McAlester, OK in Pittsburg County (East-Central, OK, about an hour-and-a-half south of Tulsa, OK)

The characters:

• Jim Bob Miller - District Attorney
• Michael Ethan Miller - Jim Bob’s Son
• Gene Stipe - Former State Senator, Convicted Felon
• Wayne Stipe - Nephew of Gene Stipe
• Harold King - Operator of the “McAlester Watercooler”

The background:

The McAlester Watercooler (McCooler.net) according to it’s home page:

Our goal is to provide the citizens of McAlester, Oklahoma a place to voice their views about the on-going City events. All suggestions are welcome….Keeping it positive doesn’t mean living in denial.

According to a recent report in the Tulsa World:

King said he has been trying to get the district attorney and “most of the Pittsburg County judges” prosecuted for alleged corruption. Commentary on his Web site concerns local politics and the federal government’s investigation and prosecutions of political corruption, kickbacks to legislators, and state funds that were illegally funneled to businesses controlled by Gene Stipe.

King also told The Oklahoman:

The site focuses on McAlester politics — particularly matters related to former state Sen. Gene Stipe.

In December 2005, King filed a police report claiming Stipe assaulted him. Stipe and his brother Francis filed a stalking complaint, accusing King of harassing them. Gene Stipe also obtained a protective order against King and accused him of libel.

According to the Tulsa World report, Stipe, then an associate of Stipe have each unsucessfully gone after King on “libel” accusations, which if successful, would have carried penalties up to a year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

On the page if his site where members are encouraged to enter their opinions, is the following quote:

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. -Thomas Paine - Introduction to Common Sense

The story:

The tumult, it seems, has not yet subsided, because over the weekend, King filed a police report and sought a temporary restraining order against Wayne Stipe.

According to a report in the Tulsa World:

King filed a police report Saturday [August 9, 2008] after Wayne Stipe allegedly hit him in the mouth outside a grocery store, records show.

Wayne Stipe said: ‘This man has been trying to pick a fight with me for the last three years. He was finally successful. He picked a fight with me, and I defended myself. I felt like I was about to be attacked by the crazy man.’

Asked whether King physically assaulted him, Wayne Stipe said King ‘verbally assaulted’ him.

King said: ‘I don’t know how you pick a fight when you say, ‘No, I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.’ He hit. I didn’t.’

So then, on Tuesday August 12, 2008, according to a report in The McAlester News that McAlester police detectives handed him subpoenas:

I was at home and they came and knocked on my door…I understand it was due to a criminal investigation requested by elected officials…[I] was not told which elected officials, or official, requested the investigation…

The Tulsa World is reporting that:

McAlester Police Capt. Don Hass said the investigation concerns ‘criminal libel’ complaints.

King Told The Oklahoman that he:

…researched posts under those pseudonyms and found one common denominator: All had written critically about Pittsburg County District Attorney Jim Miller.

Miller, according to The Oklahoman, had no comment about any investigation, but he told the Tulsa World that, “he thinks some statements posted on the Web site about him and others are libelous.”

King, calling the request for 35 names a “witch hunt,” says he needs more information before turning over any information about the bloggers (commenters) on his site:

I’m waiting specifically for what they need. There has to be a real need — and that need has to be balanced against the Constitutional rights of the blogger. Blanket requests will not be accepted. If they would be specific, I would be happy to contact that person and have them get in touch.

King told the Tulsa World he would file an objection to the subpoena.

There are several possible grounds — ranging (from) Bill of Rights issues to procedural ones. The problem that really concerns me is what they might try next.

The ramifications:

And that, my friends, is a concern for the entire online community. Right now, there is a request by either a prosecutor or a judge for the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of people who have posted criticism (some anonymously or pseudonymously) of local elected officials. The possible ramifications of such a precedent, if successful, are staggering, nationwide, in the online community, particularly the political online community. We need to watch this closely.

The “libel” complaint could easily be used as a weapon to silence dissent. As Joey Senate, past president of FOI Oklahoma Inc. and associate professor of journalism at Oklahoma State University, pointed out to The Oklahoman, the subpoena could have:

…a chilling effect. It just smacks of trying to chill criticism. We have a right to speak anonymously, especially about political matters.

(hat-tip, Okie Campaigns and The McCarvile Report Online)

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It has potential, after all, as it has been developed by some former Google employees.

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.

Cuil (”knowledge”) is developed and run by folks with years of web and search engine development experience (including inside Google), and is currently privately funded. It has some great features, including Drilldown, rollover definitions, and navigation suggestions:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

I haven’t received any feedback yet on the site (good or bad), but my own trial of the site has yielded less than spectacular results. For one thing, when I’m searching, I usually need to know what the latest news is on a topic, and Cuil has no way of sorting this info (or at least, I haven’t found it yet).

The other major problem is that the sources in search results are so obscure that I usually have to do a lot more additional research to even find out out if the source is credible for the topic I’m researching.

A third problem of slighly lesser importance I’ve encountered is that the search engine is not being picked up by any of my stats counters, so I do not know if I’m receiving any traffic from the site or not. But since I haven’t had a spike in traffic from any unknown sources, I suspect not. As a blogger, it is as important to me that a search engine drive traffic to my site as it is that I can find good information on the search engine when I need it.

So, so far, I am not as impressed with Cuil as I’d hoped. Has anyone else had a similar (or different) experience?

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Is this legal?

According to the JIDF, it is acting “with the advice of legal counsel and within the confines of the law.”

Why bother? Didn’t the Anti-Israel site have “Freedom of Speech?”

Well, keep in mind that Facebook is a private, not a government entity…so “free speech” is granted only as long as the Facebook administrators allow it to be taken. The new description of the group explains a little of why this was done:

This group was one of the most vile, antisemitic, pro-terrorist sites on the internet. Moreover, it was the most active hate group of all, heartily promoting hatred, murder, and genocide while proliferating abominable propaganda paralleled only by the fables of Goebbels. While such content clearly violates Facebook’s own Terms of Use and Code of Conduct, provisions that users agree to abide when they register on the site, Facebook refused to take action. Despite thousands of user complaints over the course of eighteen months, Facebook allowed this group and its ubiquitous antisemitic lies to flourish. Facebook’s own negligence and abdication of responsibility gave us no option but to take matters in our own hands.

We wish to be clear – we have no issues with legitimate political discourse so long as it is contextual, comparative and truthful. However, when it comes to encouraging the murder of Jews and purposefully disseminating misinformation to demonize Jews and to delegitimize Israel, there is a moral obligation to remove the platform of such repugnant hate-mongers. Unfortunately, we do not need to search too far back into history to realize that such evils have a real cost in terms of human lives.

The comments and posts of the original group are no longer available, but “vile” is truly an understatement. To get the gist of the types of conversations that took place there, you can take a look at a couple of smaller groups that are in the same mindset as the original, here and here.

Should the JIDF have done this?

There will be repercussions, that’s for sure. But if there are 48,000 people assimilating freely, some literally conspiring to kill and ahihilate an entire nation of people…what is the appropriate way for them to protect themselves?

I’ve noticed a similarity between the mindset of some in social networks online and that of road-rage. Some people get very aggressive while they are inside their vehicles, protected by somewhat of an “anonymous” identity. Most of these people, in real life, are harmless. But for the mentally unbalanced, that rage sometimes seeps outside the vehicle, and can result in injury or death to the object of their rage.

Social networks online are also vehicles which provide somewhat of a protective barrier of anonymity. However, when we see thousands of people congregating, fueling each others fury, actually making death threats online, and discussing strategies for exterminating an entire race - we need to realize that a few of those people might actually get out of the care and act on that rage. That is particularly true when that rage has actually been boiling for centuries, excalating in recent decades, long before there was anything called Web 2.0..

Also see: Jewish Internet Defense Force ’seizes control’ of anti-Israel Facebook group

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Unfortunately, the government is stepping in to “help.” Remember the No Child Left Behind legislation that was oh-so-effective in improving the educational experience of American students? Well, now some folks want to add an amendment to that legislation to “fix” the problem of childhood obesity.

Parents! Where are you?!

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Facebook is useful for many aspects of social networking, but the one we’re going to discuss today is promoting your own blog. Before I get started listing the blog promotion opportunities, I cannot stress enough the importance of not overusing any of these strategies - and the importance of not using Facebook only for promoting a blog. Try that, and you’ll lose friends faster than you can add them. The purpose of Facebook is to foster genuine networking relationships - and no one like to be “spammed.” But along with superpoking, sharing videos, writing on friends walls, and responding to clever status messages, here are some great blog-promotion opportunites with Facebook:

1. Sign up for FriendFeed, and add the FriendFeed Facebook Application, and selectively submit your blog posts to the Feed.
2. If you’re on Twitter, you can automate the above submissions by adding TwitterFeed, and then adding your Twitter stream to your FriendFeed.
3. Join Groups that relate to the content of your blog, or start a group on the topic of your blog. As a group administrator, you can message the members of the group when you have an action item that your think they’ll all be interested in (heed word of caution above about overusing these techniques).
4. Put links to your really important stuff in your “status” message (occassionally). Note, there are several Twitter apps on Facebook that automatically update your Twitter status to your Facebook status - if you’ve installed the TwitterFeed app in #2 above, I would not recommend using these apps. Your Facebook Friends might grow weary of the constant blog promotion directly on Facebook.)

Also see:

• Patrick Ruffini: The Early Adopter Effect
• Facebook info on the WebWarriors Wiki
• How to Develop a Social Networking Profile in Four Easy Steps
• Friendfeed: Web 2.0 for Fans of Discussion Forums

Related Posts

• March 20, 2008 -- FriendFeed - Web 2.0 for Fans of Discussion Forums (0)
• May 17, 2008 -- Using (and Abusing?) rel=”nofollow” to Preserve Page Rank (2)
• April 8, 2008 -- Time’s ‘Top 25 Blogs of the Year’ (Not a joke - Unfortunately) (0)
• April 4, 2008 -- Diggers React to Facebook Fatality (2)
• April 3, 2008 -- Betting on the News…?! (0)

I went last year, and learned a lot, so I’m planning to go back this year. From the site:

BlogWorld features the largest blogging conference in the world including more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of online technology and internet-savvy business. If you are currently blogging, vlogging, podcasting, producing other forms of new media content, entering the new media industry, or just want to know what the blogosphere is all about, then you need to be at the most comprehensive blogging convention–BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Located in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at: 3150 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89109

Vegas, baby! See you there.

Note: You can support Ft. Hard Knox by signing up using one of the links from this site. Also, if you would like to become an affiliate, and register your own blog readers, click here, or on the affiliate link at the top right of this page.

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Do you have an online presence, or is your online reputation a bit hap-hazzard, with um-teen different ID’s and profiles on who-knows-how-many social networking sites out there? It’s time to get it together, and show some virtual self-respect. Developing an effective online profile takes a little planning and work, but it is not difficult, if you follow these four easy steps.

1. Choose a name.

   This is the name you’re going to use everywhere online, so choose wisely. You can use your own name, of course, but if you have safety and privacy concerns, you may want to choose a pseudonym. I recommend choosing a name that sounds like a real name (i.e., has a first and last name, like “Jenn Sierra”), so that you’ll also be able to use it on sites like Facebook and Linked-In. Alternatively, some social networkers choose a name that reflects their online interests or political stance (e.g., Foeammer, or bamapachyderm).

   Keep in mind, that if the name you choose is too overtly “anti” any group of people, including anti-jihad, it may eventually be banned by some of the more politically correct social networking sites, and/or make you a target for “burying” by the users on those sites. Your courage in choosing such a name is commendable, but you may find that it becomes more tiring than you think to have to continuously “start over” with new user ID’s and profiles.

2. Get a free e-mail account using your new name.

   This can be done through a plethora of e-mail services like g-mail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.. Don’t use your internet service provider (like AOL, or Cox), because if you change providers, you’ll lose your e-mail address. Begin developing a list of contacts and networking with those contacts by e-mail whenever possible.

3. Choose an avatar.

   This is the little picture that will be beside your username nearly everywhere. Choose one you like…it should be a square, and save it to your harddrive or photosharing site in a few different sizes, from 50×50 pixels to about 400×400 pixels.

4. Join social networking sites, using your new e-mail address, avatar, and name.

   …or as close to your name as you can get. The longer the site has been active, the more likely someone has already used that name, so you may have to add a number or a suffix to your user ID on some sites.

   Join networks as you discover them. You will be more active on some networks than others. On some, you’ll simply be reserving your username, but on a few, you’ll be actively developing online networking relationships by participating in voting on articles and especially in the discussions.

   On the more established networks like Facebook and Stumblupon, use the friend-finder feature which checks your e-mail address books for friends that are already using the social networking sites. This helps you develop a friends-list quickly.

And there you go - you have a Web 2.0 presence. Take care of it. Your reputation online is as valuable as your repuation in “real life.”

Update: See Get a Gravatar, by ChrisG of Blogging and New Media

(Also on FHK)

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The catch is that those coupons have to be used in 90 days, or the coupons expire - and the stores are having trouble keeping the “coupon eligible converter boxes” (CELB’s) in stock. I tried several places online, and they were also out of stock. So, what are you supposed to do, if you can’t buy a converter box before your coupons expire?

Well, you can re-order the coupons, and try again. That’s what we’re doing. We’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

What we don’t understand is why the coupons expire. We all know that the government has no money of its own, so it’s using the money it gets from us, the taxpayers, to give us either $40 or $80 (depending on whether you ask for one coupon or two - two being the limit per household) of our own money back to help pay for something it decided to do without asking us in the first place. But we only have 90 days to use our money - whether or not the stores have the merchandise. Then the oh-so-generous “offer” expires.

Good grief. Will Rogers was right when he said,

“Be glad you’re not getting all of the government you pay for.”

Thankfully, if you’re using cable, satellite or the phone company for your T.V., you won’t need one of these boxes. Everyone who’s stuck with roof top antennaes or rabbit ears, however, probably will. U.S. Rep Tom Cole (R-OK) has some very helpful information on his site, here, and the official coupon site is here (retailer list here).

(Also on GCV)

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If you type in either Wal-Mart.com or WalMart.com, you’ll see who eventually won that battle.

Another tactic used by domain name speculators is to grab up the alternate top-level domains (TLD’s) like .org, .net, .tv, .info, .gov of famous organizations, or catch-phrases that promise to be popular. Remember “Don’t Taze me, Bro!”? Some industrious person(s) went to GoDaddy.com, and grabbed up donttazemebro.com, donttazemebro.net, donttazemebro.org, donttazemebro.info, donttazemebro.tv…etc..

Well, as of today, there’s a new domain name craze. “.me” is the TLD for Montenegro, but has lots of possibilities for domain name speculators worldwide. (hmmm…I wonder if help.me, love.me, bite.me, and youdontknow.me are taken?)

Hat-Tip: Quick Online Tips

Also on Ft. Hard Knox

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Now, where was I? Oh, yes! You know what’s really maddening as a blogger? When you research and post a great blogpost, with some great links, and when you check your “IP’s” and “actions” later on your stats, you realize, readers found your article, then promptly clicked out of our blog to your link, never to return. How can this be avoided?

Code your hyperlink to open in a new window (this makes it easier for your readers to get back to your article), by adding (minus the brackets): [target="_blank"] to your hyperlink, so it would look like this:

For more information about using hyperlinks, see “Adding Hyperlinks,” or the WWF Wiki.

Chad, of the Grizzly Groundswell, reminds us that if you are using the visual editor in Wordpress, one of the drop-down options available in the “link” box is the option to have the link open in a new window. Using this, you will not have to enter the code manually.

Also see:

• The FHK Hyperlinks Archive
• HTML Code Tutorial

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