Blogging will be (and has been) light as I am in class. I know I should really just alert you when the blogging is more than merely sporadic, but at least this way I get to generate a post.
Archive for category Inside Blogging
Lightness Ahead (and Behind)
Aug 27
I Got In On The Ground Floor
Aug 12
Join the celebration over at Blogcritics for its (our?) first anniversary. Despite the hype, it isn’t a sinister cabal, although I won’t argue with Eric that we are superior bloggers.
Midwest BlogBash VI
Aug 12
Saturday a good time was had by all, well at least Sean (Sara’s Good Time Man) who got a volume discount on his Bass Ale. We missed J Bowen who has left for greener pastures (and for some strange reason Indianapolis), but we were heartened to pick up a bunch of new people – clever Ben AKA Mr. bloghorn; Tanya, one good looking redhead (what redhead isn’t goodlooking? A dye job); the inimitable C. Dodd Harris (was it just me, or were the sparks flying between C. and Tanya that night?); the Yetiette (Jim’s younger and prettier sister); and some woman who talked with the heretofore mentioned (hey, I sat next to lawyer Harris) Sara and who seemed to know Marc, who was his usually ebullient self. Rounding out the lineup was Charles (with whom I celebrated my $800 refund by not buying anything for anybody), and Chris (who was so excited by the prospect of attending another Blog Bash he fell asleep in his barcalounger and arrived late).
I spent much of the night talking to a couple of third year med students from Washington University whose names have escaped me; a gal from Louisiana and a guy from Florida. The gal was a blogger, and after a search on St. Louis Bloggers for live journal bloggers, I couldn’t find her. Her friend wasn’t, and when he arrived was “how do you know all of these people?” incredulous. Don’t underestimate the power of blogging – bringing people together really and virtually in one great meta conversation.
UPDATE: Pooja is the med student blogger I talked with, and Justin is her friend. Thanks Pooja for stopping by and setting me straight. Stop by anytime, I can use plenty of straightening up.
Sweaty Female Armpits
Aug 8
I get a lot (for me, anyway) of people coming here looking for sweaty female armpits, or various combinations thereof. Why? Is it a fetish? Is it scientific research? If you come here looking for sweaty female armpits, could you please leave a (family friendly) comment about why you are looking for sweaty female armpits? I feel like Lewis Black and his reaction to overhearing the remark, “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.” So please, let me know why you are looking, so I don’t get a brain aneurysm.
I’ve written before that some people don’t like blogs and really don’t like how highly they rate with Google. Well, Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly the computer book publisher) writes approvingly:
“Robert Scoble just told a great story that vividly explains how users help to build Google’s product. He describes discovering a new Iranian restaurant in Redmond, WA, and linking to their website. He notes that the site doesn’t now show up in google, but that, because of his weblog, it will now: “Oh, did you just realize that this weblog is nothing more than metadata for Google to use? Yeah, you’d be right. Google figured out how to get people like me to go around and look at websites and add meta data about those websites. How did Google do that? By giving us power. Think about it. That’s how Google pays us back for the work we’re doing to improve its index.”
There’s a dark side to this story. Scoble told it in the context of rumors that advertisers are lobbying Google to de-emphasize blogs in calculating its page ranks. I trust Google to do the right thing because of their relentless focus on the user. If they adjust the impact of blogs, it will be to get a truer result for users rather than for advertisers. But you can’t underestimate the short-sightedness of many big players. Asking Google to take blogs out of the input is like asking EBay to stop taking product from small players and only take it from an approved vendor list, or asking Amazon to take reviews only from publishers and approved journalists! It’s the essence of the new paradigm that users help to build the product. “
So maybe it’s not love, but at least it puts the whole shebang into perspective. As a blogger, I’m not engaged in a selfish narcisistic hobby, I’m engaged in a giant collaborative venture that brings value to others. Yeah baby, how very yeah!
One of my gripes about old time feminists is that they talk a lot about choice, but they don’t really mean it. Abortion should be a choice they say, but when it comes right down to it, they pretty much think that abortion is the only right choice for any “unplanned” pregnancy. What a women does with her life should be up to her they say (and I wholeheartedly agree), but they can’t stop criticising women who choose family over career. I’ve noted before that a lot of my female college classmates made that exact choice – leaving very successful careers to stay at home with the kids. Maureen Dowd has gotten around to noticing the same trend and instead of being surprised like moi, she’s pissed. For her its like a multiple choice test – when given a choice, there’s only one right answer.
How Did You Get Here?
Jun 18
Since I get so few hits, I’m able to track how each and every visitor got here. My favorites are the seach engine queries. I can answer Kojak’s question, “Who loves ya, baby?” with Google loves me – it’s made over forty percent of the referrals here.
Somebody asked Google “are frogs nearsighted or farsighted” and came here not just once, but twice. Google obviously confused me with J Bowen who’s the sort to answer that question out of the clear blue. But to answer your question, since I’ve never seen a frog wearing glasses, I’m going to guess neither.
I get a lot of people coming here looking for JLo’s (JayLo, J. Lo) booty – not a day goes by without a hit based on that query. People, she’s got a dancer’s butt – larger and more muscular than the average, but it isn’t near as big as the jokes about it. And why is it always referred to as her booty – not her butt, not her derriere, not her heine, or even bottom (I think I’ve heard backside a couple of times)? And why such fascination with a just a body part, when the real interesting thing is how someone with modest dancing, singing, and acting ability made it so big in all three fields? It’s amazing how far oozing sex appeal and shameless self promotion will take you.
Doug Wilson’s (from Trading Spaces) orientation is another perennial favorite. I have no idea what he finds attractive beyond the color blue and venetian plaster. And I don’t care. I’m of the we’re all sinners school of theology, and as long as he sticks to interior design, I’ll stick with him. A few things have bumped him up in my estimation – I think he designs some pretty neat rooms, even if some are over the top; in a local radio interview I blogged about he made it pretty clear he plays a character on the show (e.g. he isn’t really lazy like he pretends to be); and on the episode at Scott AFB where he did the little boys room by adding half of two real cars, we met some of his good ole boy truck firm family and found out that he comes from a small Illinois town near Champaigne (which isn’t too big itself). Of course, after the kiss with Hildi on the Las Vegas live reveal show, I’d be surprised if he married any time soon.
Then there are the “what were they thinking” inquiries. Needless to say, they didn’t find what they were looking for here. Nobody does. “Picture of sweaty female armpits”: sorry, this isn’t a fetish site. “Nuns in a catfight”: again, this isn’t a fetish site, but the way things are going, you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding “bishops in a catfight.” I could see why google picked me for the ones above as I have something close in my eclectic oeuvre, but “Topless women on holiday” shouldn’t have found me. What’s really intriguing is the “on holiday” part, but sorry fellas, this isn’t a travel site.
Bill O’Reilly wrote a wrongheaded “Talking Points Memo” that claims the internet has become “a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled waterway, where just about anything goes.” and concludes with “So which is the bigger threat to America? The big companies or the criminals at the computer?” That criminal would be me (and you if you are a fellow blogger, or chatter, or forum poster). I supplied my answer to my local paper’s similar compaint five years ago — that Solomon guy was on to something when he wrote there isn’t anything new under the sun — in a letter they actually published. Rand Simberg has fashioned his own satirical reply to Mr. O’Reilly and it’s a doozy. This was my comment at his site:
The best defense of the internet is a clear demonstration of its worth, and you have done so. You have achieved a rarity – three birds with one stone: people who want to curtail second amendment rights, people who want ot curtail first amendment rights, and Bill O’Reilly. Okay, Bill’s a soft target, but it’s still an impressive achievement.
You’ve also raised a knotty question for the EU’s enforcement of internet equal time (though I doubt they’ve thought of it): Who gets equal time after satire? Here, the form would say first amendment supporters, yet the meaning would say Bill O’Reilly and second amendment suppressors. Only the lawyers will profit from such a requirement.
A Clash Of Titans
Jun 13
The whole blogosphere has quaked to the battle of a couple of titans arguing over who’s the real moxie. The odd thing to me is that neither is actually named moxie – they just use that moniker online. Just think if all the “Kevins” decided to get in a flame war — the internet itself would slow to a crawl as the legion of Kevins and their supporters sucked up bandwidth. Hey, that would be a real traffic booster!
I’m hereby laying down the gauntlent to all those other bloggers who use Kevin in their name – it’s mine, all mine. I’m older than most Kevins out there – 41. I’ve been on the net since 1997. And I have an Irish family name to go with it. Ha! Take that, you other Kevins! I think that entitles me to be King of the Kevins, the one true Kevin, the Keviniest Kevin of them all. So all of my regulars, both of you, go out and tell all the other Kevin bloggers that they are ripping me off. That goes for:
Kevin who definitely isn’t Irish,
and any other blogging Kevins.
Okay, the taunting was pretty lame — my heart wasn’t in it. I’d rather form the League of Kevins than get in some stupid fight about who was here first. Still, I can’t deny I would like the traffic.
Oh yeah, Kevin Drum did link to a bunch of Kevins, and Kevin Aylward liked the idea enough to do it again and send a nice email, but the League of Kevins is my idea!
As this Register article makes clear, some people don’t like blogs, and really don’t like the fact that blogs rank high in Google searches. They feel that we only clutter up the information stream with a bunch of narcissitic rambling. I didn’t realize that so many people read my blog; I figured they all read the informative ones I link to over there in the sidebar.
