Technology is changing how people interact with government forever, says a prominent homeland security consultant.

In Federal Computer Week on Monday, W. David Stephenson argues that emergent behavior enabled by the convergence of personal communications and publishing technology with massive private and government data sources will “empower individuals in their relations with governments.”

Stephenson cited examples of New York City’s plans to allow mobile phone users to send text and multimedia messages to 911 and 311, as well as a private project in Washington, D.C., which publishes District-provided road work data overlaid on a Google map, as two examples of the changes in the way citizens interact with government.

Displays showing the status of potholes repairs subtly, but effectively, keep the city’s Department of Public Works on its toes. That example also illustrates an important aspect of the Web 2.0 world. Some call it “sousveillance,” which happens when people turn the tables and monitor government.

Also, the growing scientific understanding of the principle of swarm intelligence is an important aspect of this potential transformation of government. The term suggests that groups of people may be capable of a higher level of collaborative behavior than could be predicted from the abilities of individual members. — Federal Computer Week

In the past, Stephenson has also cited how private citizens collaborated during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to share information, help reunite families, and pick up the slack where government failed.

Smart mobile phones, PDAs and other communications devices, all connected to Web 2.0 applications on the Internet, have the potential to utterly transform the way people react to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or even ordinary fender benders, Stephenson argued, as people collaborate with each other to find solutions.

“These devices have transformed our daily lives and the media,” Stephenson said in an e-mail. “It’s inevitable that they will have the same impact on government.”

Stephenson also has had a long-running weblog which he recently relaunched, along with a new RSS feed. For those of you who have wondered where he disappeared to, Stephenson said he’s trying to move all of his old content from Userland to the WordPress platform.

“Unfortunately those who have subscribed to my blog in the past don’t know that, because, with everything else, the blog feed changed,” Stephenson said.

Most of you, my loyal readers, don’t actually realize I have, at last count, four blogs where I cover various topics. If you’re looking for something new and interesting to read, check these out:

IO ERROR (this site)

I started this site right after the bungled 2004 elections, and if you go back and read the posts from November you’ll see why. I generally talk about homeland stupidity, technology, and anything else that catches my interest. Though as one of my readers noted, I say very little about my nonexistent personal life.

Lunacy Unleashed

This is my newest blog, where I talk mostly about WordPress and Bad Behavior issues, programming, and maybe on occasion a personal note. If you’re subscribed here for WordPress or Bad Behavior information, you should be subscribed there as well. It’s hosted on Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress.com project.

Make Stupidity History

Dedicated to the eradication of stupidity worldwide. Read all about the stupid things people do, and things you can do to combat stupidity and raise the overall intelligence level of humanity. Everyone is welcome to contribute; just register and write an article!

Phone Watch

Keeping an eye on the telecommunications industry and bringing you, the telephone consumer, news you can use. Also features tips, tricks and articles to help you get the most out of your telephone service and save money. I’m still building this site, and not nearly all the information I have is posted there yet, so keep an eye on it.

There you have it, enough reading material to keep you fast asleep entertained for a while.

After much yelling, screaming, gnashing of teeth, and maybe a bit of bribery, I finally managed to get myself an account on WordPress.com.

This means, among other things, I can finally keep all my WordPress-related ramblings separate from my main blog here, as well as provide a solution for people wanting to subscribe solely to Bad Behavior announcements.

Visit Lunacy Unleashed and read all about WordPress.com and WordPress 1.6. Be sure to subscribe there for further WordPress and Bad Behavior announcements and information!

Feeds: Lunacy Unleashed; Bad Behavior (there’s nothing in that one yet).

Are you a Google AdSense publisher? Do you worry about accidentally clicking on your own ads and being thrown out of the program? I have a solution for you.

Today I’ve released a Greasemonkey script for Firefox which prevents you from clicking on your own Google AdSense ads. The script prevents clicks on both ad units and link units. You can still click on others’ AdSense ads, however.

The script requires that you be running Firefox as well as the Greasemonkey extension. Note that it has only been tested with Greasemonkey 0.5 and I cannot guarantee that it will work on previous versions. If not, the script will warn you that your version of Greasemonkey is too old, and will not prevent any clicks.

Shortly after you install it, it will ask you to enter your AdSense publisher ID. This is the pub-**************** number from your AdSense code and is used to determine which ads to prevent accidental clicks from.

Once you have Firefox and Greasemonkey, download the script.

Forbes magazine has named WordPress Best of the Web in its Blog Tools category, saying that version 1.5 puts it squarely ahead of Movable Type.

Forbes was impressed with the wide variety of plugins and themes available, but reserved special praise for the WordPress community. “If you have a question, either check the documentation wiki (to which anyone can contribute) or ask at the support message board. We had an obscure question answered within an hour.”

Read more: Forbes Best of the Web: WordPress

Received via Piece of Shep

Anyone with a blog has noticed that trackback spam is on the rise. The usual PPC spammers have figured out how to send trackbacks and bypass many blogs’ spam filters. But there’s a new kind of trackback spam out there.

Let’s review what a trackback is supposed to be used for. A trackback is sent by a blogger who references another blogger’s post in their own post. It notifies the original blogger that someone has written an article and linked to them, and provides an automated reciprocal link. This is generally a win-win situation for both parties as people who read either blog can become aware of the other and find out more information. When used in this way trackback is a great way for your blog (and the other blog!) to receive wider exposure.

Trackback spam, on the other hand, takes advantage of the situation to create a one-way link from the blog receiving the trackback to the spammer’s site. The spammer has not linked to the blog, and the blogger doesn’t want to create a link to the spammer. (At least, not without being compensated for the link.) The spammers hope to drive traffic to their sites and thus gain revenue.

Therefore, the easiest and most effective way to stop trackback spam is to check the linked site, and ensure that it links to your blog. For instance, Spam Karma 2 does this and it is completely effective at stopping trackback spam.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of people sending trackbacks from their own blogs, but not linking to mine. I have taken the time to contact them and explain the situation, and all but one placed the link. I then released their trackback from moderation. But it’s that one who I want to talk about today. When I contacted him about the issue, he simply deleted my message and did nothing. I was not amused, and did not release his trackback from moderation.

If you hope to drive additional traffic to your blog through trackback, be sure you provide a link to the blog you are sending the trackback to! Not only is it the right thing to do, it will prevent your trackback from being marked as spam.

In the future I will keep a complete list of any blogger who sends trackback spam here. With nofollow on the link. The list currently is:

• Update: See below; this list is now empty.

Bruce Schneier, author of the Blowfish encryption algorithm and Applied Cryptography, turned me on to this article on encrypting RSS using Bloglines, Greasemonkey and Blowfish. Unlike other proposals for serving encrypted syndicated content, this actually works today.

The method allows you to freely intermix encrypted and non-encrypted content within the same feed, and even within the same item within the feed. The content is decrypted using a Greasemonkey script when viewed in Bloglines.

Howie at The Jawa Report goes off on some blog commenters who got a little out of hand the other day.

I noted that the thread was accumulating comments left and right. We were picking up new readers. All our statements and comments were being read not only by regulars here but also potential new readers as well. People from all over the world. Then came the insults to the queen and the profanity. Personally I thought that the insults the queen were particularly in bad taste considering the events of the day. After that it became the Greg and Carlos show. Other comments especially from new readers seemed to vanish. I think Mike’s thread could have easily went over two hundred comments had we just thought about it for a few more seconds before we hit that post button. See not only did Mike loose readers so did you. I know several of you like to go around and piss on every post like a dog on patrol. That is fine and dandy with me. For the most part I enjoy most of it. If you would just take a couple minutes to consider what thread you are on and also that you are shitting in your own nest. You not only drive off Mike’s readers, which was totally unfair to him. You also drive off readers of your own comments and ideas.

I have a couple of thoughts of my own:

Blog comments are one of the most powerful tools of self-expression on the Internet, second to blog posts. Your thoughts and ideas can receive exposure to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people all over the world. Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands if you get really lucky. Do you really want 100,000 people to think of you as a complete tosser?

The other thing is, that blog you’re commenting on belongs to someone else, who usually is investing a lot of time and money to keep it up and running. They’re usually looking for intelligent discourse, or at least something funny. It’s like being a guest in someone’s home. You don’t generally take a dump on their carpet or tag their walls.

This is just an extension of what Internet veterans call netiquette. Someone want to write up a Netiquette for Blogs?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has added a section on labor law to its Legal Guide for Bloggers first published last month.

Whenever there’s talk about blogging horror stories, inevitably the conversation turns to people getting fired for blogging. What kinds of things can your boss fire you for? Aren’t there laws to protect you for whistle-blogging about the rotten things your company is doing to the environment? If you use your work computer to blog, does your employer have the right to monitor you? What about if you’re working from home, using your own laptop? — Electronic Frontier Foundation

If you are blogging in the U.S., this is required reading to ensure that you remain within the law, or at least know what may happen if you stray into the many gray areas.

More info: EFF press release

It appears that Technorati is somehow confusing the tags of my posts, and in many cases the tags for one post get associated with the previous post. Apologies to those of you looking for something and finding something else! If this is happening to you, try going to the post immediately following the one you arrived at, and it will probably be the one you want.

The tags appear in the correct <content:encoded> section of the feed, so I’m not quite sure what’s going on. Hopefully this will get fixed soon.

To help sort this out I have redirected Technoratibot to the original RSS2 feed rather than the FeedBurner feed which most everyone else gets. Hopefully this will improve the situation, and if it does, I’ll update this post.

Update 4 July: This did indeed fix the problem, whatever it is. Technoratibot can’t seem to get the right tags in the FeedBurner feed, but it gets them right from the WordPress feed. Technorati is aware of the issue and I’ll update again when I am aware of a fix. Also, other people are having the same problem, and not with FeedBurner feeds.

Update 5 July: Well it appears I was wrong. Technorati still is associating the tags with the wrong posts, even on the original WordPress feed. I suspect it’s falling back to the XHTML, which is tricky at best. Though the feed is plain old RSS2 and should be easy enough to parse. So I dunno what’s going on.

Update 8 July: I received a response from Technorati that the issue should be fixed. I did some quick spot checks and it seems that my new posts have the correct tags, though posts made while the trouble was occurring now have both the correct tags and the wrong tags. I can live with that.