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| Friday, August 18, 2006 |
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Findings 
Re-educated guesswork
| | I should start keeping a running tally of how many minutes a week are lost to the many activities software security companies have a product to block. My guess is that the average American worker spends about 8,000 hours a week doing something he or she shouldn¹t, for a grand total of $98 gajillion in lost productivity. |
| | American tech journalists lose an average of 3 million minutes a week wading through this crap, but since we usually just sigh and write it up anyhow, even though it¹s lame, boneheaded and springs from the stupid assumption that if you can just seal off all forms of entertainment people will work ninety times harder, it¹s kind of a wash in terms of claiming lost productivity. |
Grow down, already
| | Being Five. "A kid who blogs using voice recognition software", it says. |
Flying lower
| | Clearly there isn't enough interest by enough airlines, or Boeing would stick with it. But I think there is something else: tightened security. There is a high risk that laptops will be forbidden on more flights. This will discourage more airlines from supporting laptops any more than they already do, which is very little. |
| | Still, it's a bummer and a shame. |
| | For what it's worth, I tried Connexion once, on a Lufthansa flight from Washington to Copenhagen. It only worked some of the time and cost me $29. I was ready to use it on the return flight, but it was broken completely and cost me nothing other than aggravation. |
Unchain your art
| | in the end, that¹s what the A-list is all about: directing traffic. They are the traffic cops of the blogosphere and they are not as easily replaced as some would like to make us believe. They are brand names and we tend to trust them, even if they let us down sometimes. |
| | As often happens, I'm listed among the 'listers. |
| | For what it's worth, I don't consider my readers "traffic". Nor do I consider my links to other blogs or sites a way of "directing" anything other than a reader's interest. |
| | If I thought of myself as a "traffic cop" of anything, much less the blogosphere, I'd hang it up. |
| | As for my status as an A-list router of anything, you can count my visitors here. The number has been between a few hundred and a few thousand since somewhere back around 2000. Growth in "traffic" over the years has been roughly zero, near as I can tell. |
| | You can find my referers here. |
| | Most of my referers are not other bloggers, much less A-listers. The top single referer currently is netvibes, which I'd never heard of before looking at my referers just now — something I almost never do, and haven't done in many months. As I look down the list, it appears most visitors arrive via searches on Google for stuff like this. |
| | The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. |
| | Yeah, but the best way to get a link from any blogger is to link to them first. But geez, make the reason something other than a link exchange. |
| | Sure, sometimes I'll link to something somebody's said about something I've said, but it's always either because the other writer said something interesting or because what they said moves a conversation forward. I never link for the sake of reciprocity alone, or to perpetuate any "elite". |
| | That said, I just looked through my referer logs for evidence of current reciprocal linking. Or of elites. Couldn't find either. |
| | As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant's little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal's hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger. |
| | Want to succeed in the blogosphere, or the Web in general? Easy. Do search engine optimization. Here's how: |
| | - Write quotable stuff about a lot of different subjects.
- Do it consistently, for months if not years.
- Link a lot, as a way of giving credit and of sending readers to other sources of whatever it is you write about.
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| | I can't promise royalty, because there isn't any. But I can promise a rewarding relationship with the readers you'll get, regardless of how many there are. |
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