CQ
QRL
TNX
SK

Your survey also shows how fallible the number of blogs created can be. When they talk about the rise in the number of bloggers, how many of them are fake sites set up to scam money from google and others?

The best comment filters I've found have been following links on weblogs I trust. I tend to give preference to folks I recognize from rec.arts.sf.fandom, but then I follow their links as well. I build my own list based on what I find there. That is a time-consuming task, though, and not suitable for everyone.

When I post a message on my blog, I notify the world by using a service called pingomatic.com, which updates about twenty aggregators (including Weblogs.com and Technorati) automatically. That way, anyone using an automated search tool can find out that I've posted.

I'm moving to a new ISP soon, and reorganizing as a result. One thing I'm seriously considering is a combination of JavaScript and cookies to point out new items to regular visitors.

You appear to have the Movable Type default PublishCharset of iso-8859-1. This is marginally more international than ASCII (as you may have guessed from the names; the International Organization for Standards vs American Standard Code for Information Interchange), but is still a Latin-alphabet, Western European-centric character set.

To get those characters to display, you'd need to switch to something that supported them, like UTF-8 (Unicode) or ISO-2022-JP (an older code-switching standard) or...well, something else. Unicode is probably the best bet moving forward.

See anyone can be provincial or I can eat glass for some amusing browser tests of Unicode support.

One of its optional features is a blog for every registered user, so it probably turns up on weblogs.com every time one of its users posts something.

And I forgot to link to CivicSpace's features in my other comment. Argh.

Well, not until the FDA approves my invention, a ray-gun which remotely and selectively paralyzes the Jackass Lobe of the human brain.

So, for now, the heck with that.

It's a sitewide configuration setting, so it would apply to all the blogs in your Movable Type installation. All, er, one of them.

Another option that I had forgotten, though; for a one-shot situation like this one, you can include Unicode characters using &# and the numerical value of the character.

Let me do some fiddling to see if I can come up with a quick conversion for you to copy & paste in.

It may be that the screwy banner in UTF-8 is because Teresa has a title tag with ashes and thorns lurking underneath the weblog's subtitle.

I suspect the best approach will be the numeric Unicode entities, unless either of you expect to be posting in Japanese on a regular basis.

Tabitha!

My Uncle and his floozie from Sheffield persona very non grata around here after their visit this morning. The idiots leave the door open and the cat gets out.

Black and white, very affectionate, but Tabitha doesn't know the area. We've only been here a month.

And the aforementioned floozie is one of those elderly ladies who, if spoke Japanese, would pursue any passing cat with shrill squeals of "kawaii!"

Floozie no baku!

Nobody reading this in Barnetby?

So now the question is, if you give 100 monkeys 100 pieces of monkey money, how long will it be before they all go in on a copy of "Hamlet"?

We also try to edit one another. if I post something, one of the other writers may edit it for grammar. I need it. :)

What makes us a simialr to a blog is that we can write whenever we want, generally about whatever we want. As long as it is Dane County related. A more structured site that is simply "about Madison, WI" couldn't do that. They would have an editing process that would delay the speed in which something gets written about. Not to mention much of what is written on the site is opinion.

Also, all of the writers on Dane101 are volunteers. no one gets paid. While we do have google ads, any profit we make from that goes to server costs.

I guess we should be honored that you don't consider us a blog, because that means we must look professional and not cookie cutter. But I would like to know what your definition is?

5. 日々悶々気ままに戯言
22. 若さゆえの過ち
35. Ｊ♡王子殿๑۩۞۩๑
40. →☆★☆★◎＿◎★☆★☆←
58. 追逐太阳的风

Those sites display fine on my computer when I click on them, but not your rendering of them.

Your characterisation of Potemkin blogs is spot on, and part of the problem we face in filtering out the spam. I do wonder if as we get better at spotting these, they will get better at faking it. If we can keep this evolutionary arms race going long enough, they may start being useful.

By linking to them form here you are both raising their profile and potentially risking being grouped with them by other automated spam-catching tools.

On the language issue, the sooner you bite the bullet and adopt utf-8 the better. It is the best way to encode arbitrary languages, but you will likely have to convert your templates to it too. Technorati converts all encodings it detects to utf-8 internally. AFAIK, weblogs.com just passes through the bytes.

Jeff, if Teresa can find that many that fast, imagine how many are being created every minute. It's an ongoing battle.

Jesse, I yield entirely: Dane 101 is a weblog. At least half of what convinced me is that you're watching your incoming links closely enough to show up here only a few hours after the piece was posted.

Jeff, I agree with your point in principle. I won't go so far as to advocate the death penalty for high-end spammers, but I'd like to see the nonlethal book thrown at them. However, the cloned pseudo-weblogs aren't violating any law I can think of. They'll go away as soon as Google Ads stops paying for ad space on them.

Christopher Davis, the first, second, and fifth character strings match the ones on the websites. The third and fourth have been translated into Oblivian or Venusian or Old High Syldavian.

Kevin, I'm sorry I spoke unkindly about Technorati, but since its last major transformation it's been very difficult to use. Let me see if I can be specific here. I haven't kept notes.

1. It's haphazard and slow about spotting links. At least half the time when Brad DeLong links to me it never shows up at all, and the other times Technorati can register the existence of his link days after Brad puts it up. Same thing happens with Crooked Timber, though not quite as often; and if Patrick didn't tell me about it, I'd hardly know that Body and Soul has ever linked to me at all.

Any time I put Making Light's URL into Google's search box and choose the "who links to this URL" option, I can find handfuls of links to Making Light I never saw on Technorati at all. Of course, by then they're so old that they're not part of the ongoing discourse.

There are times when I can more readily find out who's linked to something on Making Light by revving up my tracking software and looking at its "last 20 referrers" screen to see if I'm getting multiple hits from one URL. In fact, I did that just now and discovered that Neil Gaiman linked to one of my Particles a week ago.

2. I can't get past the first page. I think I've gotten the second page to load maybe two or three times in the past six months. I just tried it again: no dice.

3. Slow updates. At one point Technorati said I had the same number of incoming and outgoing links for several weeks running. At its best, it updates maybe once or twice a day.

4. It stutters. Sometimes two-thirds of the entries on page 1 will be the same entry over and over again. Some weblogs are especially prone to this, but right now I can't think of a one of them.

5. Links o' mystery: At least once a day I'll click through to a weblog that's supposedly linked to me, only to discover there's no such link present on that weblog. Waiting a few days and running a Google search on the snippet of text quoted in the entry doesn't turn it up either.

6. Resurrected links. A few times I've suddenly seen several entries from the same weblog for links to Making Light that that weblog had posted over a period of weeks or months.

7. I miss that fast-moving left-hand column of current hot links.

I think that's the list. If I remember more, I'll let you know. It's been distressing. Technorati has been such a favorite vice of mine that for the past two years in a row I've given it up for Lent.

You have my utmost sympathy about the problem with fake weblogs. Those things are deliberately set up to woof Technorati and Google. You might try complaining to Google. They've got all that state of the art searching and sorting capability. Let them apply some of it to their ad placement policies.

Current OpenOffice uses the Unicode code points in its 'insert special character' dialogue (along with everywhere else inside itself), so you can chew through Unicode character categories like "general punctuation" and "letter-like symbols".

An image capture of what those titles look like on my machine in Safari is here. This matches what Safari does with the titles of those blogs when I visit them.

The third and fourth ones use some odd characters (hearts, stars; what, is the Lucky Charms guy blogging now?), which may be why they look different on your browser. The renderings that I get appear to be the ones intended, though.

(Huh. Not that I know who he is, but he lives two kilometers from here.)

(words my censor missed)

No more than about 60 people ever knew of it, and no more than about 15 (my tutorial group) had any need to read it. But... I never took it down, and when I looked at it the other day, each of the hundred or so postings I made had about 70 pieces of comment spam.

Which I guess makes me part of the problem. Must clean house.

Seriously, there is no reason for you to attack lots of decent people just to make a point about Weblogs.com

> Seriously, there is no reason for you to attack lots of decent people just to make a point about Weblogs.com

You sure there? I didn't notice any attacks on anyone other than people who were using weblogs for content free advertising. You're treating it as is saying something is not a weblog is a criticism, and I very much doubt that's what's intended.

Teresa is the Empress of the Universe.

Alas, my friend, you have stumbled into the latest iteration of the long-running discussion (I first became aware of it over thirty years ago), "What Is a Fanzine?"

In fact, I've seen people use the adjective "bloggy" as an unfavorable comment on someone's writing style.

But they are still very useful tools, e.g. upcoming.org is much more manageable on the receiving end than a mailing list is.

At least that's how I currently do it. I'd love to know of any better ways.

I shall be able to sleep soundly now.

Personally I think blogging software and templates are an extremely good way of publishing an e-zine.

> In fact, I've seen people use the adjective "bloggy" as an unfavorable comment on someone's writing style.

Oh yeah. I'm having a hard time convincing a workmate that there really are intelligent, interesting and non-egotistical weblogs out there. My case isn't helped by the fact that so many of them really are awful.

Good for you and for the cat. Alas, I shall probably shall not sleep soundly as you have installed an earworm.

Oh! The cat came back...

Where's that bourbon?

Thanks for Judging my Blogs 'The Food and Health Awareness Archive' by given me the Hello World wink.

It's the photoblog, if you will, of an unemployed Belgian in her 20s, and although she's using it to showcase photos she hopes to sell, it also has blog-type text, including a recipe for elderflower cordial.

[...]

Onward, then, to those other 36 weblogs, online journals, and miscellaneous electronic perzines.

It pains me to be this much of a dork, but I can't help it: 34, not 36.

On the general topic, Weblogs.com has been around for quite a while (I used to manually ping them for booklog updates). It was never really useful in the way that Technorati is, but it used to be good as a means of finding interesting weblogs. After doing a manual ping, I would scan down the list of recently updated blogs and look for eye-catching titles.

Granted, most of those are also crap (the ability to write and the ability to think up snappy titles appear to be orthogonal), but you can find some interesting things that way, if you're bored. It's also one of the better ways to get out of the immediate circle of blogdom that you operate in (most of the links I've found via Technorati turn out to link to several of the same sites I do-- via Weblogs.com, you can sometimes turn up sites that have no recognizable links, which is a nice reminder of the real scope of blogdom).

(This last point is also why I think most blogger triumphalists are missing the real point of the whole weblog explosion, but I really do need to go to work at some point, and if I start ranting about that, I'll never get out of here...)

By the time Patrick and I were doing fanzines together, subscriptions were no longer an issue, but it was still true that the best way to attract contributors was to write the first issue (or two, or three) yourself -- and make it good.

The only part of The Enchanted Duplicator that's outdated is the section on how to avoid overinking. The rest is both relevant and illuminating, though it may need a bit of explication.

I think about Subrs and bootstrapping one's own projects when I see ads for clever schemes that will drive huge amounts of traffic to your site, get you a high Google rating, all that sort of thing. The One True Secret Technique for attracting traffic is to put stuff on your website that people want to read, look at, play with, buy, or view with indignation.

This morning I got a letter from Jim Macdonald on that very subject:

While indulging in vice* today, I came upon this:

Getting a Decent Search Engine Ranking is Costly!

There are millions of websites across the internet and everyone wants a top search engine ranking. Do you see the problem? Getting a decent ranking for a popular keyword has become nearly impossible if you don't shell out big bucks. First you wait 6 weeks for your site to even show up in the search engines (unless you pay $300 for a quick listing in Yahoo), then you hope for the best. If you're not listed in the top 20 for a keyword, you won't be getting many visitors from the search engines.

These fellows were touting their own software program that would deliver thousands of hits to your site with the touch of a button, and they were running down the other ways people use to get traffic.

So I checked:

Search on Teresa:

You're #1 on Google, #4 on Yahoo**

Search on Science Fiction Bookstores:

I'm #1 at Google, #1 at Yahoo

Search on Literature of the Fantastic:

I'm #1 at Google, #1 at Yahoo

Search on Truth about PublishAmerica:

I'm #1 at Google, #2 at Yahoo

Search on Learn Writing:

I'm #2 and #4 at Google, #8 at Yahoo

All this without paying some fly-by-night scamster anything!

____________________
Notes:

*"Indulging in vice" = "hunting down online scammers."

**Since dropped to #6 in Yahoo's rankings. Note my nonexistent concern.

You are wise in the ways of the Web, Grasshopper.

I'm in da bidness of Web publishing and we learned that for ourselves. Indeed, it's a phase new online editors go through — they become fascinated with search engine optimization and start cranking out e-mail with tips on how to optimize pages for search. We older, wiser heads indulge this obsession, partially because it's something we know that newbies have to get out of your system, partially because sometimes they DO come up with a couple of good tips, and partially because Search Engines and How They Do Things is something that a commercial online site really does have to stay on top of.

And, if high traffic numbers are important to you, it is important to make your site friendly to search engines. But that's not very hard, and it only takes a little time. The really important thing is to create a site that people want to bookmark and come back to, and you do that by posting interesting stuff.

(I initially wrote "creating compelling content" as the last three paragraphs of the previous paragraph. I really AM spending too much time with the corporate people.)

The thing about search engines in particular, and traffic from external links in general, is that it's evanescent and completely out of your control. Sure, it's swell when one of our articles is tops on Google News, or it gets Slashdotted — everybody involved with that article just feels good about life all day. But the next day, the link will have faded, and you're back to getting traffic from your loyal readers. And you'd better have loyal readers so that you have traffic when you're not being highlighted on Google anymore.

Earlier, I said that it's important to keep up with search engines if high traffic numbers are important to you — and that "if" is very important to keep in mind. If traffic was important on my personal blog, I would have stopped doing it years ago, it never really took off. If InstaPundit and Boing Boing are A-list bloggers, and Making Light is a B- or C-list blogger, I'm, like, an N-list blogger. Still, my friends and family read it and enjoy it, and I have a small but loyal group of commenters, so I'm happy. And, heck, maybe this will be the month that I'm catapulted into Blogging Glory.

What's less clear is how it is that taking a position on this amounts to "attack[ing] lots of decent people."

> (I initially wrote "creating compelling content" as the last three paragraphs of the previous paragraph. I really AM spending too much time with the corporate people.)

At least you didn't say "Content is King".

Patrick wrote:

> It's an interesting question: in what does the quality of blog-ness inhere? Structure, content, intent?

Imaginary statistics show that fully 60% of internet arguments are matters of definition.

> What's less clear is how it is that taking a position on this amounts to "attack[ing] lots of decent people."

Quite.

"What is the sound of one blogger blogging?"

Only a matter of time before Chip Delany will criticize us for trying to define the Science Fiction Blog instead of just discussing it.

Did telegraphers of the Wild West (cf. the Russian in Deadwood) have a secret Western de facto Blog? Are the walls of the Lascaux cave a Paleolithic Blog? Is there something on the wall that we should understand before we clone the extinct Cave Bear whose genome has recently been sequenced? Just wondering...

I'm wendy.

The last weekend I have a little discussion with my mother but no about MY CLOTHING!!! whe discussed because I screamed in Spanish to a man who wanted to stealed me (to steal = robar; clothing = roba -in catalan-)...

You are not a very good Spy!

[w]

--Mary Aileen

Also on this morning's first page are two links to a single post, Counting weblogs at mlhall.com. The first has a sample text from the post; the second just says "Making Light."

As you've probably figured out by now, I've gotten over my snit and am back to using Technorati.

Tell me -- is it at all useful for me to describe these problems? That's the only reason I'm writing about it. If this is stuff you're already aware of, just let me know.

I've been thinking about how complex a problem it must be to track weblogs. Bloggers are forever adding new modifications: stories jumped to a second page, comment threads in a separate floating window, comment threads plus the original post on a separate page, sidebar indices of posts ... much stuff.

I've never wondered until now whether it gives you guys a headache when I link alternate letters in a word to two different sites, or all the words in a phrase to different sites but the spaces in between them to a single site. Come to think of it, the headache probably belongs to the linked-to site, which would come up on Technorati with a separate listing for every wordspace in that phrase.

The more I think about this, the more impressed I am that you make Technorati work at all.

As for how to achieve good Search Engine ranking, my son Andrew worked that out when he was 7

Isn't it time we put a stop to this madness?
What about the children? Who'll protect the children from the bloggers?

Wait, or is that boogers?

Eh, screw it!