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Boy do I ever feel like Rip Van Winkle ... you know, the character from Washington Irving's story ... who fell asleep and missed 20 years of his life. I certainly haven't been asleep for anywhere near that long ... in fact I haven't slept much at all in the last couple of weeks ... but somehow I missed the big news about 2257. If you're like me and you missed it then here are the Cliff Notes.

What we webmasters refer to as 2257 is basically a law that requires, among others, adult webmasters, to maintain certain records if we display images or video of sexual or implied sexual activity on the Net. 2257 has been around for a long time and until recently the record keeping required under 2257 for mere affiliate webmasters was almost nothing.

A few years ago the record keeping requirements were tightened and producers of the content we used were required to keep much more detailed records regarding the performers who appeared in the content. At that time there was an attempt to extend that record keep requirement to what the law called 'secondary producers' ... basically we adult webmasters.

For some time that requirement for secondary producers to maintain as detailed records as the producers were required to keep was blocked but now some regulations that have been produced by the Department of Justice will change all that and they will come into force in March. Those regulations do not have to go before Congress, they do not have to be passed by anyone, they simply come into force without any reference to anyone.

I'm not going to go into the exact requirements of the new regulations except to say that they're going to change a lot of things for affiliates and sponsors in this industry. I would urge you, no matter how small you are in this industry, to find a copy of those new regulations and to get some qualified legal advice about what they mean for you.

There are some very harsh penalties for anyone who fails to comply with the regulations and ignorance of the regulations is no excuse. If you are prosecuted under the regulations you won't be able to get off by telling the court that you didn't realize that the regulations applied to you.

Nor should you think that you are too small to ever be called on to produce the records that the regulations require you to maintain. That's simply a gamble that has about the same odds as playing Russian Roulette with a half-loaded revolver ... and those odds will get shorter the longer you stay in the industry.

So find someone who is legally qualified to advise you and also look around on the Net to see what others are saying. However, take the information you find on the Net as uninformed advice unless it has been given by one of the industry's leading First Amendment lawyers.

Those guys are out there and they are talking about it but then so are a lot of people who basically don't have a clue so be careful who you listen to. If you listen to the wrong person ... or think that it could never happen to you ... then you might have a stay in prison in your near future and that's not something that any of us would care to face.

A little search engine tip
Now that I may have scared the willies out of you let me try and soothe your jangled nerves with a little search engine tip.

For a long time now we've found, from our own personal experience, that searches for singular terms have also produced results for the plurals of those terms. For example, a search for 'hot car' would return results that included the term 'hot cars' and when we did a search for the plural term we would usually see the same results page that we saw for the singular term.

In the last day or so we've begun to see quite different search engine results pages for singular and plural terms so that may change the way you write text for your websites and perhaps now you should be including both singular and plural terms in pages if both versions of the keyword/s are important to your business.

Now I'm off to start loading all the programs I use into a new computer. The one I work with down here at the office is about three years old and even though it's still working fine I have to admit that it is rather slow.

The new machine is already built and while it's nothing fancy it will be a good workhorse and that's about all I need down here ... maybe two 24 inch monitors would be nice though ... the current brace of 22 inch ones look so small.