Coming into 2009, I was blogging semi-regularly at NoTreason, participating at the Mises Community forums and generally trying to educate myself as much as possible on libertarian and market anarchist theory, while working on my own projects of entrepreneurship.

Since that time, I’ve had to trim back some of the time I had been using for debate and education as a matter of necessity and sanity.  Necessity that I should maximize my productive capacity during this lull in the economic storm, and sanity, to get away from petty and self-indulgent arguments which can be soul sapping.

Topics that moved me in 2009 were intellectual monopoly, capitalism, praxeology, self-awareness, performative contradiction, subjective ethics, logical fallacies, long tail marketing, capital goods, epistemology, paying it forward, low time preferences, and consent.

People I would like to thank for teaching, tolerating, and encouraging me are

• Jeffrey Tucker
• Nir Graham
• Mike Gogulski
• Grayson Lilburne
• Adam Knott

Voluntarists who asked the “right questions“, questions which prompted me to go deeper into my understanding and challenge my own dogma,

• NitroAdict
• SpideyNW
• AJ
• JackCuyler
• Zefreak

I also want to thank Stephan Kinsella for inviting me to his group and Brutus and Paul Edwards for showing my ideas respect when I was there.  Stephan was a big influence on me this year, not just for his verbose and difficult to read articles on IP and property NOK, but for being the first (and only?) member of the LRC crowd to publicly embrace Mario Rizzo’s call for more class and tolerance within the ranks of Austrian Economics and Libertarianism/libertarianism at large.  It takes a lot of courage to be accountable.

And David Friedman, who I feel gets very little respect from Austrians, and seems to get judged more for things his father stood for than what he has written about, has also been an excellent influence.  The Machinery of Freedom is anarcho-capitalism for grownups.

And Marc Stevens, whose legal arguments are fantastic for illustrating what a farce the state really is.  I think he has really expanded on Lysander Spooner’s work, adding strong arguments against constitutionalist mythology, which is a by-product of Rothbardian populism through the Ron Paul vector.

What happens with NoTreason.com going forward?  I’m not really happy with many of my past posts.  Some are important, like pointing out the hypocrisy of left-libertarians when they attacked Keith Preston, but the hypocrisy is so thick, one could run hundreds of blog posts correcting silly errors like bossism, racism, feminism wage slavery, free(d) markets etc.  Some posts are not so important, like my Alex Jones/Webster Tarpley post which never got a follow up because I simply stopped caring about Tarpley’s bad ideas about economics.  There are lots of cranks, some are high profile cranks, but they are still bit players in the market of ideas. If there is something I have learned this year, it is that the way to legitimize someone with bad ideas is to engage them and give arguments without merit undeserved attention.

Going forward, if and when I post, I want to reflect the spirit of voluntarism, and that means writing more about my journey through markets, trying to use markets, entrepreneurship.   More about ideas which I think are good, and less critical reviews of ideas I don’t agree with.

Sorry Conza, that means my critique of Rothbard’s radical libertarian political plan isn’t going to see light of day.  It’s just not rewarding to critique ideas I don’t care about and as a voluntarist, I reject the political means, even if it makes the possiblity of transitioning from slavery to liberty longer or less likely.  The ends do not justify the means and without principles, my work for honesty and principles will be for naught.

I think my readership is relatively tiny now, I haven’t done much to develop this site.  If anyone has an idea of how such a great domain name can be better utilized; combined with, separate from, or without blogging, I am all ears.  Use the contact form or post in the comments.

Thank you for reading.  My 2009 was an amazing journey which I intend to continue with greater patience and energy in 2010.  I hope you have an excellent, safe, peaceful and prosperous 2010.

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PR is also known as “toolbar PR”.  As in the Google Toolbar.  There are websites and browser addons which will show PR of the URL you are currently browsing, but the original green bar and numerical score originated with Google’s Toolbar.

In a nutshell, Google assigns a score between 0 and 10 to URLs.  3 is decent, 4 is pretty good, 5 or higher is authoritative.  It is very hard to score a 7 or higher.  But what does it mean?

Not much really.  In the absence of a metric to reveal back link (incoming link) volume and anchor text quality, Google invented PR.  It is not precise and it is not determined with any transparency.  There is also little proof that PR is actually used to determine SERP (Search Engine Result Position).  Toolbar PR is only updated approx. every 3 months, while the real ranking system is constantly working in real time to provide the most relevant search results.

However, whole industries have cropped up around the game of achieving a high Google PR, and soliciting backlinks from high PR sites, in order to improve one’s own PR (bleeding/sharing/passing pagerank).

A similar web generated site value metric is Alexa Rank (based on web traffic as measured by installs of the Alexa toolbar).

These measurement ranks aren’t particularly valuable except as gross indicators.  It is very hard to monetize a site by simply knowing it’s link value or traffic is high.  Marketers need to know geo-preferences, traffic shaping by hour, by week day, sex, age etc.  Many times, this can only be accomplished with experience and by testing.

But back to the PR game.  Many professional SEOs (Search Engine Optimzers) use PR to determine the quality of a backlink, in the absence of testing every link one at a time.  A PR4 URL, will likely provide more backlink value than a PR2 URL with the same anchor text.  And bidding for purchased links based on PR are determined accordingly as well.

I can’t emphasize enough, that Google’s own search rank algorithm, which continues to get more complex with time, is not directly correlated with PR.  MSN and Yahoo also have their own proprietary algorithms that must be kept secret.  Already SEOs seek to exploit the “known” factors used to dominate the SERPs, which is why you may have noticed that Google has added voting to it’s result pages, in attempt to return to the human touch it had when it leaned heavily on the DMOZ (the open directory project).

So while PR can lead to monetization opportunities with companies like , it is wholly controlled by Google, and very arbitrary.  Banking on your PR being constant is not enough.  These days, people are much more focused on gaining lots of traffic (say from one timely and well placed link) than thousands of links that could inflate PR, but not contribute the meaningful clicks that create readership and long term income.

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Google releases their new browser, named Chrome. Someone mentioned that it was difficult to find Chrome related domain names. Not too difficult for me. I scored 4 in 10 minutes.

Also, the release of Chrome is somewhat surprising. I’m not a tech gawker, and admit I had no idea it was coming even though it coincided with Google shutting down it’s CPA referral program (perhaps due to someone I know who had found a way to push massive conversions through it) where it promoted Firefox heavily. After doing so much work to move people to a browser that is now a competitor…

Maybe it was to give Microsoft a kick in the jiggly bits.

What’s fascinating to me is that the internet is evolving so rapidly that browsers are becoming more diverse and more disparate. Chrome is not like other browsers, although only the more technically minded folks will realize how different it really is. There truly is a lot of differentiation in the freest market mankind has ever seen.

FSK lost his job. That sucks. Although I think the drama of his workplace was starting to crush his soul, so maybe it is a good thing that he is now searching for a new mission. I’ve been there. I’ve always been better for the resets in my life, whether I pushed the button or someone else did.

I have 10 drafts, or unpublished, half-written, half-baked posts. With each passing day, I feel less connection to them, and the reasons I started them in the first place. While this holds true of what I thought might be a legendary post about the LRC Podcast, with the lack of podcasts for what feels like a couple weeks now, perhaps it is best that I didn’t get that one done or sink hours into transcribing audio quotes.

I totally abuse commas. So sue me.

I don’t like blogging. Bloggers have always seemed like soapbox self-promoters to me. There are so few who have something worthwhile to say, and many who just want acknowledgment for saying anything. But I have to admit that it is cathartic. And can be reflective.

On the Mises forum, someone asked, “How does an industry benefit from being taxed?”. What proceeded were explanations of the method by which companies benefit from taxation, and the conclusion that taxation functioned similarly to regulation as a barrier to entry.

I was going to add to the discussion and point out that lobbyists and corporations now write legislation, because whether it is tax or regulation, the government is the most efficient way for big business to control and limit competition. There doesn’t seem to be enough disgust with statism and the status quo for me in those discussions. At times, the environment seems very laissez-faire and in direct contradiction to Mises admonition, “tu ne cede malis”. I’m all for laissez-faire, but not when it comes to my oppression.

There are so many charades going on around us. The campaign charades, the legislative charade, the patriotic charades. Yesterday I listened to a few friends talk about Obama and Palin. They both acknowledge the system is a scam, that politicians are parasites and so forth, but are completely enthralled with the cult of personality that surrounds speech making and grandstanding.

“You should watch Bill Maher!” they tell me. Well, no I shouldn’t. I gave up Maher early in my transformation. He’s a cynical bigot whose primary contribution is attacking everything and everyone. The problem is, he does it indiscriminately. Literally, the loose cannon of left-intellectualism.

This guy, Francois Tremblay, does a Market Anarchist Carnival. I thought about signing up for it, but I don’t have a lot of content yet. I don’t know that he would let me run one.

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