Category: Uncategorized

Blood and Treasure on the Daily Mash

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The wonderful Blood and Treasure on the Onion-derivative Daily Mash:

… the two cultures (the UK and the US) have enough basic
similarities to make an Onionesque publication work on this side of the
Atlantic.
“There’s the same toxic mix of corporate dominance, authoritarian
government and witless media, all marinated in a deep well of
comprehensive public stupidity.

Hey, we have that in Canada too.

This site may harm your computer??

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What's up with google? This morning I google "twitter time magazine" to look for an article, and every item on the search results, including time.com, has a "This site may harm your computer" label. See here:

Mayharm
As a result, I can't actually get to any of the sites on the list. And any search I do give the same result. The BBC, Wikipedia, you name it. And clicking through to the "Safe browsing diagnostic page" for the site just gives "Server Error".

The effect is that google, in this house, is basically offline. And for all I have mixed feelings about google, that's not nice. I may have to do something useful.

Is this just google.ca? Is it just me? Or what? 

Update: It was Google. One little / and the world goes to pot.

SYS-CON Media Redux: You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up

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Here is how I was going to start this post:

Do you have fifteen minutes or so? Then relax and, if you don't mind a few f-words, enjoy the hilarity of a supposed media company shooting itself in the foot. Then the other foot. Then going so far beyond shooting itself in the foot you won't believe it.

But, while that's one way to look at it, there is also the possibility that this is a tragedy. That the state of the world is so grim that these poor hapless people are driven to extremes of apparent stupidity. What could be going on in their lives to reduce them to this? Do they have landlords demanding the rent by tomorrow or they will be out on the street? Or what? Because, really, there is something here that is undeniably pathetic.

But enough of the teaser. On to the action. A couple of weeks ago I posted about my own unpleasant experience with SYS-CON media. I already knew about, but did not mention, the LinuxWorld fiasco there, because it didn't seem fair. But that's for later.

Yesterday a comment on that post led me to Jame-Ane Ervin's blog, where she describes a run-in with the CEO of SYS-CON. In short, as an advertiser on SYS-CON she offered some suggestions, in an abrupt but not impolite way, on how they could improve what they do. And she asked to be removed from their site. According to Jame Ervin (whom I have never met) she got a reply including these words from SYS-CON CEO Fuat Kircaali:

Who the fuck you think you are, lady? Are you fucking out of your mind?

You are certainly mixing SYS-CON media with some other company. The
reason you heard from the CEO of the “most powerful” tech media company
in North America today is because he could not believe your email, out
of more than 4,000 contacts who received the same email, you had to be
the only bitch with a big fucking mouth.

Now it did occur to me that this was so unbelievable, so incomprehensibly over the top, that it was a fake. I mean, I don't know Jame Ervin. It could be a hoax, right? She could have said something unbelievably offensive to Mr. Kircaali to prompt this outburst? The world is a pretty damn strange place sometimes, right?

But today I see that SYS-CON have actually posted, on their own site, the entire correspondence, to explain their response. So go read it if you are interested. Did Jame Ervin behave outrageously? She did not. The entire correspondence just makes the Kircaali email more jaw-droppingly offensive than it already seemed.

And just in case you thought this was all, SYS-CON also posted an article about the affair. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait here.

Done? Good. I think my favourite line is this:

Well, reporters use the word "bitch" casually these days. Last week, there was a headline published here, announcing the new Yahoo CEO as "Tough Brazen Bitch Takes Over Yahoo," but I know Carol Bartz and this crackpot marketing woman is no Carol Bartz.

The linked-to headline is, of course, a SYS-CON one.

Now maybe I shouldn't be joking about something as offensive and aggressive as these insults. But really, the SYS-CON people can surely not be in a position to hurt Ms. Ervin professionally, and I trust they live miles away, so I'm assuming the offense – unpleasant as it is – carries no real threat with it. In which case it comes across as being simply delusional.

And now back to the beginning, where I mentioned LinuxWorld. A technical magazine run by volunteer editors, the entire editorial board resigned a couple of years ago in response to a complete lack of editorial control and in the wake of a scandal involving personal attacks written by a SYS-CON writer. When Dana Blankenhorn wrote about this SYS-CON responded by, you guessed it, publicly having a go at Blankenhorn. Of course, being SYS-CON, their article is posted across all their publications, including the unbelievable Yacht and Charters Magazine: see here, calling him a "crackpot" (the same word they used for Ms. Ervin) and poking fun at Mr Blankenhorn's possible joblessness. 

From what it looks like, he has been in the business for 25 years and
can not find a job, and because of that he hates the company (SYS-CON) and its
founder.

Is this over now? Part of me hopes so. But I admit that another part of me can't wait to see what these people say next. You really couldn't make this stuff up, could you?

One hundred thousand

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That's the total number of page views of this blog, according to Sitemeter, although TypePad says it's only 83,000 or so. Still, it seems like a time to take stock or at least review some basic stats:

First post: November 2005. Total number of posts, excluding this one, 292. So that's about two a week.
Number of visits: about 60,000. So on average a visit is two pages. Most are only one, and a few people with nothing better to do click around once in a while.

Average page view rate is about 100 per day. Probably a good half of those are inappropriate searches, and it looks which leaves an actual readership of about 50 people per day. In general my traffic is lower than that, but I seem to have a handful
of patrons (thank you Nick C, Henry F, Mark T, Brad D) who
have sent people this way and then I get a spike.
Most views in a day was over 2500 when Nick Carr pointed people to Mr. Google's Guidebook. I've only had one post get traffic through reddit or digg, which was a computer software post some time ago.
Audience: On average, I'm writing for an audience of about 100 people, although there is no way to tell someone who reads every word I write from someone who glances at the title and moves on.
Comments: 429, or about 1.5 comments per post. My impression is this is pretty low even for blogs of my readership. Not surprising as I am too slow a writer to get into many of the debates that prompt comments and don't link to other bloggers as much as I should. Partly, while some widely read blogs post link collections to draw people's attention to particular views, it seems a waste to post such collections here. There is little point in me saying "hey, look what the BBC/New York Times/CBC has posted"; if you need a guide to the news you won't find it here.

Thanks to those of you who come here regularly. I will try to respond to comments more often, but let's face it, that resolution may well go the way of my others.

Now, if I just carry on blogging for another two years I should have the same size audience as my 30 second caterpillar video has achieved on YouTube, recorded in less than twenty minutes in a single afternoon.

Motor Neuron Disease/ALS

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You can react to illness in a couple  of ways.

Take me. I have had a really crappy cold for the last couple of days and so I didn't cook last night, didn't walk the dog this morning, and I've been basically slobbing around and doing nothing.

Or take my friend Tim Lester. Diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease (also called ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease) a couple of years ago, he still plays in a band, has done a large part of a walk across the Speyside Way, promotes MND awareness and continues to raise his kids. His son Alex (who, I happen to know, is prepared to wear a Borat thong in front of a high-school audience) narrates this video on Tim's life with MND; it's a short (2 mins 30s), clear, unsentimental, and helpful description of what challenges the disease brings with it. 

Maybe I shouldn't let a cold slow me down so much.

The Outsider Manoeuvre

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Writers and actors are notorious for seeing themselves as outsiders. "Why did you become an actor?" they are asked. "Well, I was always a bit of an outsider…" This morning, take director Terence Davies:

"I felt like an outsider because I was from a large working-class family. And I spoke with this kind of [posh] accent even by the time I was 11," Davies noted in our interview. "I've always felt an outsider. I think I was reasonably intelligent, I largely taught myself because I didn't go to university. And I was Catholic. And I was gay. I mean, in a large, working-class Catholic family, that's very hard."

He may be right, what do I know? But it is a standard manoeuvre and we should not trust it.

Politicians are fond of the same trick, of course. Americans saw this in spades over the last few months with the self-positioning of the Republicans, after eight years in power, as "mavericks".

And the phenomenon reaches into the world of blogs as well. Dan Gilmor at Talking Points Memo writes about "The Media's Role in the Financial Crisis", making it clear that TPM and DG in particular are not part of the media. They are outsiders. 

But they are not.

Dan Gilmor is, according to his Wikipedia entry, Director of a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He's a long-time journalist. He just doesn't want to appear as one – hence his book title from a few years ago "We the Media".

And TPM is a widely-read collection of writings, many by actual journalists, surrounded by advertisements. It may not have started off as media, but it is now media in most senses we use the word.

I saw a link to the Gilmor piece posted on boingboing.net, introduced like this:

In Talking Points Memo, Dan Gillmor makes some stinging points about the media's complicity in manufacturing the financial crisis by unquestioningly promoting reckless bubble spending while pooh-poohing any idea that the bill would come due some day: 

But boingboing is also advertising-funded, and run by people who write  as a full time job. It is media.

The First Rule of Critical Reading, digital or otherwise, should be "don't believe what people say about themselves".  Particularly if they position themselves as outsiders.

Take it from me. Look around: I have no advertising here and I'm not paid to write this stuff. 

I'm an outsider.

Tumbleweed blogs (firstname challenge again)

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So some bloke called Graham emails me about my competition and he says, like, why don't you do it yourself then? And here's a list of names: http://bel-epa.com/area51/library/names.txt.

So I says, OK then. I will. And I write myself a little python like this:

import httplib
import re
import sys
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("bel-epa.com")
conn.request("GET", "/area51/library/names.txt")

namelist = conn.getresponse().read().split()
conn.close()

activenames = {}
inactivenames = {}

print len(namelist)

for name in namelist:
 try:
 host = name + ".blogspot.com"
 p = re.compile('200[0-9]<')
 conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host)
 conn.request("GET", "")
 response = conn.getresponse()
 body = response.read()
 mo = p.search(body) 
 if mo:
 activenames[name] = mo.group().rstrip('<')
 print name, mo.group().rstrip('<')
 else:
 inactivenames[name] = "null" 
 print name, "null"
 except:
 print "Failure on " + name 
conn.close()

f = open("blogdeath.csv", "w")
f.write("name,year\n")
for name, year in activenames.iteritems():
 f.write(name + "," + year + "\n")
for name, year in inactivenames.iteritems():
  f.write(name + ",1900\n")

And then I plot the results and they look like this.
Blogs
Which means that of the 7489 potential firstname.blogspot.com URLs:

  • 2692 don't seem to have anything going on ever or have weird styling so I can't catch the date headers blogger templates usually use.  A quick scan suggests that most are stillborn. See http://ned.blogspot.com/ or http://karim.blogspot.com/ for a couple of examples.
  • 361 were born and died in 2000.
  • 2001 and 2002 were the peak years for firstname blogs, with over 900 dying off each year. Not surprising that this is an early peak: the firstname places would be picked up quickly. Perhaps more surprising is that these blogs have been sitting there for 7 or 8 years, unattended, and blogger hasn't done anything with them.
  • The number of dying blogs falls off – meaning that the number of active ones does as well probably. Until now, only 96 blogs have been updated in the first three weeks of 2009.

96 out of 7489. That's about one in 75 that are active. Pretty small numbers.

How does this silly survey compare with a bigger picture? The  Technorati annual review of blogging for 2008 says that about 7.5 million blogs were updated in the 120 days before their report of 133 million that they have ever indexed: about one in 20 or so. Given the longer timeframe, not too bad a match. So 19 out of 20 blogs that have ever been started are now moribund.

And here, for those of you who are interested, the 96 firstname blogs still going strong are listed at the end of this post.

My technorati ranking is
about 33 at the moment but I have been as high as 90. That puts me,
they say, in the top 1% of blogs. I get about 50 readers a day, many of
whom are googlers who probably land here and don't find what they are
looking for. And, on generous average, about one comment per post, so 99 out of a hundred bloggers get few readers and no comments. If these people are a typical sample, maybe one of them gets a comment per post. Maybe you should choose one and say hello.

elvina
adger
minta
cindi
worden
doretta
grover
carmen
charlton
hildagarde
melesa
lillian
miranda
delcina
barbette
urbanus
tina
jess
roland
bonny
madalyn
vivi
corabella
nikoletta
faunie
cherey
henka
terrill
olive
valli
kamila
cherice
lorette
daune
orville
sella
johnathon
aleecia
madelina
dottie
dario
roselyn
merrie
amalea
ephraim
trey
werner
antonino
levon
lavina
saxe
douglas
meira
danila
winston
lavinie
teresita
clovis
chas
letti
anders
edythe
aileen
luanna
huntlee
bancroft
sidonnie
fancie
marcelline
joella
pauline
engracia
oran
kirk
rhonda
leonardo
claudia
evette
kris
bird
zia
wilmette
merrel
fitz
cain
lindy
hope
dwain
mareah
sara
berkley
pinchas
josselyn
robinett
oprah
heidi