Month: November 2003

At the Den of Volokhs, David Bernstein says:
“Michael Jackson: The last boy who accused Jackson of molestation received a $12 million settlement even though his claim was uncorroborated, and, in the view of many who followed the case closely, of dubious veracity. Given the obvious financial incentive of a family to fabricate a claim, it’s going to be awfully tough to get a conviction in the current case unless the police have turned up additional evidence.”
Actually, I was thinking that knowing past history and the ability of Jackson to defend himself, they must either a) be pretty damned sure they have a solid case — i.e., stronger evidence than was present in past accusations — or b) be complete idiots.
We shouldn’t rule out b), however…

Special Message for Google, Yahoo and AOL Searchers 12/13/03: Hello! N.Z. Bear here, the proprietor of this little corner of the Internet. First, let me waste no more of your time: if you are looking for the actual video, or nekkid pictures of the young lady, you aren’t going to find them here. Hit that back button right now; move along, nothing to see here.
Still with me? Good! In that case I’ve at least momentarily held your interest, which is a good start. Check out the post below, and if you like it, stay a while! Bounce up to the front page, and for a sampling of what I do here, take a look at my own self-selected greatest hits under “Classic Bear Truth” to the left. Or if you are interested in weblogs themselves, browse through the Blogosphere Ecosystem to see rankings of blogs, or find new up-and-coming weblogs in the New Weblog Showcase.
Ok, enough of my yammering, on to — er, more of my yammering. Thanks for stopping by!
-N.Z. Bear

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By now most everybody knows that Paris Hilton, heiress, socialite and — well, not much else — is the web’s latest amateur video star.
I take as a given that Ms. Hilton’s recent escapade, as noted at Fleshbot (not work safe) and elsewhere, does not represent any fundamental new ground for the young lady. When you devote your life to being watched: to being observed, the step that you take when finally allowing that observation to extend to your most intimate — or at least, most explicit — moments is not a particularly bold one. When put in the context of her past behavior, the act is different only in degree, not in kind.
But observing Ms. Hilton (no, not observing her doing that, but more generally) makes me wonder about a personality so in need of attention from others. She yearns for the spotlight; for the eyes of the world to focus on her for a moment, and, if possible, longer. She seeks notice wherever she can find it; basking in the radiance of strangers’ gazes and thoughts. Where once, we can assume, she sought such attention a source of approval, a validation of her own worth, now, the notice itself has become the end. Positive or negative; embarrassing or flattering, whatever keeps her in the spotlight is by definition good.
She almost acts like a blogger.
How different, really, is the desire of Ms. Hilton to be noticed — to see her name in the tabloids, to have her visage streaming into our living rooms — from the desire of a blogger to be heard? To get that big link from Glenn or Andrew; to see their blog sit atop the Ecosystem?
Not very, I submit. Any blogger who tells you they don’t care at all about links, or stats, or being read by others — well, that blogger is either lying or wasting their time. Because they have a name for weblogs written by people who don’t want other people to ever read them. They call them diaries, and they don’t go on the Internet.
So if you find yourself tsk-tsking at the foolish escapades of Ms. Hilton in between checking your Ecosystem ranking and polling your SiteMeter stats — pause for a moment. And ask yourself whether, perhaps, you might suffer from the same need for notice that drove that young lady to conclude that making a home movie while getting boffed was a splendid idea. Again: it’s a matter of degree, not kind.
Ms. Hilton has the celebrity press corps to do her dirty work for her: here in the blog world, we do it differently. In the blogosphere we are all each other’s paparazzi. Stalker and stalkee; celebrity and gossip — we each play both parts in our turn, and in the end we are all attention-addicts and enablers both. And sometimes, I fear, we need to stage our own interventions and stop our own madness.
The question to ask is whether the attention is a goal in itself, or a means to an end.
Attention for its own sake is a hollow victory; if that is what you seek then you are indeed no better than poor foolish Paris. But if that desire for attention drives you to do great work; to inspire others with a turn of the phrase or a clever remark; to create something — then embrace that desire. Let it fuel your work and drive your writing; let that yearning for the Big Link push you to scour the web just one more time to find that missing story that nobody else is noticing, but everyone should be.
Accept your inner Paris Hilton, and let her have her fun.
But please: try to keep your clothes on.

Jeff Jarvis is one of the most articulate spokesbloggers when it comes to bridging the gap between old media and the weblog world, and if you aren’t paying BuzzMachine a regular visit, you should be.
Jeff has been blogging the Online News conference, and took a dim view to some of the very restricted ideas of ‘interactivity’ he heard at a panel there:
In weblogs, people have their say and try to influence people in power. So what they have to say does not end there.
Interactivity isn’t about pushing buttons.
It is about interacting with power.
I’d add to that: it is also about creating power where there was none before. A few years back, this medium did not exist, and the media world was a binary one — you were either in it, and had power to define the issues of the day, or you weren’t, and couldn’t.
Now it is shades of gray, and every blogger has a chance to lend their voice to the chorus in a way that actually has a chance of rippling through the overlapping worlds of weblogs and traditional media and affecting the public debate.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this change, from a black-and-white world of “in the media” vs. “not in the media”, to a gray world where it bloggers become a part of the media ecosystem — sorry, but it is the best word — this change is what makes weblogs powerful.
To be sure, individual bloggers don’t have nearly the immediate and direct ability to define the agenda that traditional media outlets do — not even Glenn. But what we can do is raise issues to the surface; draw attention to news that traditional media overlooked, and keep focus on issues until big media is forced to take notice.
No one blogger can rival traditional media. But taken together, we are the lever, and the blogosphere is the place where we can stand to move the world.
Even if it is just by a little bit…

The Ecosystem and Showcase rankings are not updated today, because a periodic problem I have with my MySQL database is back.
Basically, the Ecosystem has one huge table with almost a million rows in it which stores all the links that it harvests. Every week or so recently, it simply stops working. When I try to access it through phpMyAdmin, I get:
Can’t open file: ‘links.MYD’. (errno: 145)
Error
SQL-query :
SHOW KEYS FROM `links`
MySQL said:
Can’t open file: ‘links.MYD’. (errno: 145)
Back
Thus far, I’ve found no way to recover from this other than to drop the table, re-add it, and do a full rescan of all webolgs for links. (A full scan happens every day anyway, so thankfully this is never really a case of data loss).
Any suggestions from MySQL gurus out there?
Anyway: unfortunately I’m not going to be able to resolve this today, so stats will be off until tomorrow…
Update 11/15: Fixed for now. Thanks to all for the suggestions.
To describe the table in question a little better, here’s the creation script:
CREATE TABLE `links` (
`source_url` varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”,
`source_host` varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”,
`dest_url` varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”,
`dest_host` varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”,
`new` varchar(10) default NULL,
`blacklist` varchar(10) default NULL,
KEY `source_host` (`source_host`,`dest_host`),
KEY `source_url` (`source_url`,`dest_url`),
KEY `source_url_2` (`source_url`),
KEY `dest_url` (`dest_url`),
KEY `source_host_2` (`source_host`),
KEY `dest_host` (`dest_host`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;
I am fairly sure I am not using all those indicies at the moment and some are redundant/wasteful.
But basically, it’s a very simple table, and I’m not entirely sure there’s a way to rearchitect it to be more efficient. It’s pretty self-explanatory: it’s just a big collection of all links found during the Ecosystem’s scans, including data on the source and destination URLs. The ‘host’ is a somewhat clumsy concept which I use to try to identify a particular blog (so all links going to a particular blog may have different dest_urls, but they should all have the same dest_host).
Anyway. I’d welcome suggestions on how to a) avoid the routine corruption problem, or b) optimize this layout.
Thanks again all…
-NZB

I’m late. But it is still worth saying.
To all those who have served this nation in the past, and to those who serve now, I simply say: thank you.
-N.Z. Bear

Browsing about the blogosphere tonight, I passed through Rick’s Cafe Americain, and noticed a spiffy feature that caught the eye of the web-development bear in me. Atop Rick’s page, he displays a rapidly cycling counter — similar to those old “national debt” ones you used to see — which reads “Cost of the War In Iraq”.
The counter shows around $84,210,061,103 right now, and it zooms upward as you read this.
Not to be outdone, I thought I’d show off my own web widget chops, and add a nice auto-updating counter of my own. Here goes:

Someday, maybe I’ll let y’all in on the secret of how I coded that…
Update: To his great credit, Rick at Cafe Americain has a well-reasoned, civil response to my little snark up at his place. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it is well worth reading. The phrase “loyal opposition” leaps to mind: for me, this post marks Rick as a sane voice of the left that I’ll return to in the future…

Let’s call it official: congratulations to Clareified for winning the first political Showcase contest, and to Rocket Penguin for taking home the first non-political category.
See here for the full results…

In this first week of the dual-category Showcase, Rocket Penguin looks to be the front-runner for the non-political category with the post Who Da Pope?, while in the political contest, Clareified brought it on with Death By Invitation.
Now, as Clareified is a liberal, and I’m a warmongering, biased conservative, I will of course immediately disqualify Clareified, and anybody who looks like Clareified, from the contest.
Ahem. Or not.
Both winners are tentative until after 5pm today; feedback/comments/complaints will be heard until then. But for now, a tentative congratulations to both!
And oh, yeah: the League is clearly slacking, ’cause they had a whole two members fail to vote this week, managing only to deliver a measly 43 of 45 for 95.6 % participation in the Showcase sponsorship contest.
Click more for full results!

Continue reading “Preliminary Results 11/10/03”

Well, not surprisingly, League of Liberals members weren’t terribly happy with my commentary on their tactics yesterday. There’s quite a bit of feedback in the comments on that post, and I thought it would be worthwhile to follow-up with additional thoughts and questions of my own.
Let me start by trying to explain in clearer terms where I am coming from on these issues by talking a bit about the Ecosystem itself.
I’d like to say that I built the Ecosystem, originally, as a serious study of the blogosphere designed to better mankind and the weblog world.
But that wouldn’t be true. I built it originally because I was curious to see if it could be done, and because I thought it would be cool, and because I thought it might get me attention in the Blogosphere. As it turns out, it could be done, it was cool, and it did get me attention.
And you know what else? It was fun. It was fun for me to see the positive reaction it received in the Blogosphere, and I think it is safe to say that it has been fun for many, many bloggers to participate in. I still smile when I see a new blogger posting proudly on their blog that they have become a “Flappy Bird”. The Ecosystem is goofy; it is a silly, silly thing and I believe firmly in my heart that the reason it enjoys some success above (or at least, different from) other ranking systems is that very silliness.
But the fact is, through all the silliness, I have genuinely grown to care about the blogosphere, and to believe fervently in the potential it holds as a communication medium and information source. And I know that the Ecosystem, and tools like it, have an effect on the way bloggers behave. I think about those effects, and I try to do what I can to influence them so that, in my humble view at least, they help to build a diverse and meritocratic blogosphere.
So, when I recognized that the Ecosystem reinforces the tendency of top bloggers to stay on top, I created something to help counteract that effect at least a tiny little bit, and give the bottom bloggers a chance: the New Weblog Showcase. When I saw that the desire to beef up Ecosystem rankings was driving people to create pointless multiple links to other blogs, I changed the ranking system to remove that motivation.
The way I see it, as the owner of the Ecosystem, it’s not that I have a right to “make the rules” or demand that bloggers behave a certain way or I won’t let them play in my sandbox. It is that I feel I have an obligation, having created the Ecosystem, to counter the sometimes-toxic effects it can have on blogging behavior. Where I can do that fairly by adjusting the way the system works, I do. And where there is no “code” solution, then I’ll use the other option available to me: to speak out with my own voice, in my own little corner of the weblog world, and draw attention to where I see things going wrong. And try to use my own powers of reason and argument to explain why I’m concerned, and hopefully suggest solutions.
Which brings us back to the cut-and-paste roundup posts that I’ve seen on some League blogs. I find it encouraging that very few respondents have actually tried to defend the practice of blindly copying roundup posts onto their own blog. I recognize that many League members haven’t done that, but more than a few have, so I think it is fair to say that while the practice may not be “official policy” of the League, it is also not uncommon.
We could debate all day as to exactly how widespread the practice was, but I don’t have the patience to go combing through all the League’s membership to count exactly how many of those cookie-cutter roundups have been done, and I hope none of you do either. My bottom line is this: when I see behavior like this, I worry that bloggers are focusing more on beefing up Ecosystem ratings than they are about expressing their own thoughts & views. And that bugs me. Roundups done by an individual blogger pointing out the posts they find of value are great. Roundups distributed by some central source and reposted with no editing by the blogger themself strike me as pointless parroting of a party-line view.
I would worry less about these things, in the context of the League, if there weren’t other signs that the group as a whole — or at least its leaders — seem to have what I consider to be an unhealthy concern over driving up Ecosystem rankings for League members.
When, in the comments from my previous post, I see Barry of Rush Limbaughtomy rattle off a statistic like “Approximately 110 of the TOP 350 blogs on the Ecosystem are ‘Liberal’ today”, what strikes me is that he (or someone) actually took the time to count. He then proceeds to accuse me of bias and states:
“Since we have half as many liberal blogs we have to work harder to get recognition. We are doing that. You seem to have a problem with our hard work, our dedication, and our purpose. As OWNER of the Ecosystem you should be aware that we are now playing on your uneven playing field. When you take sides you tip the balance even further.”
…and when I read that, I hear the Ecosystem itself being described as a “playing field”, with the goal of the game presumably being to drive up the Ecosystem rankings of the League’s players.
I read that, and then I look back at the Liberal Linker blog, and I see a blog that someone registered in the Ecosystem with the tagline “moving liberal bloggers up the blogosphere” that seems to consist of nothing but continual lists of links with minimal commentary. And I start to think that you know what, maybe someone is trying to juice the Ecosystem rankings just a little bit. Call me crazy, but let’s also not forget that it was that very same blog’s habit of multiply linking to League member’s blog posts that prompted me to change the way the whole Ecosystem works.
Am I blaming the League for the sins of one blog? Yes, I suppose I am. But I have yet to hear many comments from League members denouncing the Liberal Linker blog’s tactics, and League members are clearly benefiting from those same tactics through the inflated Ecosystem rankings generated by the many links to their blogs on Liberal Linker.
There’s a simple solution to put my mind at ease on this particular issue, of course: de-register the Liberal Linker blog from the Ecosystem. I’m not planning on doing that myself. But if the League is serious about pursuing higher Ecosystem rankings based on merit, then why not take this step to demonstrate that? Have your leadership make the request to me in email, and I’ll take care of it.
Look: you may think that because I tend to the conservative side, I’m just plain biased against the League. You’d be wrong, but only I know that for sure, and I don’t think there’s a way to convince you otherwise.
I’m not out to get the League. To be frank, I find the League to be in at least some ways a more interesting group than the Axis or Alliance, because it seems to have a purpose beyond sheer silliness. (There’s nothing wrong with sheer silliness, so that’s not a slam on the other alliances, but the League is trying to push forward real-world objectives (spreading their views and ideas) through weblogs, something that the other alliances have dabbled in but not made their primary focus).
But what I don’t want to see happen is for the League to get so obsessed with Ecosystem rankings or combating the alleged conservative bias in the Blogosphere that it forgets what’s actually important: doing good work. Demonstrating the power of the League’s ideas and ideals through the writing of individual members, and through their hard work in seeking out and drawing attention to the issues they think are most worth fighting for. That is what the blogosphere should be about. Listen to Mark Pierce: he’s got the right idea.
Perhaps I am overreacting to certain limited behaviors by a subset of the League’s membership, and if so, then that is great news. But as I have said, I feel a certain responsibility to speak out against the disease of Ecosystem-obsession when I see it, and my honest judgment right now is that the League, when taken as a whole, has at least a mild case of it.
Prove me wrong, and I’ll be a happy bear…

It won’t surprise anyone that I spend more time than is probably healthy thinking about the blogosphere and the effect which tools like the Ecosystem and New Weblog Showcase have on it. And lately, of course, the impact of weblog alliances has begun to be felt in ways that are difficult to fully quantify, but may turn out to ultimately be quite significant.
The most deliberate and conscious attempt to influence the blogosphere, as I think they themselves would acknowledge, currently comes from the League of Liberals. Recently, the League seems to have implemented a practice of posting daily or near-daily roundups of their members’ posts, which members then put on their own weblog (see here, here, here, here and here for an example). The result: League members whose posts are circulated get a boost in their Ecosystem ratings.
The following post comes from the pseudonymous Liberal Linker weblog, which, curiously, doesn’t appear to be considered an official member of the League, and yet certainly seems tightly connected with it. I don’t know who actually runs the blog, although I assume it to be one of the League’s leaders. But at any rate, it offers the clearest explanation of the League’s tactics and goals that I’ve seen. I’m snipping the highlights here, but as they say, read the whole thing:

I don’t want to get off on a RANT here. but:
I find it disturbing when terms like “artificially creating the hits by linking” or “link-whoring” to describe our practice of supporting each other by linking to our member posts as a group are used…
Bloggers link to the “first movers” or top traffic blogs in hopes of being noticed.
They get massive links from many sites and seldom do the linkers get “repaid” by a link in return. Our system is much more Democratic. We help each other by sharing our ability to link. Is there anything “artificial” in that?
(snip)
…Our system is the fairest, and cleanest way for a group of like-minded bloggers to gain notice on the Ecosystem.
Many of our members have seen meteoric rises in the past few days. Some have jumped 100’s of places. It took me months to get that far in the early going and I am happy to help my fellow liberals up the laddar quicker. My only hope is that they pass the good fortune on to others. 30 or 40 links make a huge difference at the lower orders of the Ecosystem.
To me it is the perfect Liberal Democratic ideal. We as a group make all of our ships rise on the eco-ocean as the tide rolls in. We share and we trade in the only currency of the Ecosystem – links and visits. We know this is not a Zero sum game and there is little gain in being a single winner. We win when we all win.
So there you have it. But this really raises more questions than it answers, starting with the big one: what’s the point of driving up someone’s Ecosystem ranking?
That may seem an odd question coming from me, but honestly: who cares what your ranking is, if you know that is has been gained simply because you signed up for membership in a particular club? There’s no real practical benefit to being high on the list. Trust me, if you think you’ll get massive referral traffic from TTLB when you hit the top 100, think again. TTLB gets about 1,000 visits a day on average, and if the average blog in the top 100 got 1% of that in referrals (10 visits a day), I’d be amazed. It is probably much less than that.
The League’s tactics also, not surprisingly, seem to match their politics rather appropriately. It is not clear to me how the roundup-posts of links to League posters are created, but there seems to be only two possibilities: either they represent an unfiltered list of every League member who posted, or they are being selected by the League’s leadership in some manner. (It is of course possible that there is some system of voting for posts hidden outside the view of non-members, but that seems unlikely).
So take the possibilities in turn. If the roundup posts are unfiltered, then the deal seems simple: sign up for the League, and you get extra links, regardless of the merit of your work. Make a brilliant post, make a crummy one, it doesn’t matter: you’ll get the link that is rightfully yours. I don’t think it is a stretch to call this the Blogosphere equivalent of welfare (minus the means testing — the “rich” bloggers who already have lots of links get just as much as the “poor” ones who have none)
But the alternate possibility — that the posts are, in fact, selected by the League’s leadership — is even more intriguing. If that is the case, then a system which, on the surface, purports to be democratic and egalitarian, is in fact simply a method for individuals to suborn their own judgment to that of their Leaders, who know better.
Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? The real-world political analogies are left as an exercise to the reader.
In case it isn’t obvious, the League’s vision of how the Blogosphere should work just doesn’t match my own. I love the idea of weblogs as a community where merit is truly what matters, and I honestly believe that if you have talent, patience, and willpower, you can and will be successful in this world. I’m not blind to the imperfections, vagaries and politics of the blogosphere, but on the whole I find they are vastly outweighed by its strengths.
I like to see strong, intelligent voices in the Blogosphere succeed — whether or not they happen to agree with my views. I’d rather live in a blog-world where the most successful blogs disagreed with me but were written with intelligence and skill, than live in one where I was surrounded by poorly written and ill-considered echoes of my own views.
That vision seems the opposite of what the League wants. And that’s OK — one of the strengths of the blogosphere is that it is a big, big place, and there is plenty of room for the League to pursue their vision at the same time I strive to encourage my own.
I am in a somewhat unique position, of course, as arbiter of the Ecosystem and the even more directly competitive Showcase. And in that role, I do my best to run fair, neutral contests where all comers have an equal chance for success, regardless of my personal views on their merit.
But that neutrality doesn’t mean I intend to sacrifice my right to speak my own mind on what the blogosphere can, and should, be. I make no secret of the fact that I’d like to influence the course of the Blogosphere’s development in directions that I think will make it a more vibrant, diverse, and ultimately useful space for ideas and information to be exchanged.
So I’ll keep boring y’all with my thoughts: and I’d welcome yours back in return — particularly, on this subject, if you’re part of the League itself. It’s all about the dialogue, after all…