Category Archives: Blogging

OGMD: sometimes a meme can easily be seen

Posted on by

Like right now:

Search Engine Terms
These are terms people used to find your blog.

Today
Search                       Views
Lucy Gao                         296
“lucy gao”                        39
Lucy Gao email                 31
beautiful agony                 25
lucy gao citigroup              21
blackzilla                            8
lucy gao t-shirts                 7
lucy.gao@citigroup.com       4
beaver shots                      4
gao email                           3

Top Posts
These posts on your blog got the most traffic.

Today
Title Views
Lucy Gao, revealed 514
Lucy Gao’s email 351
Lucy Gao doesn’t need a p.a. she needs a 205
Linkie o’ the Day: Beautiful Agony 48
review o’ the day: AA Gill on Barnes Gri 21
101 bottles of diet coke, 523 mentos, 2  16
Blackzilla 10
beaver shots 7
Horse-O-Phonic 8-track saddlebag system 6
How not to JDate 6

OGMD: Ads! On My Blog!!!

Posted on by

TIAAds! Commercial advertisements!

ON MY GODDAM FUCKING ANARCHAL COMMUNIST BLOG, BY GOD!!!

WordPress is lovely, WordPress is free, WordPress feeds orphans in Bangladesh, yadda yadda yadda.

Could they not have had the common courtesy to say “We are going to be sticking ads on your blog, starting August 29th, and we are going to be making money off of it, and really there is nothing whatsoever you can do about that if you want to stay here”???

Failing that, could they at least act like good dot-commers and share the luv? Split the proceeds with the bloggers. I’m an anarchal communist and quite frankly being used as an advertising platform in this way was NOT what I had in mind for this blog. Would I be going off on this rant if I had been forwarned? Of course not.

WordPress did announce, a couple of months ago, that they would be “experimenting” with Google Adsense on certain blogs. As I said at the time, rather than just plopping ads on people’s blogs at random, there was sufficient interest among the community (although not me) that they’d have had an eager and full pool of volunteers within hours, had they only asked for one.

Let those people have their ads. But if you’re going to be making money off my writing without paying me for the privilege, then I really think you and I need to talk, sweetie.

I sent in a Feedback. Yes, it was more restrained than this. We’ll see if it’s any more effective. After all, I get a thousand hits a day now.

Which is, I believe, why this whole thing started in the first place.

Operation Global Media Domination: the avatar and blogworth situation

Posted on by

TIASee my lovely new avatar? WordPress has just added a feature that allows you to upload an avatar which appears in “Latest Posts” and also on the forum when you post a question or response.

I know you’ve seen it before: it’s my icon for Operation Global Media Domination, my relentless pursuit of fame across the blogosphere. If you’re American, you may have seen it even earlier than that, when it was the logo for the US government Office of Total Information Awareness. Nice, eh, and not at all Orwellian. Wasn’t he an immigrant? Don’t worry, at some point someone grew a set of brains and deep-sixed the Office and its logo, at least publicly.

I should really co-opt their motto, too, “Scienta est potentia,” Latin for “Knowledge is power.”

In any case, now that I have a logo and a motto (49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude! fits me so well!) I should be all set to conquer planets, beginning with Pluto, for lo, it will love me because I called it a planet and will fall willingly, at least after a couple of good, strong girly drinks.

I’ve already started playing one blogworth counter against another. Surfing Latests Posts today, I came across a post called “How Much is Your Blog Worth,” which, given recent events, was bound to attract a laserlike focus from moi. It’s from Gauravonomics, and introduces a much more sophisticated blogworth calculator than the aforementioned Pingoat‘s.

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, Dane Carlson of Business Opportunities has created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays a blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

Which is hella inflated, but enough about that. It says this blog is worth $30,000+, so do I give a rat’s ass that the numbers are puffy? Hell to the no! I’m not a buyer.

Wonder how soon someone will factor in blogger book deals. I say give MediaBistro four months, Huffpo maybe four weeks. Too much fun for those underemployed, think-tanking economists to play with. They will be powerless to resist!

quote o’ the day: Oscar Wilde on blogging

Posted on by

V“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

— Oscar Wilde

 

Operation Global Media Domination: Blogworth

Posted on by

We’re all familiar with the term “blogworthy” by now. Wil Wheaton has a t-shirt that says “I’m blogging this” but really, for most of us it goes without saying.

It goes without saying that most of what we experience actually isn’t. Blogworthy, that is. Which is sad, when you come to think of it. Ever read a LiveJournal? With rare exceptions (called “aberrant” statistically speaking) LiveJournal is where things that are not blogworthy go to get, after a fashion, blogged.

eg:

Had to take the kitty to the vet today. Not the big one, the little one. The vet was nice. I can’t stand vet’s offices, they smell so bad LOL!!!1 Mike won’t tell me what he’s planning for our anniversary, but I’m so tired of Tahoe. Why can’t he see that I want to do a yoga retreat in the Northwest Territories. He knows I’d vote Democrat, if he’d ever drive me to the polls, but he always says next time, LOL!!!1 He’s so cute, God is good to me. I’m going to post pix of my latest scrapbooking project l8r!

etc. Ad nauseum.

Anyway.

While there is no objective test for what is, or is not, blogworthy (getting Farked, Boinged, or Gawked aside), there is now a (glitchy, somewhat arbitrary) test for what your blog is worth, thanks to Pingoat.

Now, I really don’t know how this works, on a deep-down level. But it must be admitted that I do not actually care, either. Basically what it does is take your Technorati rank and equate it with a dollar figure. Whether a big blog sale or book deal affects the size of each individual “Technorati Unit” I do not know, although it certainly should, as should a market correction, ie the bottom dropping out of the blog market.

It’s not an estimate of the blog’s value as a whole on the open market; that’s far too subjective, given that the market for blogs is so small. It also doesn’t seem to take into account whether the blog accepts advertising or not. I don’t, some are plastered with ads (and thus make money) but that doesn’t make any difference here.

No, the reason I like this tool is simple: since I inserted the wee button in my sidebar it tells me in an instant whether I’m up or down relative to the blogosphere at large. I don’t have to go to Technorati and sign in. I don’t have to check Google Blog Search for links that don’t show up on Technorati. I don’t have to do anything more than look over on my sidebar, and as I am constitutionally lazy, I like that.

Your Blog’s Value is $237.11!

Inbound links: 199
Technorati rank: 48998

Up 3,000 from yesterday, woohoo!