Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:50:17 -0600
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Sender: The Internet TourBus - A virtual tour of cyberspace
Comments: Resent-From: crispen@netsquirrel.com
Comments: Originally-From: Patrick Douglas Crispen
From: Patrick Douglas Crispen
Subject: TOURBUS -- 3 FEB 2000 -- PRESIDENTIAL QUIZZES / DOUBLECLICK
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TOURBUS Volume 5, Number 64 -- 3 February 2000
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\___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/
Free Greeting Cards, Polls and more fun at http://www.TOURBUS.com !
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S):
Presidential Quizzes / DoubleClick Opt-Out / Burlap Boy
TODAY'S TOURBUS ADDRESS(ES):
http://www.presidentmatch.com/
http://SelectSmart.com/PRESIDENT/
http://www.ivillage.com/election/candidates/match/quiz
http://www.whatis.com/
http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/index.shtml
http://www.doubleclick.net/optout/
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/depts/forward/fwd000125.html
Howdy, y'all, and greetings from the historic Athens, Georgia [I am
here to speak at a conference tomorrow at the University of Georgia.]
TOURBUS is made possible by the kind support of our sponsors. I thank
the folks at "Health4Her.com," "FreeArcade.com," and "Web-Send.com"
for making today's post possible. As always, please visit our
wonderful sponsors and thank them for keeping the bus rolling!
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On with the show ...
--------------
Primary Season
--------------
As you probably heard, Punxsutawney Phil -- Pennsylvania's world
famous prognosticating, grizzled, thickset marmot [see
http://www.groundhog.org/ ]-- crawled out of his burrow in Gobbler's
Knob on Wednesday, saw his shadow, and predicted nine more months of
the US presidential election season. On was that nine more months of
the National Hockey League playoffs? I can't remember.
Anyway, the United States is in the process of electing a new
president. Over the next couple of months, both the Republican and
Democratic parties will be holding primaries and caucuses in each of
the states to determine which candidate will represent each party in
November's general election.
To make this whole process more ... how shall I say this? ...
"interesting," a few Web sites now offer free, interactive quizzes to
help you discover which presidential candidate most closely matches
your political views. The first quiz, which was recommended by fellow
TOURBUS rider Meridith Maruska and was created by America Online and
CBS news, can be found at
http://www.presidentmatch.com/ .
To take the quiz, click on the "Find" button on the right-hand side of
the page, and then follow the on-screen instructions. The quiz asks
you questions about things like abortion issues, school prayer, and
gun control, and you choose how strongly you oppose or favor each
particular issue. For example, one of the questions is "[w]ould you
support an amendment to the constitution that would make it a crime to
burn the American flag?" Below the question are five radio buttons,
ranging from 'oppose' to 'no opinion' to 'strongly favor.' Click on
the button that most closely matches your opinion.
At the end of the quiz, you will be taken to a page that shows you, in
order, the candidates that most closely match your political views.
The page also lets you compare one particular candidate with another
-- just click on the "Compare With Another Candidate" link.
A similar quiz can be found at
http://SelectSmart.com/PRESIDENT/
and iVillage.com also offers a quiz at
http://www.ivillage.com/election/candidates/match/quiz .
By the way, words cannot describe how silly it would be for you to
simply let a Web site quiz decide which presidential candidate you
should support. That decision, in the end, should be yours and yours
alone. These quizzes will give our American riders a good place to
begin their investigation of the candidates, and they will also give
our international riders a better understanding of which US
presidential candidate best matches THEIR political views.
As for me, I'm voting for Punxsutawney Phil. :)
-----------------------------
DoubleClick, Toil and Trouble
-----------------------------
We've talked about browser cookies before. You can find a SPECTACULAR
definition of browser cookies at
http://www.whatis.com/cookie.htm
http://www.whatis.com/cookie.htm
While many Internet newbies are foolishly terrified of cookies, most
Net veterans realize that cookies are about as innocuous as you can
get. Cookies are NOT dangerous to your computer. According to the
Unofficial Cookie FAQ,
A cookie is a simple piece of text. It is not a program, or a
plug-in. It cannot be used as a virus, and it cannot access your
hard drive. Your browser (not a programmer) can save cookie
values to your hard disk if it needs to, but that is the limit of
the effect on your system.
More importantly,
A COOKIE ALONE CANNOT READ YOUR HARD DRIVE TO FIND OUT WHO YOU
ARE, WHAT YOUR INCOME IS, OR WHERE YOU LIVE. The only way that
information could end up in a cookie is if YOU provide it to a
site and that site saves it to a cookie.
[quotes from http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/index.shtml ]
In fact, according to www.whatis.com,
Cookies are commonly used to rotate the banner ads that a site
sends so that it doesn't keep sending the same ad as it sends
you a succession of requested pages. They can also be used to
customize pages for you based on your browser type or other
information you may have provided the Web site.
Pretty boring, isn't it? Well, a little excitement recently crept
into the cookie world. The following is adapted from a 28 January
2000 memepool article [ at http://www.memepool.com/ ]:
DoubleClick [ http://www.doubleclick.net/ ] is an Internet
advertising company behind a lot of the banner ads you see.
DoubleClick recently acquired Abacus Direct
[ http://www.abacus-direct.com/ ], manager of "the nation's
largest proprietary database of consumer catalog buying behavior
used for target marketing purposes." DoubleClick plans to link
online activities [through the use of DoubleClick's browser
cookies] with personally identifying information [from Abacus
Direct's database].
You can "opt-out" of this sort of tracking by getting an opt-out
cookie [ at http://www.doubleclick.net/optout/ ] from
DoubleClick's Web site.
My suggestion? Opt out, and then get back to doing whatever you were
doing. This really isn't worth losing much sleep over.
----------
Burlap Boy
----------
Spend any amount of time on the Net and you are bound to receive
dozens of 'I'm a dying kid -- please forward this email to the entire
planet' messages. As we've mentioned in the past, every one of these
messages is a hoax.
Well, TOURBUS rider Chris Dahl recently forwarded me a Yahoo! Internet
Life article that is possibly the funniest parody of this type of hoax
I have ever seen: the "burlap boy" story at
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/depts/forward/fwd000125.html
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/depts/forward/fwd000125.html
If you want a good laugh, I strongly recommend that youcheck this page
out. :)
That's it for this week. Have a safe and happy weekend, and we'll
talk again next week! :)
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S):
Presidential Quizzes / DoubleClick Opt-Out / Burlap Boy
TODAY'S TOURBUS ADDRESS(ES):
http://www.presidentmatch.com/
http://SelectSmart.com/PRESIDENT/
http://www.ivillage.com/election/candidates/match/quiz
http://www.whatis.com/
http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/index.shtml
http://www.doubleclick.net/optout/
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/depts/forward/fwd000125.html
---------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE WEEK
---------------------------------
TALL (noun). A piece of fired clay used especially floors and walls.
Usage: "Bubba, you need to clean your bathroom tall!"
[Special thanks to Janice Carlson for today's wurd]
You can find all of the old Southern Words of the day at
http://netsquirrel.com/crispen/word.html
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(\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen
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