01 March 2010

how many?

[click image, video, one hour]

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Must watch documentary.
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General Information:

The good old html search button gizzy here has been working for shit for quite a while. It seems this is because Blogger has given us a new search widget, which also, thus far, works for shit, but, going off the premise that it is new and they will be hassled to improve it, fix the frickin' code, whatever, I replaced the search mechanism for this blog. It quite probably will end up working really well. A few weeks ago I added what they call a "label cloud" to the bottom of the page. So these changes improve your chances of retracing your steps, or investigating the history, of this blog.

If you think it irritates you, just THINK how it is for ME when trying to link back to prior posts I know damn well are back there... somewhere. I have a little list of things of my own I hope to stumble upon again myself....

I am sorry that my way of blogging things does not lend itself to searching and finding stuff very well. Part of me wants to get obsessive about helping you find again stuff that you found here to begin with and want to revisit, but the part of me that does not want to coöperate with strictly popularity-enhancing protocols bucks and bucks and bucks. I am not doing this for popularity. Yes, I could look at it that what I bring up is frequently important for EVERYONE to know and there is a pat bodhisattva rationalization for making sure all my post titles contain key search terms, being conventionally precise with my labels... yadda yadda yadda... but I remain a staunch believer in the workings of karma. Not personal karma. Cosmic karma. YOUR karma. So people who should stumble upon me will, and if they want to alert friends and other denizens of the tubes, they bloody well will. If they don't, they won't.

I had started to cede some of this basic outlook to the needs of my fellow bloggers to be raised in the estimation of certain stats mechanisms, popularity gauges, being as how so many were so concerned with them, but NONE of the services for this sort of thing are the least reliable. You get different measures from each of them—wildly different—they are there for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue off bloggers' ego problems, contribute to the dread human propensity for group think, and they are monstrously repellent to me. So. I'm sorry if I test your patience with this stubbornness.

And, something everyone ought to know, sidebar links to other blogs do not count toward their popularity anymore. They only did less than half the time before, because we had to have our feeds set to "full" in order for our links to others to count for those others, but now they don't count if they are in the sidebar. Stats services ignore sidebars. Also, even linking in the main body of your posts doesn't count for anyone unless your feed is set to "full" and so mine is. Plus, with the craze for shortening URLs, lots of people link using link shortening services and those links never show up on any stats service either. So. If you are a blogger, give up on trying to measure up in the stats wars. They have always been based on nothing, unreliable in the extreme, easy to game by the stats people themselves... and... I don't think this is even marginally better for those who PAY for fancy stats measurements.

This last bit should make those wishing to make a living at their blogging cease sleeping immediately.

If you are not a blogger, the badge of good citizenship of Blogistan is to recommend blogs you like wherever you comment, when it is applicable to the discussion in point, and to email your friends with the links.

Lastly, my dearest and most beloved Trisha is coming to visit me tomorrow, and I'm going grocery shopping and getting the guest bedroom straightened out for her today. I don't know how long she's staying, probably only a day or two, but we should have a number of things to do, which means there won't be much blogging going on here for the next couple two or three days. Not none. But probably not much.
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2 comments:

  1. How many people can live on earth max? I just had this conversation with someone and they said 40 Billion. I don't know if that's right or not, but that's what they said they read somewhere.

    ReplyDelete
  2. They meant 40 MILLION.

    ReplyDelete

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