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 … Continue reading

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 … Continue reading

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.

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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 … Continue reading

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.
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