Today my home town of Cleveland, Ohio, began to accept domestic partner registrations. As bigger dominos fall around the country (yeah Maine yesterday!) this can seem like a small step. But even small steps help move us forward. I particularly like that heterosexual couples are registering, some in lieu of marriage, as an act of solidarity with gay friends. One couple writes:

We’ve both always felt strongly about equal rights for everyone, and for the past four months, we’ve been working with the gay-rights organization called Ask Cleveland, on their “Keep the Registry!” campaign. Marriage may be in our future somewhere down the line, but we feel it is important for us to show our support for the LGBT community by registering now.

When we were married, we shared our vows with everyone who joined us, because we knew many of them had not been allowed to share such vows with one another publicly. I am hopeful that the day is coming when our friends won’t be excluded from the peculiar pleasure and pain that is marriage.

At a breakout session I conducted this week I shared the Kutiman Thru-You videos and fielded a question about “how will Kutiman make money if he gives this stuff away.” I speculated that free downloading might increase sales, not diminish them, because it helps increase exposure. Yesterday, in fact, I bought two Lily Allen tracks from Amazon only because someone had made a wonderful communal video out of one of her songs. I would never have known she existed without the remixing of her music with this new video. Today I ran across some documentation of this effect.

A recent report from the Norwegian School of Management suggests that people who pirate digital music are also more likely to buy music. Illegal downloading, it seems, may in fact help boost sales (a try before you buy effect?). And the report notes that this is no subtle effect, illegal downloaders are ten times more likely to buy music from legal download services.

Says BI’s Audun Molde to Norwegian daily Aftenposten: “The most surprising finding of this study is that the percentage of legally downloaded music is so high. The results of the study suggest that legal downloads outnumbers illegal downloads by a wide margin. We also saw that users stating that they were involved in illegal P2P file sharing were in fact the legal download services’ biggest clients.”

Good for Intel. It looks like they get it, deploying a new campaign that tries to make their people attractive and their mission inspirational rather than their technology “inside”. I like it!

As a Democrat, I get used to being called an American-hating liberal. Though I don’t feel unpatriotic, I’ve somehow internalized a sense that conservatives must somehow love America more than I do.

Today some Daily Kos polling data calls the question:

Would you approve or disapprove of the state that you live in leaving the United States?

        Approve Disapprove Unsure
All         4       82       14
Dem         2       95        3
Rep         9       63       28
Ind         3       83       14 

Aren’t sure? There’s a debate as to whether leaving the US is good or bad? Is their love of America so shallow, so skin deep, that leaving the country is even an option?

Even in the depths of the Bush Administration I never felt Minnesota should leave the USA. I did feel Minnesota should help change the USA!

Marika Viragh has created a wonderful “Race to Africa” project for her senior year in high school. She hopes to attract support for kids at the Ubumwe Community Center in Rwanda. She’s collecting shoes and dollars. Consider it.

I’m also impressed with the webhost she’s found for her site. Squarespace looks a bit like an iWeb that could actually work: solid hosting with the sugar of interesting design.