This has always sort of bugged me, and tonight it bugs just enough to post to Sift Talk about it. What's up with the Gold-100 star? It seems a bit odd that there are two gold star ranks in a row. On top of that, there's no gold diamond; rankings go straight from silver diamond to bronze crown.

So here's my proposal -- Change gold-100 to bronze diamond, bronze to silver (diamond), and silver to gold (diamond again). So you'd have the three diamonds at 100, 250, and 1000. Plus that gives a nice progression for future orders of Sift magnitude (orders of Siftitude?) as follows:

Precious Metals: Bronze (10), Silver (25), Gold (50)
Objects: Stars (1), Diamonds (10), Crowns (100)
Rank = Object * Precious Metal

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting any of the invocations move from their current power level, just that the names change. It's purely an aesthetic choice to appeal to the programmer inside of me.

A recent Ars Technica article highlighted an new push from the American Library Association to educate and mobilize the general public in support of privacy rights, seeking to push back against the erosion of civil liberties that has been so prevalent in the last decade. The ALA has produced a flyer in .pdf format and set up an informative website to make their agenda clear:

http://privacyrevolution.org/ala/oif/ifissues/privacyrevolution.cfm

There's even a bit of Sift fodder here for members with enough star power to post blip.tv vids. I think they'd make good additions to the Sift; unfortunately my own star doesn't shine quite bright enough to illuminate blip.tv. If there are a few shining individuals that think along the same lines as I, please sift away.