The FBI could be reading your blog! That's the conclusion you might jump to from the story of how two agents turned up on 17-year old blogger Erin Carter's doortstep. In truth, the Independent Online's article makes you realize that the FBI are highly unlikely to be reading your blog -- unless you're fraudulently making a lot of money from it:
"In cyber crime they're stretched so thin that there has to be a monetary threshold crossed before they can dedicate their resources to investigating it," comments Dan Verton, author of Hacker Diaries. "It's somewhere along the order of five or 10 thousand dollars before they'll even come out and talk to you."
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Here's an interesting concept in website searching/marketing. The Stumbleupon toolbar -- a plugin for your browser, like the Google toolbar -- lets you rate sites as you visit them, and other users get to see the overall ratings. The toolbar also suggests sites that you might like, based on your preferences. Its creators call it the "word-of-mouth" web.
The trouble is, Stumbleupon itself doesn't seem to be getting much word-of-mouth promotion. Too bad, because it's one of those concepts that needs a critical mass before it can take off.
Expect one of the bigger names on the web to introduce a similar concept in the future...
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