Author: N.Z. Bear

Well damn. I just realized that I plain missed my one-year blogoversary.
One year ago and two days ago, I posted launching The Truth Laid Bear out into the Blogospheric ether. I can safely say I’ve had a blast along the way, and have no intentions of going away anytime soon. Y’all are stuck with me.
Anyway, happy blogoversary to me, I suppose…
-NZB

Have I mentioned just how good is lately?
Having been slammed with real-work lately, my blog time has been limited. And one blogger I find myself consistently seeking out is the Mickster.
Why? The man’s one of the masters, if not the uber-master of the blogging form.
He’s not a columnist. He’s not an essayist. What he has mastered is the particular cadences and rhythms of short, sharp commentary interspersed with focused and relevant links. Kaus is the definitive example of the differences between print-media columns and blogging: you simply can’t replicate what he does on Kaufiles in print; without the connectivity and immediacy of the web, it falls apart.
Whether you agree with his viewpoints or not, you have to acknowledge the guy has this form nailed. And so, if you are a new blogger and want to see how it is done: read Kaus. Don’t try to be Kaus (the position is taken) — but watch the way he crafts his posts, and learn…

Yet another rough real-work week, folks, hence not much on the blogging front. Refunds will be provided on demand for the full purchase price of the free ice cream, of course.
With a bit of luck I’ll be rolling out a major new Ecosystem feature at the end of the weekend, though, which will be of particular interest to new bloggers.
Stay tuned…

Hey, Glenn’s on Washington Journal! Like, right now.
They appear to be doing their whole morning show on weblogs. Neat. The doubly-neat part is that generally you can get streaming video/audio of previous shows for a week or so after they air.
The archive link should hopefully appear someone obvious on C-SPAN’s site; I’ll post an explicit link when I find it…

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What Is Your Animal Personality?
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Well, duh.

For the past two weeks, the has been accumulating historical data on every weblog’s rank and inbound link count. I’ve just now implemented the front-end code to show this information on the details page.
So: You can now see how a weblog has moved up or down in the Ecosystem over time.
I am planning to keep a decent chunk of this information online (past month, perhaps?) and archive the rest for posterity. Perhaps someday somebody will want to do research on this kind of thing; if so, I’ll have oodles of data for them.
Spiffy graphs are on the agenda, but I have thus far lost my argument with the graphing package I’m trying to use… perhaps next weekend…
-NZB

Lair is nostalgic for the old days of Atari.
Well, I’ve already said my piece on that era…

I owe a few people e-mail responses to various things; sorry. Hectic period of work has left little time for the bloggier things in life, so please, if I haven’t responded to your message, don’t take it personal-like.
Part of me wants to think that feeling the need to post a message like this must mean I’ve arrived as a big blogger who can’t keep up with their email, but nah: I just can’t keep up with life in general…

The site is back up and running.
Sorry for the outage (to those of you who noticed): I moved servers so now WMDI is back on the same host as TTLB itself, and ended up with things halfway-done for longer than I had planned.
I think everything has been moved over properly, including the forums, but please let me know if you see anything odd or missing.
Thanks!

Devon points out a question by Joel Engel:
“With the Dixie Chicks posing nude on a magazine cover to atone for their intemperate remarks, don’t we wish that Shania Twain had opened her mouth instead?”
and adds:
“Yeah! What did she think about the war? Maybe she should do a nude magazine cover as a pre-emptive strike! And now that you mention it, what was Jennifer Garner’s position on the war? Or Famke Janssen’s? Why hasn’t the press covered this?”
Well, I can’t help you there, but I can do you one better: how about the Republican Babe of the Week?
Sarah Michelle Gellar is this week’s pick, so how bad could it be? Sure, I’d rather have it be a little broader than ‘Republican’ : Anti-Idiotarian Babe of the Week, perhaps? (Michele: Next project ? ) But I’ll take what I can get.
Smart, beautiful women. Mmmmmm… yummy…

Marshall on William Bennett’s recent difficulties with them gamblin’ demons, and how “the chorus of defenses of Bennett ring rather hollow”:
“…I don’t really care that much about gambling one way or another. But I think it’s entirely appropriate to report that Bennett is such a big-time gambler even if it would be inappropriate or simply irrelevant to report such information about most others. The reason, I think, scarcely requires explanation: Bennett spent the last dozen or more years not only being a big hawker of ‘morality,’ but also a prime advocate of the proposition that there is an unbroken thread connecting our private habits to our public selves and that we — the media, the chatterers, everyone — should happily pull on that thread and see what we find.
…This isn’t a matter of payback or two wrongs making a right, just treating Bennett to the standard he’s made a living off setting for everyone else.”
Um, Josh, it sounds like payback is exactly what you are endorsing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But if you’re arguing that Bennett’s previous actions single him out as being deserving of particular special treatment for his current offense — well, I suppose you could call it “justice”, but I think payback works just fine as an accurate description too.
Now, I happen to think Bennett deserves exactly what he gets in this area, but I have no qualms about admitting that “treating Bennett to the standard he’s made a living off setting for everyone else” and “payback” are, in fact, the same thing in this case…

For what it’s worth, Glenn, think you’re right.
Holding the speech on the Abraham Lincoln was just the right amount of symbolism; goofing around like a fighter pilot was over the top.
Hold steady, your Instaness: the conventional wisdom shall prove this point shortly.
Could have been worse, I suppose: they could have given him a callsign. ‘Maniac’ has been taken and ‘Shrub’ just doesn’t have the right ring to it for a fighter jock…
Update: That came off a little too snide. I don’t begrudge Bush a bit of fun, he’s earned it. But I guess my suggestion would have been to separate the landing-in-a-jet piece from the major-address-to-the-nation piece. The two together just didn’t quite fit right to me.
And for those of you coming here direct from Instapundit who have no idea who I am: trust me, I’m a blogger who supported the Iraq campaign, even if this post didn’t sound that way. Ask anybody!

Attention new bloggers & those who just want to get more links: Eugene Volokh has some typically excellent and thorough advice for you on to promote your weblog.
I agree with basically everything he says, especially the following:
…pitch the blog post (“Here’s a post I just posted:”) not the blog (“Come and read my blog”). If people really like your posts, then they’ll start to regularly read your blog.
Yes! I’d also elaborate on Eugene’s points (go back and read them all) around e-mailing posts to other bloggers. I have made extensive use of this technique myself, and it can be very helpful in gaining the “big guns” attention. But I think it’s critical to calibrate just how much you e-mail any one blogger, and the best way to do that is to ask yourself whether the relationship you are building seems to be a mutually beneficial one.
Because when a big blogger links you, they generally aren’t doing it to do you a favor. They’re doing it because they find your post interesting, and believe their readers will too. At one extreme, if you could send a Big Name blogger only posts that they thought were great and linked every time, you’d be perfect: you wouldn’t be “bothering” them at all, you’d be helping them. But at the other extreme lie the trolls who send me their daily why-Bush-is-Evil newsletters. I doubt they actually expect me to link them, but they certainly provide no value to me, and are simply an annoyance.
One basic way to measure if the relationship is a mutually beneficial one is the obvious: is the other blogger actually linking the posts you send them? I have found that even the biggest-name bloggers generally do make an attempt to read all their e-mail. So if you get no response on one post you e-mail to them: they might have missed it. But if you get no response on three in a row — well, you’re probably just not providing them with material they find intriguing, and you should either stop, or change your approach.
And the logic doesn’t change once they do link you, either: that’s not a sign to go ahead and e-mail every last post you write to them! Keep sending just the very best stuff; aim for a linked-to-ignored ratio of at least above 50%.
If you follow Eugene’s rules and the guidelines I’ve stated here, I won’t guarantee that you’ll achieve blogging success, but I will at least predict that you won’t annoy the hell out of anybody trying.
And one last thought: Don’t always just aim for the very-top tier bloggers. The folks who are a notch or two down (for instance, me) generally get far less mail, and are far more likely to actually take the time to read your weblog. My personal position right now is that I enjoy receiving mail from new bloggers — though I definitely prefer those who follow Eugene’s advice to pitch the post, not the whole blog. It’s not that I mind getting mail that says “Come check out my weblog” — it’s just that it doesn’t give me much to go on, and I may or may not actually get around to doing it.
Anyway, as Eugene doesn’t have comments, I’d welcome fellow blogger’s contributions here. What’s your strategy for promoting your weblog (or do you not bother doing so at all?) What’s your perspective on onsolicited e-mail from other bloggers? (This is an ‘evergreen’ discussion, by the way: I swear I had a post on similar stuff sometime last year, but can’t find it just now.)

Sorry for the lack of posting. An irritating week last week transformed gracefully into a lousy weekend, which today morphed into a crummy Monday.
More when I’m less grumpy.
-NZB

Hey, I’m a little slow on the uptake on this one, but everybody should wish a speedy recovery after an incident with a Rottweiler. (No, not that one). Latest news is she is recovering, but still in pain and on a bunch of meds. Drop by her place to wish her a fast return to full health & good luck on her clever plan to scam larger breasts out of the whole episode.
And oh yeah: Wish the Big Cat well, too.

Hanah is grilling with some stovetop gadget:
I bought this fascinating little contraption yesterday – a device that transforms your ordinary stovetop into a grill. Okay, so it’s just a large and heavy sheet of grill-textured metal, but it’s really cool anyway.
Hanah, trust me: just buy the George Foreman. Yes, it’s a cheezy celebrity-sponsored product, but it’s great anyway. Turn it on, toss whatever you want to eat onto it, come back in twenty minutes or so, and it’s yummy doneness.
Cleaning it’ is a pain, but nothing’s perfect…

Brief random thought #1: How come I haven’t heard any serious outrage from the libertarian crowd in the Blogosphere about the travel advisory warning against travel to Toronto (among other places)? A non-elected, unrepresentative international body has by fiat made a declaration affecting the livelihood of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Canadian citizens. Isn’t that, like, a big deal? (Yes, Samizdatistas, I’m talkin’ to you).
Brief random thought #2: Would Toronto itself, or businesses (or individuals therein) have standing to sue the WHO? In what court — Canadian? Volokhs? Prof Reynolds? Anybody?

OK, blogging has now arrived: There’s an ad for by Tripod sitting atop the TV Guide web listings page….

Kaus has been all over the Iraqi looting story, pointing to (among other things) a Washington Times story on the memo from Lt. Gen. Garner’s office requesting troops to guard critical cultural sites, a Washington Post piece on which says widespread looting crystallized much of the anger toward the United States.”
Kaus is in his favorite “I’m just askin'” mode, lobbing these nuggets in the general direction of “pro-war controversialists” (his phrase) like Mark Steyn and pondering whether, you know, perhaps this might actually have been a minor error? (It’s good stuff, read it all).
But he doesn’t go far enough. Following the chain of evidence and logic Kaus himself lays out, it’s clear to me that the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in particular, and the chaos following Baghdad’s fall in general, must unavoidably be chalked up in the “screwup” category for U.S. forces.
Let’s be clear on this. Does this mean all the terrible things about U.S. motives being impure are true? No. Does it mean those who predicted quagmire and awfulness were right? No. Does our failure in this area outweigh the huge success that we’ve had in defeating the true enemy (Saddam’s forces) while at the same time not just sparing, but often protecting the lives of Iraqi civilians? Absolutely, no.
The war is still a tremendous success. But: it is crucial that those of us who supported the war be willing to stand up and actually acknowledge when some things genuinely do go wrong.
This is hard, because for the past month, we’ve been barraged by chicken-little complaints from the anti-war side of the isle. We’ve gotten very used to ignoring criticism — or at least, swatting it away reflexively — because up to this point, criticism of the conduct of the war has been pretty damned weak.
Now, however, we have a clear example of something that U.S. forces did, indeed, screw up. It happens; the failure was not deliberate (to the best of my knowledge), and it’s importance should not be overstated. But it should be acknowledged for what it was: an error.
Thus far, the pro-war side of the Blogosphere isn’t faring too well on this test. Glenn devoted a piece on GlennReynolds.com to the looting story and the idea that critics of U.S. power are now expecting the U.S. to be omnipotent — a valid counter-criticism. But he never actually acknowledges clearly that allowing the looting to occur was in fact a mistake. Jeff Jarvis does only slightly better, at least acknowledging that there’s something to apologize for, but only in the context of minimizing the issue. (“Hey, I’m sorry that antiquities got lifted. I’m sorry Iraqi museums didn’t have better locks. “). And Andrew Sullivan has been completely silent on the issue (although that may be in part to his vacation). To be fair, both Jeff and Glenn’s pieces came out before some of the revelations Kaus points to: but neither (to my knowledge) has come back to the story to update their thoughts given the new information.
It’s crucial for those of us who supported the war to be able to also criticize it, and the peace that is following. Because the anti-war forces (some of ’em) were right about one thing: in many ways, the hardest part lies ahead. And we need to retain all the credibility we can get: both to convince the rest of the world that yes, America is imperfect, as will be the reconstruction of Iraq, but overall we’re pretty darned decent — as well as to keep our own eagle-eyes on those doing the reconstruction, so we can legitimately call ‘foul’ on them if they are going wrong.
That’s the job: now I’d ask my friends in the Blogosphere to rise to the occasion…
Correction: Well, this is what I get for trying to dash off a substantive post in the morning before heading to the paying job. Andrew Sullivan did blog on the looting issue, contrary to my assertion above (as buddy Spoons points out in the comments). I missed it because it was only one paragraph, but it was a very good paragraph:
“I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future – and America’s critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups – the failure to protect Baghdad’s museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear. And if the U.N. is successfully kept at the margins, we can work this out.”
If he ever bothers to read my humble page again now that I’ve been caught out as not just being a jerk to him, but being a careless jerk: Andrew, you have both my kudos for your response, and my apologies. And those two things, plus about two bucks and fifty cents, will get you a nice latte at Starbucks…