Sean Miller wrote a great article on TheHill.com. It re-iterates how important it is for politicians to take their online intellectual property seriously:

“You’ve got to get your domain name registered early, long before
you consider running for office”
--  Democratic Web strategist based in Oregon.

At Avantla, we provide tools to help local, state, and national parties track and monitor domains, social media and other online trademarks for all their candidates. We help make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Read the full article here.

It's a little known fact that "Happy Birthday To You" is the "most sung" song in the world. You rarely hear it on television or in movies, because of the copyright. Right?

Well it turns out that the copyright for "Happy Birthday to You" isn't as clear as it seems. There's a long history to it. But the song is missing a copyright renewal, and the original authorship is questionable. Find out more here.

By now you've heard of the new "Tea Party". This is probably in spite of the terrible job they're doing on social media. Ron Callari at InvestorSpot.com wrote an incredible blog entry on the Tea Party -- he really digs into the details of the Twitter, Facebook, domain presence, etc. To sum up the big tea party convention:

"For such a large event that draws on people who like to hear the sound of their own voice, one would think they would have a significant presence on Twitter and Facebook."

At Avantla, we've seen the same thing with the major political parties. We did an analysis of all recent California candidates for local offices for both major parties. The result? Over 100 did not own the domain name for the politician: "FirstLast.com". And we found quite a few "Last.com" type domains available.

What does this ...

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