Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

In case you've never seen it, this is what actual democracy looks like. It's ugly, crass and vulgar. It's about as intellectual as a lynch mob. The people in the US largely delegate running the government to their elected officials so they can get back to important issues like working, paying taxes and watching American Idol.

I'm a little pissed off right now. Our politicians just don't get it. When it comes to healthcare, it's not real complicated. I want:

Security: To be able to get medical care without fear of being bankrupted or losing their life savings.

Stafety: A system that "does no harm."

Freedom: The ability to make choices and select providers.

Well, that didn't take long. We all know two things we didn't before the Tour:

1. Armstrong is in good form. And he's as cagy and smart as ever. Witness Armstrong's instinctive jump to the front as he smelled a break... and the crushing win by the Astana team in today's team time trial.
2. The question is, will Contador contest or be steamrolled by his 37 year old seven time winner domestique?

After looking over the stages of this year's Tour, I thought I'd share a little of what I expect to see. This year's tour has a couple of interesting stories:

Who will get DQ'd for doping? The last few years have taught us to expect the unexpected. 

How strong is Lance? If you listen to Lance, he's not in form. If you listen to everyone else, Lance is never in form until a crushing mountain stage. We'll get an early idea as we hit the montains in Stage 7.

The last few weeks have been crazy.  First, we moved from Fishers back to Indianapolis, and then this happened:

Linda T. Sanchez (D-CA) has a really bad idea that she would like to make into law:

Straight out of the bill (I can't even make one up this bad):

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both....

Most companies and brands use Twitter as follows:

1. Follow people, and when they follow back, unfollow them.
2. Search for people saying things about your company or brand.
3. Use Twitter to advertise to your followers.
4. Rinse, Repeat.

This strategy is comfortable and safe. It's just like email. Just get them to opt-in. Then broadcast away, just like you do with ConstantContact. Here's why this strategy gets the fail whale: it's stupid and short sighted.

One thing that gets old and tiresome in helping companies with internet marketing: dealing with misconceptions on what spam is, what it isn't and what you can do about it.

It's really not that tough to understand.  And it is an important issue because if you are in the US and you send emails of a commercial variety, then you need to know the law, and you need to know the rules that ISPs and blacklists will make you play by.

Instead of wasting your time with my opinion, here are the facts:

The Law

I recently did a vanity search for myself, and found one link that was very inaccurate. It was for Spoke.com, social networking's answer to parked domains or those annoying "fake search engine" pages. Spoke apparently spiders the web and tries to create profiles automatically for you.

There's a reason people like using the internet and it's not premium, name brand, video content. It's that the internet is one of the few places we've got the freedom thing right. Here's what happens when you do it wrong: the internet just routes around you.  And in this case, you happens to be the most connected country in the world: