I have been a VERY busy beaver for the past few days.

One of the reasons why is http://billofrightsday.com, a new site I just launched. I'll let you in on a little secret: It's awesome! I don't usually like to brag (it's an involuntary reflex), but BillofRightsDay.com has the makings of a really cool activism site. It's one of my proudest, and most complete online projects -- and it was nothing but a wad of ideas a few days ago.

I've had billofrightsday.com (and .org) for about a year now, and making up something like what I made has been on my mind on and off that whole time. Specifically, I wanted to put up a kit to help people hold a Funeral for the Bill of Rights, which was a sweet event I helped put together last year around this time.

And for most of the year that idea swam around with the other 50 or so things I'd like to do that orbit my mind on a regular basis. And in the meantime, I tried to get a hold of the too-many projects I already have going, and tried to keep myself from starting too many new ones.

But for the past couple weeks, there has been a looming opportunity which has been begging for my time. Bill of Rights Day is on the horizon -- it's December 15th. And rather than have the idea buzz around my head for another 11 months, I just dedicated most of the weekend to it, and cranked out what I think is going to become a major powerhouse of single-day-based activism in the years to come. This year is the debut, the "beta" test. But now that all the tools and components are in place, it will be easy to promote a major amount of Bill of Rights Day activity for 2004. I want to have at least a thousand Bill of Rights Day-related events around the country posted on the site next year. And I think that will be pretty easy, actually. Maybe I should make 10,000 the goal. :-)

The motto of the site is "Bill of Rights Day is December 15th. What are you going to do about it?" That's that looming, begging opportunity I mentioned. And (part of) my answer is http://billofrightsday.com . It looks like there will also be a couple events, a meeting, some petitioning, and a TV appearance -- all related to local Bill of Rights day stuff here.

So what are you going to do about it? Take your pick from about 15 choices at that new site.

And spread the word. Just send all your friends a quick e-mail:

Bill of Rights Day is December 15th. What are you going to do about it?
http://billofrightsday.com

Remember how I said a month or so ago that I wanted to switch from consumption to output? Well, I switched for a bit, and a whole website came out.

I learned alot about making a good activism site while making that one, and I'll be applying that to my other projects/sites over the next month or two. Including this one.

I noticed that the right column appears to have disappeared on the main page here. I don't know why -- though I've been having similar issues at another blog on this site.

If you're not seeing the right column (with recent links and archives and stuff), you can click here to see this entry by itself, but with that stuff on the right side. I'll try to fix the main index page later today.

You can check out the Blogdex results for George Bush's biography page to see a list of a lot of the bloggers behind the "miserable failure" brouhaha.

This is pretty remarkable...

You may have heard already, but if you haven't, check out the search results on Google for the phrase "miserable failure".

It probably won't last much longer, but right now, the #1 result is the biography page of George W. Bush.

--Instant Update: I just read a Newsday article that said it's an instance of "Google bombing", where a bunch of people linked that term to the bio page, to boost its listing. Pretty clever -- and now it will likely get Internet-wide exposure. Hard to say what the political ramifications of it will be.

Here's an archived copy of the Google page, since the original is going to change eventually.

I'm wondering if Google will penalize the pranksters or not. I pondered the idea of hopping on the bandwagon (I even had the link made), but I decided that Google treats this site too well for me to join in. It's not worth risking a demotion when Google probably provides 40% or more of my traffic.

Further Update: I see that Democrat Dick Gephardt has a site called amiserablefailure.com, which features the phrase. Is this Gephardt trying to out-'Net Howard Dean? Hmm...