Doc Searls isn't blogging much today, but he did say that Emergent Democracy is required reading, and I have to agree with him.

Its about society, democracy, weblogs and other interesting topics. Well worth using some 10's of minutes to read.

From what I have read about Nameprotect and their web-bots, I shouldn't have been surprised that they are lying when they claim to respect robots.txt:

[...]Practices the following best practices to ensure non-invasive crawling:
Honoring robots.txt files - to exclude the NPBot crawler, please use "NPBot" as the user-agent name in your robots.txt file [...]

I have added the necessary line to my robots.txt file to exclude the NPBot from my site, but they are still indexing without caring about what the robots.txt file says.

Its also worth noting that Nameprotect have been (and probably still are) using spiders which are lying about who they are. (more information about "crawler918.com" / Nameprotect)

So my suggestion, if you want to get rid of the Nameprotect bots, is to block their IP-range from accessing your web pages:

Add the following to your .htaccess file:

Deny from 12.148.209.192/26


See my earlier post about NPBot

Interesting transcript of a Bill O'Reilly Fox moment:

GLICK: On September 14, do you want to know what I'm doing?

O'REILLY: Shut up! Shut up!

GLICK: Oh, please don't tell me to shut up.

O'REILLY: As respect -- as respect -- in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians...

GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government...

O'REILLY: Out of respect for him...

GLICK: ... not the people of America.

O'REILLY: ... I'm not going to...

GLICK: ... The people of the ruling class, the small minority.

O'REILLY: Cut his mic. I'm not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father.

The start of the "interview" was even more interesting. Follow the link to read the whole transcript.