US legal Imperialism is a worry to all free citizens of the world, especially online citizens.

The arrest of a David Carruthers, of the British listed company, BetOnSports, as his plane touched down in Dallas on the way to Antigua, is just the latest episode in the absurd and scary campaign by the US legal system to subject the world to its tyrannical legal system. The idea that this company is “racketeering” like a clan of Mafiosi is plainly ridiculous. the online gaming company is based completely outside the USA, but American citizens have been placing bets with it. Now the site is down due to an “restraining order” placed by an American court on an oversees company.

The World Trade Organisation has ruled in favour of the tiny specs of land called Antigua and Barbuda, saying that the US anti-gaming laws are a form of protectionism, but the US just ignores the ruling.

It seems that America’s response to globalisation is to say that it’s fine, so long as everyone plays by America’s rules. Its Guantanamo style legal system, in which suspects are chained and put into orange boiler suits, and then told that if they don’t turn state evidence and accuse their friends and colleagues of terrible crimes, they themselves will spend 90 years in jail, might well be fine for the Wild West, or Stalinist Russia, but it’s not what those of us in the Free World expect. It’s hardly surprising that 90% of those accused of Federal offences plead guilty. What’s worse, prosecutors are elected, and are often budding politicians. They tap into any wave of public feeling that’s going, and dish out their Judge Dread justice accordingly. When the stock markets going up, bankers and business people are heroes. When it crashes, they are criminals.

It’s odd that America, with its incredibly harsh penalties for financial misdemeanor, has so many huge financial scandals. The explanation lies in the fact that it’s a country of “laws” rather than principals. Laws have loopholes. Expensive lawyers will always find them. Principles, such as “utmost good faith” and “substance over form ” are much more impregnable against hair splitting lawyers.

I’ve always considered myself rather pro-American, as I admire their enterprise and creativity. The irony is, that just as we have an American client, my anti-US (system) feelings are in the ascendancy.

On Monday I told Neville Hobson about my involvement in the Exbiblio blog. It was late in the evening, and he took a glance at it, said it looked interesting, and that he would return to it in the morning. Rather embarrassingly, three of my posts had vanished by the morning. This was particularly awkward, as I had told the world that I had a free hand to write as I saw fit. I am glad to say that they are back now. The key post is about an extremely sensitive subject concerning the founder.

I think this tale could have been interpreted in either a positive or a negative light, depending on whether you think it was terrible that the posts were taken down, or great that they were put back. It’s clear to anyone who reads the blog that there as been some misunderstanding and 24 hours of deciding what to do - a classic PR muddle. However, Martin King has done much to put things right by explaining what happened.

Neville has very generously seen the story in the best light possible, and my thanks are due to him. I do hope that other companies will take note of what Neville says about the best way to communicate difficult news in the modern media. What he says is very true, but hard to undertake.

My brief career as an outside objective blogger has had its first wobble, the story of which is unfolding in the comments section of this post.

I think I’m going to write an “Outside Blogger’s Manefesto”. I envisage a check list to clarify what it’s all about. It might be useful to go through it before entering into a role like this. I still believe that there is great value in an objective, transparent, observer.

The Podcast Network is looking for a VP to head up its US operations. But here’s the catch. There’s no salary, only equity.

Well good luck to them. They may make it big yet. But I think this job ad says a lot about the current state of podcasting. The money is still in the future.

The Exbiblio Blog has gone live.

As I have mentioned, Exbiblio is a Seattle based start-up. I’m co-blogging with staffer Adam Behringer, and am giving the outside view.

I hope that my opening salvo of posts reveal what an unusual project this is.

Exbiblio asked for openness, and I’ve goen for broke, being frank and I hope provacative in the right way.

Now that Google is being kinder to our Storynory site, I feel freer to pontificate about some SEO tips which I hope will give some insight.

The information lower down this post comes from Google’s very useful Sitemaps service which I use in conjunction with the Wordpress Sitemaps plugin. It shows the average top position for our site in certain search queries.

The results aren’t bad for a young site that gives away “free audio stories for kids.” You will notice that our top search queries tend to include those words, or synonyms such as “children” for “kids”. This is because the words are included in the title of the weblog which appears at the top of the browser. As the site is run on Wordpress, I simply typed the key title words in under options / weblog title.

We do better on “story” than we do on “stories” because “story” is part of our URL (Storynory).

In order of importance, I think Google looks at URL, Title, Description, Content. In other words, it’s pretty important to think of SEO when you set up a URL (take cheapflights.com for instance), which has done enormously well out of having a URL that says exactly what it provides, and happens to be a frequent search query on google.

Incidentally, there’s another UK company that is using blogrelations in its URL, clearly in an attempt to usurp our rightful position with that search.

Of course, in real life, you can’t usually choose the URL you would like. But there’s nothing to stop you changing the title tag what whatever you wish.

Top Search Queries Average Top Position

children story 10

audio stories 10

free stories 51

history of soccer 18

free audio books 34

story for kids 9

adam and eve 55

free audio stories 3

storynory 1

bear in a kids tale 5

free children stories 8

story for children 7

children storys 7

s stories 6

one tin solider 7

childrens storys 9

free children’s stories 9

kissa 19

children’s stories 26

free children 9

Apologies for the long period of silence. We haven’t been on holiday. Nor have we given up blogging. Quite the opposite. In fact, Blog Relations is just getting over the shock of having a client that is employing us more or less full time right now, and, hopefully, at least part-time over the coming months.

When Matthew and I set up Blog Relations about a year ago, we had visions of a flood of British businesses signing us up to chart their progress and help cultivate their online reputation in the blogosphere. We soon realised that that we were sadly mistaken - apart from anything, the openness that the concept implied was completely alien to British business managers. We decided that our future lay as a podcast publishing company, hence Storynory for kids. We’ve had some nice small jobs on the consulting side, for which we are grateful, but all the promising meetings and discussions for longer term business relationships came to nothing. There’s even been a couple of juicy jobs that we thought were in the bag, but somehow weren’t.

When I received a call on my mobile from somebody called Martin in Seattle, I had just an inkling that his idea of us writing for him from London was so crazy, that he must be serious. When the unasked-for advance arrived in our bank account, before we had even done any work, it became apparent that this guy was of an entirely different breed from les autres. At least, it shut up my friends who told me that the mysterious American was far too good to be true, and that he must be a lunatic, time-waster, fraudster, etc.

My trip to see his company, Exbiblio, in Seattle, was a fabulous week in which I was made to feel like a long lost friend, rather than a outside ‘consultant’ for want of a better word. I was met at the airport by this modest dotcom multi-millionaire in his anything but flashy VW, and immediately taken out to a fabulous sushi restaurant for a long evening of wide-ranging conversation.

This last week, back in London, I’ve been working fast and furiously on a blog design with Exbiblio’s Adam Behringer. The Instant Messages have been flying back and forth. Adam’s going to be relating the insider view on the Exbiblio blog - and I’m going to be the outsider. If, as might just be possible, the blog turns into a book about the story of a start-up, Blog Relation’s Matthew Lynn, will play a bigger part.

I’m looking forward to working with Adam, who has a keen eye for design, and who takes some great photographs (as well as being able to code just about anything).

It’s a brave and interesting idea to have an outside blogger with a sense of distance from the company (10 hours flying distance, in fact). Hopefully, I will see the big picture and make sure that the story unfolds in a way that comes alive to people who are not immersed in Exbiblio’s interesting ambitions and culture. It seems to be a company that has taken openness to heart, and I think it’s going to be a very full and frank account that should, if it works, strike a cord with people in business in all fields.

I will be dropping in on Exbiblio about once a month. I see it like watching a baby grow. If you are an adoring parent, watching every day, you don’t notice the fast rate of change so much. The grandparents who see the baby once a week or so, notice the changes much more sharply.

This is a fabulous opportunity to prove that the concept of an outside blogger has a lot to offer. I’ll let you know the blog URL when it goes ‘live.’

P.S. Now live at Blogs.Exbiblio.Com

David Sifry of Technorati tells us in his latest state of the blogsophere that 47% of blog posts are now tagged.  This of course makes it easier for readers to find what they are interested in, especially via services such as technorati which aggregate blog posts.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone setting up a social or indeed almost any web application without tagging these days.  It’s such a simple idea, but combined with an RSS feed it suddenly becomes immensely configerable.  You can subscribe to any key word on Google News now, see book marks on any subject via del.ico.us, or see photos on any subject all day long from Flickr.

It takes balls to take-on Google, but Ask.com is getting serious. The search engine’s founder, Apostolos Gerasoulis, is appearing in a series of TV commercials which you can see here. In the one called Poetry, AG’s ten year old son Eli says, “Google isn’t better, it’s just more popular.” Well it’s going to be a tough job to overturn Google’s dominance, but you can’t help admiring anyone who has the self-belief to try.

I read that Universal Music is giving CDs a revamp for the download age - by which they mean putting them in fancier boxes. That’s nothing. Exbiblio, the company I’ve come to visit in Seattle, plans to give paper a complete overhaul, making your newspaper or your well-thumbed copy of War and Peace as interactive as anything on the net. Ambitious? Crazy? Certainly the first, and possibly the latter, but it’s going to be interesting to see them try. They are planning to unveil the development of their project, its ups and downs, its triumphs and failures via blogging.

As I sat in on a product development meeting yesterday, I was mighty impressed by their way of doing business. The cliches are true. These Seattle West-Coasters do lounge around in t-shirts clutching their take-away cups of (non-Starbucks) coffee, pausing to eat cherries and munch on organic musli bars. They would feel completely naked without their Apple Powerbooks open on the desks. But what impresses me is the complete absense of bull-shit from the conversation. It’s a very open way of business. They “push forward” and “push back” exploring the boundaries of what might be possible to acheive within an insanely tight timescale. There is no vanity or attempt to impress, but there is a sense of adventure and fun about what they are doing, and, of course, total, 100% dedication to the cause. This isn’t a job. It’s a mission.

Nick Denton of Gawker Media - that most gossipy and commercial of blog networks - has announced that he’s “battoning down” and putting two titles up for sale. Sploid and Screenhead (I can’t say I’m a reader of either of them) are to go.

Among the reasons Denton cites for needing to tighten ship are that he now pays wages along similar lines to mainstream media. The expansion of internet media is inflating costs. It’s increasingly hard to attract attention for new sites.

Perhaps his deadly rival, Jason Calacanis had the timing right when he sold his network to AOL last year. Denton said then that he was “way too early.”

Life has an inevitable circular quality. Young businesses mature and become rather like the old ones. But the commercial blog networks always were similar to mainstream publications, with journalistic staff and advertising relationships based on circulation figures and audience demographics. The differentiating factor was that they were easy and cheap to set up, where media launches in the past were expensive and complicated.

Real blogs are a much more individual things, and they aren’t just about building up audience share, they are more about reaching niche audiences, and perhaps more importantly about networking, collaboration, and making the world a smaller but better place. You find common interests and meet people through blogs whom you would never have met before. Which leads me to the fact that blogging has brought me far from Paddington this week, to Seattle to meet a client. I hope to be able to write more about this later.