I’m sometimes frustrated about the low comment traffic on this blog. Of course, it’d help if I actually posted relevant, interesting stuff. But then I might end up with the huge problem of information overload. Take, for example, one of my favorite lefty political blogs, Daily Kos, whereupon, just this morning, seven blog posts generated over 4,500 comments (as of about noon). I had headed over there to read the reactions to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (finally!) but I quickly gave up when I realized I didn’t have two spare days to wade through all those bytes.

It’s really too bad because often the comments on blog posts are more interesting and insightful than the original article. In fact, four of the seven posts on Daily Kos today were quite content-free and served merely as an open slot for the comment discourse.

I used Cut & Paste Word Count on one Daily Kos post with 654 comments and got a result of almost 75,000. If I remove the metadata (approximately 14 words per comment, or 9156) we end up with close to 66,000 words. Assuming 250 words per printed page, that single Daily Kos post is the equivalent of a 264-page book.

In scrolling through the comments, however, I find that a fairly small percentage of them are insightful. But I’m honestly not going to sift through a mid-sized novel to find them.

The way I see it, there are three possibilities for blogs to exercise better “comment control.”

First, Slashdot has an interesting system whereby frequent commenters are awarded points they can then assign to other comments. Furthermore, they can tag comments as “insightful,” “interesting,” “funny,” etc. On the plus side of this rather formal system, registered users of the site can adjust their filters to, for example, display only “insightful” comments rated +2 or higher. On the downside, it’s sort hard to break in, there still is a human/semantic factor (who’s to say if something is really “insightful” as opposed to “interesting”?), and power can be wielded by a very few with a lot of time on their hands.

Second, over at Metafilter, a pretty solid set of unspoken rules govern commenting. The community self-polices to the extent that excessive “Me toos!” and off-topic snark are met with considerable hostility and usually result in swift moderation. On the plus side, the comments actually end up being largely worthwhile to read. However, the community standards are unpublished and it’s is pretty intimidating for newcomers to feel comfortable commenting on anything.

The third possibility is one I have yet to see, but it would involve using something like Bayesian analysis to automagically do what the Slashdot community does. This is how spam filters work, and the algorithms can probably be adapted to do some level of content analysis of comments to give a first pass at “insightfulness” or “interestingness.” Flickr has an “interestingness” quotient for photos; I’d like to see something like that available for blog comments.

Comments? (Interesting or insightful ones only, please.)

I recently helped a friend and fellow blogger deal with a lingering Google cache issue. The search behemoth still listed a page from her blog that she thought she had deleted, but had merely “delinked.” Even if she removed the page now, I warned, the cached version would still be available unless she contacted Google and asked them to remove it (Note: Google’s page for webmasters describes how you can do this).

This reminded me of a similar incident I dealt with a couple years ago.

When I played baseball for the Madtown M’s, the manager used to follow up each game by writing an amusing recap on the team’s web site (a graphic-less archive of which can be found here). The recaps were all written in an over-the-top sportswritery style complete with tortured nicknames for the players, egregious verbing, and wild exaggerations of our on-the-field accomplishments.

After one of our games, a number of team members announced that they were heading to a nearby Hooter’s restaurant for some post-game festivities. The manager derided them in his next recap by writing a fictional account of how they were arrested for disorderly conduct after mashing on one of the waitresses.

Two years later, one of the team members implicated in this fictional scandal contacted me in a panic. He had been applying for jobs at law firms and one of his potential employers found the humorous piece during a routine background check (read: Google search). Taken out of context, it was difficult to determine that the piece was satirical on its face. He was able to convince them that it was a joke, but he worried (understandably) that other employers might not be so forgiving.

I promptly removed the offending section from the page and contacted Google to remove it from the cache. I’m happy to report that it was gone within a couple days.

Greetings, and welcome to my second attempt to flood the Internets with misguided ponderings, nostalgic waxings, and marginally-interesting observations.

You might have noticed that I stopped contributing to this weblog back in September of ought-six. Why, you are in your right mind to ask, am I starting it up again? Why have I peeled back the protective layer of pseudonymity that allowed me to write about contentious subjects without fear of real-life reprisals? Where’s all the cool, flashy, Web 2.0 stuff that was in the sidebar? Well, if you’re really interested in answers to those questions, I’ll tell you….

Continue reading "Tap… tap… tap… Is This Thing On?" »

Loyal Major Readers have probably noticed that I haven’t written anything in a while. This post will also be one of the last for a while. Here’s why.

Continue reading "Putting Things to Rest" »

You might not know it by reading my blog, but one of the reasons I have this thing is to improve my writing skills. Every now and then, when I have time away from bitching about shitty customer service and offending 90% of the population by implying they can’t think rationally, I puruse writing self-help sites and try to glean some wisdom from the gurus of the blogosphere.

The other day, I came across a tidbit that advises to let your blog posts “marinate” a bit before posting them. I know that, often, to meet my self-imposed goal of at least one post per day, I hastily rattle something off only to regret it later. Perhaps I should let things stew a bit and then review them before clicking the “Publish” button.

This reminds me of a deal my former office mate, Paul, and I once had to protect each other’s jobs.

Continue reading "Let it Simmer, then Boil Over" »

Writely is an online word processor currently in beta. It supports all the common formatting you’d expect from such a program, plus direct posting to blogs, so I’m trying it out. If you can read this, then I’ve succeeded in configuring it.

In general, I find I have little use for a word processor. In about 90% of all cases in which I need to write something, email or some other plain text outlet suits me just fine. Word processors were designed for producing print output, and there’s very little that I need to print these days.

I also have have issues with most web-based WYSIWYG editors, such as the one I’m currently using in Writely. For some reason, they generally insist on inserting errant spaces and doing funky things with line and paragraph breaks. I’ve tried incorporating some into the Movable Type interface, but the resulting code always seems to break my validation. We’ll see how you perform, Writely.

Upon inserting the hyperlink for the first word of this post, I became annoyed. I selected the word by double-clicking it, and the program un-helpfully selected the space after the word as well (grrrr). Then, upon applying the hyperlink, three spaces popped in afterwards that I then had to delete.

Upon checking the code, I am pleased that in-line formatting is applied via the span tag (though the style attributes are in ALL CAPS, for some reason), but I’m annoyed again now I see that two line breaks are used in place of a single paragraph break. Granted, it’s hard for software to determine when you’re going to hit Enter once or twice and then do the right thing, but it’s not impossible and ignoring the basic “p” tag has the potential to mess up my existing styles. Oh, and I just noticed that it inserted a superfluous line break at the start of the text.

There are some collaboration options that might be nice. I can invite other Writely users to see and/or edit this document. And that’s really the whole point, I guess. Writely is not just a word processor, but a document management and sharing system. I wonder how good it is at tracking changes? Oh, I see a “Revisions” tab that lists the changes made to this document as I’ve been working on it. That’s sort of cool. I’ll have to find some more people I know who use it and try out the sharing functions.

Many see tools like Writely as a potential Microsoft Word-killer. It’s been demonsrated that the vast majority of people use only a small fraction of Word’s capabilities, yet the software has become the de facto standard for word processing. Everyone seems to need it, but mostly for writing basic documents with minimal formatting. Given what I use word processing for, I have to say that, minus a few glitchy annoyances, Writely could meet my needs pretty well.

After posting this to the blog, I made a few corrections. The document title did not map to the blog post title, and the XHTML-compliant “<br />” tags I saw in the preview were replaced with non-compliant “<br$gt;>” tags with spaces in between them (I removed all of them and replaced with paragraph tags). The weird ALL CAPS formatting I spied on the inline span styles, however, were converted to lower case by Writely.

There’s been a lot of hubub recently about AOL’s release of 650,000 users’ search information. Though the users were “anonymized,” The New York Times was able to analyze patterns to identify at least one person simply by what she searched for. Slate magazine has used the data to classify web searchers into seven categories, including the Pornhound and the Manhunter.

My web site statistics package (awstats) lists the search terms by which web browsers stumble upon my site. There’s certainly not as much data here as in AOL’s logs, but maybe there’s enough to form some kind of understanding about my visitors.

Here are the top search-driven hits to my site from the last 2½ months (June, July, and part of August).

Continue reading "Orange Crate Canoe Boy Scouts" »

My “pings” to the Technorati site haven’t been working. None of the tags I specify for my posts are getting picked up. I’ve tried a few suggestions I found about the web, but it looks like I need to keep the test posts up for a little while to see if they work.

In the meantime, I’ve updated the site (well, the index page for now, at least) to be XHTML 1.0 compliant. Isn’t that exciting!?

Updated: The test posts are gone. The Technorati tagging seems to be working now.

Against my better judgment and sense of antiestablishmentarianism, I signed up for a MySpace account a few months ago. Some competetitor on some reality TV show that shall remain nameless was rumored to have a MySpace “space,” and I thought one needed an account to view it. What do I know about the kids these days and their rock-n-roll music, hula hoops, and social networking sites?

My forgotten account lay dormant until the other day when my Bus Friend, Molly, mentioned she had one and was keeping a blog on the site (which is highly amusing, but is for “Friends Only”).

As I was poking around MySpace and trying to figure out what all the hype was about, the whole thing really began to annoy the hell out me.

Continue reading "I Have One Friends" »

Yesterday, fellow blogger Oren expressed amusement that my mother comments on my blog. I suppose it does seem strange if you don’t know my mom.

My veil of pseudonymity doesn’t extend to members of my family; mom knows who I am. And my knowing she is out there checking this site daily, I do occasionally feel that I have to self-censor but honestly not that often. That’s mostly because I don’t do anything even approaching illicit behavior (anymore), but partly it’s because of the general coolness of my mother.

As a parent, my mom was always able to achieve that very delicate balance between being a Parent and being a Friend. It wasn’t like she was one of those pathetic hipster moms desperately trying to act 20 years younger, smoking pot with her kids and hitting on their friends, but she also wasn’t a total oldster constantly eliciting her children’s embarrassment over her terminal squareness.

I think a lot of it came from her being a high school teacher. When my sister and I were teenagers, my mom had a hundred others to deal with besides us and she saw just how truly bad kids can get. Nothing my sister or I did — nothing we pierced, dyed, wore, or listened to — was anything my mom hadn’t seen before.

I’ve already written about how she used to judge her students’ intelligence via Monty Python quotes. She also went to midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with them. It’s not like she dressed up as Frank-N-Furter or anything; she just went to have a good time, and, I’m sure, keep an eye on them.

In short, my mom knew how to relate to teenagers and young adults. She didn’t try to emulate our lingo, listen to our music, or live our lifestyle. But she kept an open mind about it, didn’t judge (well, not often), and kept us pointing in the right direction.

So, true to her form, she’s not out there blogging herself, but she’s keeping an eye on me. Just like a mom.

It looks like we’re back online. Dreamhost had been having some issues with DNS and none of the methods they recommended to get things sorted out worked for me. So I cried to them last night around 10:00, and it looks like they (or automagic) fixed the problem.

The site’s been down for a couple days, but I’ve been blogging, so make sure you check out all the new posts.

My usually-rock-solid web host, Dreamhost, is experiencing a bit of a snaggle with DNS, which has temporarily knocked Out of the Mist offline. If you can read this, then we’re back up.

Note to those receiving e-mail notifications: you might get this post (and others) in e-mail before the site is back up. Yet another reason to subscribe!

I’m taking a few days off. Our friend Adele is in town, there’s a lot to do, and I need to get away from the damn computer for a while.

See you all sometime next week.

I share my pal Holly’s stated disdain for yet habitual acquiescence to “online tests that purport to tell you who you are”. Her blog recently featured two of them, which I felt compelled to take. I learned that Holly is a bit quirkier than I am, and that we both have enviable levels of self-esteem.

Your Quirk Factor: 65%

You’re so quirky, it’s hard for you to tell the difference between quirky and normal. No doubt about it, there’s little about you that’s “normal” or “average.”

You Have Low Self Esteem 0% of the Time

Which can be translated to mean, you have high self-esteem and a healthy sense of self worth. You believe in yourself, and you know how to be the real you. You love yourself, imperfections and all.

It’s always dangerous to draw conclusions from bad data, and there’s probably no worse data in the universe than web site statistics. In fact, I am reminded of a concept Douglas Adams described in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy — recipriversexclusive, which refers to a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. Web stats are a pure form of recipriversexclusivity; “42” hits can be anything other than 42 actual page views.

I think I can safely assume, however, that the data is uniformly bad over time, so I feel comfortable drawing certain conclusions about trends, even though any given number bears no correspondence to reality at any one time.

Readership of “Out of the Mist” is soaring. In January, I averaged about 18 visitors per day; so far in April, I’m getting about 85 — a 472% increase. I don’t even know 85 people (in fact, I’m not sure I know 18 people) so I have to assume that strangers’ eyes are upon me (cue that Rockwell song). Or it might mean that 3 people read my site in January and 14.25 are doing so now, but it’s still an upward trend.

My stats package (awstats) makes a good college try to determine truly unique visitors on any given day. I have blocked all of my own addresses to eliminate instances of me hitting “Reload,” and excluded all known search engine robots. It cannot, however, deal well with phenomena such as proxy servers and NAT’s (especially AOL’s annoying tendency to route every single request through a different proxy). However, in looking at the raw data, the hits from “something-random.proxy.aol.com” are consistently proportional to the overall hits, so, again, I think I can safely conclude that readership is up.

Sorry for the second meta-post in a row; more juicy content goodness coming soon.

I just re-read some of my recent posts, and, man, can I be long-winded! No wonder it’s such a Herculean task for me to churn out at least one blog post per day*. I am in need of an editor or, at least, a more intimate relationship with the “Delete” key. All that stuff about the “three enduring myths” here in Seattle? Blah, blah, fuckin’ blah. Why didn’t someone stop me?

I’ve always had this problem. I tend to believe in providing too much information about a point, which often has the effect of causing no information to flow to the listener/reader. I suppose I can blame this on graduate school. My first few papers were full of big ideas and claims, but I was marked down for not backing everything up. At some point I must have unconsciously said: “You want supporting material? I’ll give you supporting material!” Hence, the birth of verbosity.

I used to get pretty irritated at people I worked with for not reading my email announcements. “What do mean ‘Why is the server down this morning?’ Didn’t you read the email I sent out the other day?” It never occurred to me that burying the server outage note under three paragraphs of exposition explaining and justifying it caused readers’ eyes to glaze over. Even after I figured that out and changed my ways, I was still resentful of people for not paying me the common decency of reading the words I had labored to produce.

So now, even though one of my goals in writing this blog was to hone my writing craft and to learn how to be more succinct, I find myself tending toward the plague of prolixity again.

A few months ago, I added a word counter to the footer of each of my posts; I now vow to be mindful of it and use it as a gauge to curb the logorrhoea.

* — I know I missed yesterday, so no need to tell me. But I thought about posting on this topic, so that counts.

Just as I was settling into my seat on the morning bus to write about how AOL networks annoyingly inflate my page view statistics since they seemingly route every single page request through a separate proxy server, I found a surprisingly high number of referrals suddenly coming from AOL City Guide: Seattle. Sure enough, yours truly is featured on their home page under “Blogs We’re Reading”!

So, welcome potential Seattle visitors. I hope you tour around both this site and my fair Adopted Hometown of Seattle, and enjoy yourself during your stay. Read some posts, leave some comments, make yourselves at home.

No, no one’s died. ObitBlogging is just the term I came up with to describe my blogging habits of late — pre-writing certain blog entires. The term derives from the practice major media outlets have of pre-writing celebrity obituaries so that, when the famous people die, the papers can run splashy stories without starting from scratch. This sometimes gets them into trouble, however, like when Bob Hope’s death was mistakenly announced by both the AP in 1998 and CNN in 2003 (and there have been others).

There are two reasons I started ObitBlogging:

Continue reading "ObitBlogging" »

There’s been a bit of meta-discussion, both online and off, about a couple of my recent posts so I thought I’d address some of that here. This is not necessarily a “corrections and retractions” post, but a summary of recent comments, oversights, and second-thoughts.

Continue reading "Comments, Oversights, and Second-Thoughts" »

For nearly two years, my web hosting provider, Dreamhost, has been rock-solid. They experienced a couple hours of downtime yesterday afternoon — which could happen to anyone — but I still wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone in need of web hosting as they provide the best bundle of services of anyone I came across when I was shopping around. They also have really prompt and knowledgeable support, free domain registration, and they only charge $7.95/month*. What a deal!

And, if you sign up at DreamHost.com and use the promotion code “majorsteel40” you will save up to $40 on any plan.**

* = $7.95 month with no set up fee if you pre-pay for 2 years.
** = $10 off a monthly plan; $20 off a yearly plan; $40 off a 2-year plan.

Hey, I just won Oscar Madison’s weekly word verification contest!

According to Oscar:

It’s called “word verifictionary” and it’s the latest craze!

That’s right. Take those nasty blogger word verification letter-strings and turn them into a fun game. Make a word out them and define the word!

My “Cordon bleu grand prix” winning entry: wwdlzzjd - “What Would Dalai Lama, Zig-Zag man, and Jesus Do?”

Updated at 19:20 PST to include illustration.

This week’s Blog Shout Out focuses on Valentine’s Day. But first: Post a comment on my birthday post, you lurkers! (You know who you are…)

• A valentine to Valentine’s Day from Holly
• be mine by nina (Warning: Cute polar bear photos!)
• Tonya goes a bit overboard for the holiday!
• Althouse passes along the news that Women love Lloyd Dobler
• the bonster’s not too into it

It’s Friday; time to review the week in blogging.

• nina posts a paean to February, my beloved birth-month
• Oscar is terrorized by Heidi Klum
• the bonster reports on certain rodent behaviors in Pennsylvania
• mclir picks apart the State of the Union
• Holly tries to get me to meme

This week’s Blog Shout Out is a special edition focused on my friend Holly’s excellent blog, Self-Portrait as. It’s excellent not just for the exceptional design (done by yours truly), but for Holly’s keen storytelling, wicked sense of humor, relentless self-examination, and the occasional tasty recipe. You should go there and read every word of it now.

I met Holly about 10 years ago in Iowa City, where we were both graduate students at the University of Iowa. Holly is the only person from that period of my life with whom I still keep in touch, and I consider her one of my closest friends. She makes excellent popcorn, has a taste for hot Dr. Pepper, likes The Young Ones and Zorro: The Gay Blade, and once went to Halloween party dressed as one of Brigham Young’s pregnant wives.

Oh, and she has an essay in the The Best American Essays 2005 collection, which was edited by Susan Orlean. Not too shabby!