Over at Blogs Candada, they’re debating the virtues of mandatory voting.

And, of course, some right-thinking individuals are pointing out that coercion is never a good thing.

But, taking it from another perspective, if the Liberals were to enforce mandatory voting, the first thing I would do would be to run out and register the, “The Government Made Me Do This” party. I’d get candidates in every riding, and ask all those people who otherwise would have done something else on election day to put an X by “The Goverrnment Made Me Do It”.

I think it’d be a great chance for a new party to gain a majority. And maybe do something cool with it, like abolish the federal government.

Ah, but what the heck. I don’t intend to vote again in my life anyway. Even if it’s mandatory.

Submit your blog to more than a dozen blog search engines.

Feedshot seems to work quite well. I submitted the RSS of my newest blog and got the following result after about 15 seconds:

IceRocket: Success
Feedster: Success
Bloogz: Success
NewsMob: Success
Fastbuzz: Success
EasyRSS: Success
BlogStreet: Failure
PubSub: Success
Technorati: Success
DayPop: Success
WeBlogAlot: Success
RubHub: Success
Fuzzy Software: Timeout
Ngoid: Repeat
Blogdigger: Success
FeedsFarm: Success
Planet of the Blogs: Success

Two weeks after submitting a niche article to article directories using ArticleSubmitter Pro, here are the stats for an article title search in the three big search engines:

Google: 17 (Last week: 3)
MSN: 9 (Last Week: 4)
Yahoo: 9 (Last Week: 0)

Better than last week. Still not earth-shattering.

So, you spend hours of your own time, or hundreds of your own dollars creating content for your new website.

And what happens next? Some guy, or gal, with an automatic scraper program comes along and takes your content (time and money) for his scraper site.

You get penalized for duplicate content and make less of a return on your investment. And the scraper? What does he care? He’s got no time or money invested in his junk sites.

There really hasn’t been a lot you could do about these sites. Often they’re not even on domains registered with real information, so you can’t even find out who to send the copyright infringement notices to…

But, it appears someone has had more than enough of people stealing his stuff.

Check out AntiCrawl.com. From this site you can download a FREE script to keep the crawlers at bay while still allowing search engine robots and good traffic.

You will get a very simple script to add to your sites to:

1. Stop the scrapers right in their tracks by specifying the number of pages allowed to download per second.

2. Set a daily limit on the number of pages to be downloaded. Set it to 10 or 100 per day – the lazy bastards won’t bother coming back.

3. Let Google, MSN and Yahoo!’s Slurp index your site freely. (The REAL ones).

Michel Fortin, who last weekend proposed to his girlfriend Sylvie on stage in front of a live audience, is cooking up something wicked cool for content site creators. It will help us monetize pages like never before, automatically converting keywords in the text to affiliate links. Customizable. Cloaked. Cooool.

So, I’ll be loading up Conversionary this weekend and putting a dozen or so new niche sites online so that they’ll be spidered and indexed and ready to take advantage of the software when it’s released.