews of their interpretation of your site, content, and most importantly, products.

I recommend taking a look at who’s looking at you and what they are saying. From this, delve a litter deeper and find what sites (companies) they are comparing to you. What tags do they use for your organization and who else is receiving similar marks?

By the way, this is also a good way to read into your competition and discover new trends in the marketplace. But you already knew that…