Dogs: Money Making Websites

Yesterday, we took a major step forward in improving how you get government information and services online. For the first time, the federal government has published the list of all .gov domains managed by federal executive branch agencies– all 1759 of them!

Before today, no one – except for the few folks who manage the .gov registry – has had a clear picture of what our federal web space looks like. Now, anyone can see how many different domains and websites agencies manage, what topics they cover, which sites may duplicate or overlap with others, and which sites are no longer being actively maintained. As part of President Obama’s Executive Order on Customer Service and Campaign to Cut Waste, we can identify and consolidate unnecessary websites, saving money and providing better service to the American public.

We invite you to view the list of .gov domains and give us suggestions in the comments section about how we can best use this information to make good business decisions. If you’re a developer, download the dataset, make discoveries about the data, or provide us with a creative way to visualize the .gov domain.

In the next several weeks, agencies will review each domain on the list and gather key metrics that will help determine what action to take – to maintain the site, merge the content into another existing site, or eliminate it. At the same time, we’ll launch a national dialogue to engage the public in conversation about improving federal websites. We’ll tap into voices from every corner to ensure we have broad input -- from students, teachers, and librarians to the tech industry, scientists, innovators, and anyone who has an interest in improving the online customer experience with government.

We kicked off this initiative yesterday with a live video chat, and you can see much of that great conversation by watching the #dotgov hashtag on Twitter. We’ve also enabled commenting on the domains dataset. Making government data transparent can spark the creativity of many bright minds across the country, and we hope you’ll explore, discuss, and remix this data, and maybe even use it to map the .gov domain in ways we haven't seen before.

The .Gov Task Force will oversee all of these efforts, always looking for more ways to keep the conversation going.

The Federal Trade Commission has gone to war against all the fake news sites. If you’ve visited almost any real news site recently, you’ve most likely seen these advertisements that advertise a “special report” from some news station you never heard of, has discovered the cure to belly fat or a special new secret to working from home. First these fake news sites completely ticked-off the public, who filed complaints against the owners with everyone from the FBI to the FTC. The FTC took the complaints seriously and earlier this year filed several lawsuits against those involved in these practices.

However, while this is progress, the FTC has completely ignored the actions of the large companies that allow these types of advertisements.

The issue here is simple: while the advertisers, and affiliate networks are being targeted by the FTC for compliance actions for creating these deceptive websites, the large advertising networks, including Pulse360 and AOL’s own network continues to run these ads, knowing that they are deceptive and causing harm to consumers. Worse, the companies that run these ads are major news organizations, where the ads seem like real news stories embedded in the content.

When I was talking to the writer for this AdAge article, I pointed out that the VP of Sales at MSNBC, Kyoo Kim has recognized this as a problem and said almost 18 months ago that they would no longer allow these advertisements. As the reporter of the AdAge story pointed out, the original story, also run by MSNBC was still actually flanked by these advertisements. They knew that these ads were a problem, admitted it, but then went back on their promise and continued to make money from it.

Dogs

Monday, August 1, 2011

Money Making Websites

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