Google Privacy Question as Anonymous Blogger Outed

Not that I plan on slandering any politicians soon, but this internet online privacy stuff really makes me nervous.

Anyway, Google has agreed to supply the IP address of a blogger who used Blogspot to slander some Israeli council members running for reelection.

An Israeli ruling on the subject stated that 72 hours before a hearing on the case at the Rishon LeZion Magistrates Court, the council members would leave a message on the offending blog summoning the author to the hearing, or else his IP address would be handed over. The notice would invite the blogger to disclose his identity, participate in the hearing, or oppose the disclosure of his identity by filing a motion as "anonymous".

As more and more global companies are drug into court proceedings, I have to wonder how long before online information rights will be included in political proceedings. It's only a matter of time before someone decides that email is a god given human right.

Details at Globes Online

Robotic Part Prices Drop Dramatically

"Robotic sensors that used to cost $5,000 can now be had for $.50"

Sounds good to me! Perhaps a robotics kit is in order for the holidays. The AP reports on the dramatic change in prices for robotic equipment of all types. I've always wanted to tinker with this sort of thing, but I always assumed it was out of my price range as a Do-it-yourself project.

Thanks to everyone that purchased one of those Robo-Sapiens from Toys-R-Us or a Roomba, I guess.

Jiglu Automatic Content Tagging

Jiglu is an intelligent automatic post tagging engine that pieces your site together, linking your web content in ways that make sense. Jiglu is also smart enough to pick out the names of people in articles and ignore common words even if they are repeated often on your blog (think:participles, prepositions, etc). This feature completely eliminates the need to manually insert article tags. If you're ever had to go back through dozens of posts to insert, re-label, or re-organize your tags you can appreciate this for sure! Less time spent maintaining your tags means more time to work on the part of your blog that matters...creating new content.

Jiglu automatically suggests tags based on your content, that is the entire content of your site. A post on one site may have completely different tags embedded than an identical post on another site since Jiglu uses the sum total of the blog to define its important tags. It's a brave attempt to automatically tag content and from what I've seen so far, it works quite well. It's always been a bit of a chore for content creators to maintain tags with more content only making the problem worse and worse. With Jiglu's 100% hands free solution, the more content, the BETTER it works. The more original content you have, the more accurate Jiglu's tagging topics..

The incorporation of an intelligent content tagging engine is a blogging timesaver that you should not miss. Go to Jiglu.com for more information and be sure to browse the tagging links on this page for an example of Jiglu in action. Did I mention it is 100% free?