I mentioned previously that I’ll undoubtedly be posting a lot about MySpace. Has anyone else seen people that are carrying Myspace cards? This is like a business card but designed specifically to promote a MySpace profile.

A friend of ours has MySpace cards, in addition to the over 5,000 friends he has. He is essentially a MySpace celebrity and gets recognized, in real life, from his profile.

This is interesting on a couple of levels for me, the first and most obvious being how important a MySpace profile has apparently become. Secondly it shows that we are living in a time where people are so accustomed to being marketed to that they are naturals at marketing themselves. Isn’t that pretty much what a MySpace profile is? A way to market yourself online?

If self promotion becomes natural will it translate to people becoming really good at job interviews? At getting out of traffic tickets? At talking their way out of cheating on their wives?

In case you haven’t heard of, or seen it yet, I’m addicted to Current TV. Hopefully, though, you’ve heard about this new cable channel that is composed largely of viewer created content (VC2). You submit videos online, people vote on them and then they become part of the channel.

Not only is this a badass new idea, but each of the videos (or pods as they call them) is only a few minutes long and has a progress bar in the corner. This is totally watching the web on TV – the voting makes it interactive, the VC2 makes it random and the delivery makes it watchable without a huge time investment. Lastly, one of the founders, and Chairman of the Board, is Al Gore – inventor of the internets!

Check out some of the pods that are currently running, or take a peek at the full schedule. Coming up shortly are pods on south central farmers, vegan parenting, meth in Montana and landmines in Cambodia.

Be sure to look up what channel Current is on near you, and then start watching it. I’d say that if the TV is on here at the house, 90% of the time it is on Current.

Did I mention they pay for the VC2? $500 for the first and second pieces they air, $750 for the third and $1,000 for the fourth and each thereafter.

This is striking me as really funny, what a strange domain name for an IP theft site. I mean, I get it, but is it just me that sees some pretty amusing irony here?

Anyway, what’s even weirder is that it is essentially just information culled directly from the USPTO. Other than the homepage it looks like you can find all this info over at uspto.gov. It gets even more confusing as well because there’s this Stop Fakes Small Business site where the logo on the left is from and then there’s the real stopfakes.gov which is a really ugly and disorganized version. This post is about the nicer of the two.

I’m loving two facts about this, though. First off the focus here is small business. Now, I don’t know your definition of small business, but mine is the type of business that doesn’t have to fear piracy or counterfeit. I mean, I’m thinking a shop down on the corner. Or a design firm with less than 10 employees even. Secondly, the homepage says: “industry estimates of the cost of such theft range from $250 billion to 750,000 jobs per year.” OK, first, those seem like crazy-talk numbers. Secondly, again, small business? Small businesses are losing 750,000 jobs? Would that mean we’d be at a negative number of small businesses still in existence?

Lastly, this is definitely one of those faux standards sites. Nice, clean design that looks like you’d see all css and no tables, only view the source and there she is. Take note of the Macromedia Dreamweaver tags, too | function MM_swapImgRestore