Author: N.Z. Bear

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 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 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, 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 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…

It’s an Ecosystem cleanup day. Finally implemented a minor fix which I should have done ages ago: you’ll no longer see those annoying extra slashes in weblog names which contain a ‘ character. The code which was sticking them in to begin with is fixed, and I’ve gone back and cleaned up the data for all old entries as well.
If you see anything that looks mucked up, let me know…
-NZB

Well, nobody has posted any complaints here, so I declare it official: congratulations to Mind as this week’s winner of the Showcase.
And for the second week running, the League takes the sponsorship contest, bringing a decisive 72.7 % of their membership to the table.
Thanks again to all who particpated this week. The Showcase will be open for new entries in a mere few hours, and remember: this week, contestants will have the option of submitting their post in either the “political” or “non-political” category. Should be fun!

It has been a tight race this week for the Showcase, but with Monday morning upon us, Peripheral Mind‘s post Legalizing Illegals is in the lead with 34 links. Not too far behind is ink from the squid, garnering 29 links for investing in the future.
On the alliance front, the Liberal juggernaut appears unstoppable, at least for the moment, with the League holding a solid lead over the Axis and Alliance:
Blogger Alliance: 42 of 89 = 47.2 %
Axis of Naughty: 4 of 24 = 16.7 %
League of Liberals: 24 of 33 = 72.7 %
Feedback / complaints / challenges to these results will be accepted until 5pm PST, after which the results will be certified as final. Thanks to everyone who participated this week!
Complete results are as follows:
Peripheral Mind: Legalizing Illegals
( 34 links)
ink from the squid: investing in the future
( 29 links)
LGF Watch: LGF hypocrisy: Advocating Murder
( 17 links)
the evangelical outpost: The Perfect Post
( 17 links)
Earthly Passions: Bare Faced Betrayal
( 17 links)
Bsurot Tovot: Our Mission
( 14 links)
ProfessorBainbridge.com: Dow 10000, Psychology, and the ECMH
( 13 links)
Dipped in Chocolate The World of Revog: Compliments Wanted
( 12 links)
Electronic Countermeasures: Everyone’s from somewhere.
( 8 links)
Rick’s Cafe Americain: Bush & Baghdad Bob: Bosom Buddies?
( 5 links)
FattySue!: Beautiful Fatty
( 5 links)
SchoolView: What Do They Spend It On?
( 5 links)
My Worst Foot Forward: wait. wait. don’t tell me.
( 5 links)
Damfacrats 2004: CLARK CALLS BUSH PHONY PRANCER
( 4 links)
Spero Speaks: Online Rankings of the Candidates
( 3 links)
Days Go By: I Never
( 3 links)
BoiFromTroy: Heisman Hopeful?!?
( 3 links)
I’ll Talk to Myself: Handbags & Bloodrags
( 3 links)

I’ve just implemented a fairly significant change to the way rankings are calculated. Previously, the scan routines counted all links to a weblog when determining status in the Ecosystem. Starting today, only the total number of unique links will be counted towards a weblog’s ranking.
What this means is that if a weblog links to the same post on your site twelve times, it still only counts as one link for the Ecosystem rankings.
To be clear: all the links are still being collected, and you can still see them all in your details page. There are now two link-counts displayed: “inbound links”, which is the total number of links you have received, and “inbound unique”, which is the unique count.
Why am I doing this? Pretty much the same logic as I applied in restricting Showcase voting to one-blog-one-vote. Originally, I thought multiple links would provide a measure of the degree of interest one blog was showing in another. These days, however, I’m afraid I see it more as an opening for silliness like this. Or this (scroll down and note the pattern of massively-multiple links).
Sorry to Liberal Linker and Shock and Awe, (particularly Shock and Awe, who is simply receiving extra links) but you happen to be the examples I’ve noticed of a trend: bloggers putting multiple links to a post or weblog for what appears to be the sole purpose of trying to inflate that blog’s standing in Ecosystem (or similar listing) standings. So given this change, nobody needs to bother, ’cause it ain’t going to work anymore.
I’m expecting this might be a somewhat controversial change, but hey, that’s life in the Blogosphere. So let’s hear your feedback: good, bad or indifferent…

Ok folks, I’ve noted some of the feedback on previous thread, and will be making a few changes to the showcase over the next week.
The first, and immediate, change, is that the cutoff for submitting entries to the Showcase will now be end-of-day Friday each week. Preliminary results will be posted Monday mornings as has been usual lately, and the results will be certified and final Monday evening, with registration for the next week’s contest beginning the next morning.
So, that gives Tuesday-Friday for contestants to submit, the weekend for everyone to make their final decisions and cast votes, and Monday for the actual final counts and announcement of the winners.
I’m open to argument on whether this is the exact best schedule, but I thought this was a reasonable balance.
Secondly, starting next week, I will be splitting the Showcase into two categories: one for “political” entries, and the other for “non-political”. Classification will be entirely at the choice of the contestant themselves. From here on, both winners will share the place o’ honor atop the Ecosystem for the following week.
More feedback is welcome; let me know your thoughts…
-NZB

(AP)