Huh..I Guess 4016 Diggers CAN Be Wrong...

Yep, 4016. That's how many Diggs a single article on my webzine, Rational Outrage, got not long before Digg decided that the domain was spam and banned us.

My webmaster inquired right away. After all, our site is entirely non-commercial--we're not selling anything, and there's no advertising at all on the site. And to the best of our knowledge, about a dozen of our posts have been submitted to Digg since Rational Outrage launched on March 17. That didn't seem excessive.

The response from Digg stated: As you know, Digg is a community-driven website – our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam.

Uh huh.

"Consistently", while they were upvoting our school bus rape story 4016 times: http://digg.com/world_news/7_Year_Old_Raped_On_School_Bus_School_Court_Don_t_Care Apparently those 40,000+ Digg visitors who crashed our server and left dozens of comments were just doing spam research.

So then, if that doesn't count for anything, surely the little ones won't, either:

Not the police taser abuse story with 225 Diggs.

Not the maverick composter article with 125 Diggs.

In fact, five of the twelve stories submitted to Digg received more than 100 Diggs. Surprising "the community" could find time to "consistently report" this domain as spam, what with all that upvoting going on.

The cut and paste from Digg also suggested: While we welcome users to submit their own content, overdoing it often incites the users to mark the user as a spammer, the site as a spam site, and otherwise decent content as blogspam.

12 stories. Six months. Submitted by six different people, three of whom have no connection to the site.

I've always pointed out that sites like Digg are private companies and free to make whatever decisions they like within the bounds of the law. If they want to ban us because they don't like our politics or our color scheme, they're perfectly free to do so. But guys...you don't gotta LIE.

UPDATE: On Wednesday evening, August 27, we received a brief email from Digg apologizing for the "confusion" and saying that we should be clear to submit pages from Rational Outrage again. We did not receive any explanation, either from Digg or in response to my requests in the Digg comments for one of the people who had been "consistently reporting us as spam" to explain on the forum or via email. However, we do seem to have been unbanned.

The Accidental Social Networker

When Alan from The Thin Red Line posted a message on Blog Catalog saying that he and Dane Morgan were running a writing contest at Chain Drop, my interest was instantly piqued. After all, I'll take any excuse to write, and this excuse had the added benefit of being sponsored by a couple of bloggers I like and respect. What a deal. Or so I thought until I read the description and discovered that they wanted me to write about social networking and how to use it to your advantage.

That deflated me a bit for a moment, because...well...I DON'T use social networking. I just kind of go out into the blogging and Internet forum world and do what I do in real life. It took about sixty seconds for me to see the irony in my assessment. There I was, contemplating how sad it was that I had nothing to contribute to the effort set forth by these two interesting, knowledgeable bloggers I'd really come to appreciate in the Blog Catalog forums...you're way ahead of me, right?

So I thought I'd stop over and check out the actual rules, and this is what I found about midway through the opening paragraph: "Dane says to me 'what we need is to bring in all those Writers like in Tiffany’s writing group….They would write good pieces about how they use social networking'. " I guess that writers' group had slipped my mind for a moment. It's part of my non-social-networking campaign, I guess. It currently has 627 members.

So while I'm not doing any social networking, rarely thinking about driving traffic to my blogs, and posting to my blogs when--and only when--the impulse strikes, I am in fact getting regular traffic from a couple of social networking sites, meeting a lot of interesting bloggers, and amassing a writing group of several hundred members. Here's my secret: I show up in online places and do exactly what I'd do in real life. I talk to interesting people whose thought processes intrigue me and I answer questions when I can and lend a helping hand where I'm able. And people respond--at least a fair number of people--by visiting my blog and commenting on my posts and linking to me and Stumbling my posts, and the next thing I know, there's traffic.

Don't get me wrong. I'm quite sure that if I took a more calculated approach, there would be MORE traffic. But I think on some level, the foundation is the same as it was when our parents were whispering advice as we headed out the door to kindergarten or on our first dates: Just be yourself.

Blogs that Appall Me # 1

I've been debating for a while about whether or not to write about blog like this. On the one hand, I didn't want to give them any "press" or inbound links that might help boost search rankings or traffic. I didn't want to facilitate getting like-minded people together to do evil. And most of the time I'm pretty negative on negativity.

But sometimes you just have to shine a bright light on something and encourage the world to take a closer look in hopes that most people will recoil in horror and give an extra moment's thought to the little things that we let slide by every day, dismissing them as mildly unpleasant or letting them roll off altogether or--worst of all--finding humor in them.

Of course, this happens everywhere in life, including the blogosphere. But some blogs are more shocking than others, just like some of the things people say to one another in person are more shocking than others. For the past few months, my # 1 spot for poor taste and lack of humanity has been reserved for a blog astonishingly named "Counterfeit Humans - How to Maintain Sanity over Everyday Stupidity".

The premise seems to be that the blog's author was gifted (without having done a thing to deserve it) with an above-average intelligence, and that since she already has that little bit of good fortune up on the rest of the world, the general population should get right to work making her already easier-than-average life even easier by having the common courtesy to realize that they're just in the way in her world and, if they aren't gifted with her native intelligence, they don't have the right to participate in everyday activities where they might slow her down.

Oh, wait...did I say "people"? Apparently I misspoke just a little, since (as the blog's title makes evident", Keli doesn't believe that these lesser beings are actually human at all. She doesn't even call them people; she calls them "stupers". Yep, that's right--a term she defines again and again as shorthand for "woefully stupid persons". The whole blog is about stupidity, and the enormous strain of being a superior being forced to deal with "stupers" everywhere she turns. We have stupidity at the holidays, stupidity at the hospital, stupidity field notes, stupidity of relatives, stupidity "behind the counter"...but nary a word about the stupidity of taking the gifts you're given so for granted that you come to believe you've earned them and achieved some sort of moral superiority through your good fortune.

When Brilliant Men Have Dumb Ideas

It was bound to happen someday.

It appears that the guys at Google had a very bad idea.

They were on a streak, what with revolutionizing web search and coming up with that friendly and easily identifiable little logo and becoming so popular that they had to fight to try to keep their trademarked name from becoming a standard-English verb and all that. They did pretty well for themselves making billions of dollars and buying up major players in closely related industries. Their "foothold" in web search became a stairway and then an escalator, and now few people even know the names of the early search engines and Yahoo! threw up its hands last year and said, "Maybe we should do something else."

But for some reason, these guys who understand technology and algorithms and the value of a good, free lunch onsite and the need to encourage employee creativity have missed the boat on Blogger comments. In fact, I don't think they even know where the shore is.

I can think of a lot of possible reasons that the outbound linking process from comments on Blogger blogs has changed (without notice), but they're all guesses.

• It MIGHT be because Google, which uses backlinks as part of its algorithm for determining the value of a page, doesn't want to allow people the ability to create their own backlinks by commenting on blogs--even when the blogger has deleted the default "no follow" tag in the comment section.
• It MIGHT be to prevent non-Google-registered commenters from leaving URLs; this would encourage everyone to sign up for a Google account whether they needed on or not--a solution that won't be of much help to bloggers with multiple blogs, anyway.
  

I'm sure there are other possibilities. And I'm UNsure about whether or not there's any basis in reality for either of these two speculative explanations.

I am sure of one thing, though. Someone has radically underestimated the importance of this functionality to bloggers and to those who leave comments on blogs. It's possible that the hope is that everyone will quickly sign up for a Google account so that they can leave comments with links in them, but it seems more likely that people will quickly move their blogs to other platforms where this issue doesn't exist...and that those who don't will see diminished traffic and a decline in comments.

They've also either overlooked or dismissed the fact that Blogger bloggers who do get visits from comments on other blogs will no longer be able to identify where they're coming from. Since they'll all be routed through the Blogger profile, all stats will show is a lot of referrals from the profile, not the actual source of the traffic.

I hope it doesn't turn out that we all have to abandon Blogger; I hope it mostly for selfish reasons, because I like Blogger a lot from a user perspective and would prefer not to move. But I'm not optimistic.

Of course, from what I've been hearing recently about disappearing blogs and comments, it may just be that after this post, I WILL find myself shopping for a new host...so watch this space. If I'm moving VOLUNTARILY, I'll let you know in advance.

The Power of...Anonymous Ranting?

I'll be honest. When I first saw the comment from "thechosenone" on my post about rape trials, I was inclined to ignore it. It didn't seem to warrant a response for a lot of reasons. For instance, having worked for years in and with domestic violence prevention programs, I've encountered more than my share of men who hate women but are powerless to do anything about it beyond the occasional burst of ugly language or show of physical violence. They were, as a class, a weak and ineffectual bunch, but even in that company, the Rev in his silly Dr. Seuss mask with his vague plans to finish college at some point seemed pretty irrelevant.

And then, too, there was the fact that no one seemed to be all that interested in his little rant. He posted a cute little attention-begging "I just couldn't resist" on his MySpace blog, and in the week since an overwhelming...um...ONE visitor clicked through. If even his friends weren't all that interested in what he had to say, it seemed to confirm the idea that I shouldn't be, either.

Finally, but perhaps most important to me, his little rant was very poorly spelled.

Still, he'd randomly appeared out of nowhere to call me (and one of my friends, for good measure) a name I haven't been called since some drunken frat boy took issue with my desire to remain fully clothed more than 20 years ago, and then was so proud of himself that he had to post a link to his clever comment. That seemed odd behavior even for a 21-year-old guy in Indiana. More importantly, the issue of anonymous comments and how they affect discussion has been cropping up all around me lately.

Usually, it seems to me, when people use the veil of anonymity as a means of ranting without risk, they show themselves to be fools. That only makes sense, if you think about it. Although there are occasionally valid reasons for anonymity, for the most part what it means is that the writer doesn't want to be associated with his own comment. In short, even HE knows he sounds like an ass. Unable to provide support for his position, he resorts instead to rough language and misplaced gloating.

In the case of my little visitor, he's made his MySpace page private--now that the horse is long gone. Maybe he's worried about anonymous comments. he shouldn't be concerned, though. He should know that anonymous rants only make their authors look the fool, and that if someone DID have the poor taste to drop by his blog and curse and carry on at him, it would only make his position look more cogent by comparison.

The whole experience has clarified my position on anonymous comments. I've always thought opting for anonymity said something about the commenter's credibility, but I don't think I'd fully considered how anonymous negative comments can bolster a writer's credibility. The more vile, incoherent, rude, juvenile (and misspelled) a rebuttal is, the clearer and more level-headed the original statement appears. So I guess I owe the man from Crown Point a thank you...not only did he shed some revealing light on the very mentality the original post addressed, but he gave a little boost to my Technorati authority. So sorry I can't return the favor.

Putting Our Worst Feet Forward

Over the past couple of days, I've been blogging about the prurient interest that's driven a lot of search traffic to my blog and others in the quest to find the "dirt" behind Stephanie Pearl McPhee's recent harsh words about blogging etiquette. The Yarn Harlot's blog went down yesterday due to excessive traffic, too--what a coincidence. It's been, frankly, a bit disturbing to see the feeding frenzy that somehow occurred even without any chum being visible in the waters...it was as if someone had passed along a rumor that someone somewhere might be dumping a bucket over the side of some ship and it might happen within the next few days, and the next moment there were sharks charging the bottom of any ship in the ocean.

But today I got a comment on one of those posts that brough home another point, an important point that just might be the POSITIVE lesson in all this. The comment was from a knitter who said that the knitting community had been so very welcoming and helpful to her. And I realized that the welcoming and helpful stuff most often happens in a brief comment, or even behind the scenes. A knitter who posts with a question might get 50 private emails offering help and information, but there aren't going to be dozens of blog posts and comments across the web pointing out that interaction. In a way, that's just as disheartening as the initial mess...it's just a confirmation that bad news is more "worth mentioning" than good, that dirt is more interesting than kindness. But it's encouraging, too, because it probably means that all those people digging desperately to get the inside scoop on the meanness aren't JUST sharks attacking the bottom of the ship. They may well be the same people who reach out to offer a helping hand to a stranger.

It reminded me of something that we all need to keep in mind, and something that's an extension of Stephanie's original reminder that people are READING what we write: the world only sees what we put out there in front of them. There's a vague idea, I think, that people only show their "best" in public, and to some extent that's true. But so often pride and anger inspire people to speak up where kindness has not, where the nice half or 75% or 90% of their interactions have been low-key and private.

And then, inevitably, someone roars "You don't know anything about me!" How many times have you seen that in a blog war, in comments, on a listserve? And it's true. But who controls that? The only way we can know anything about you is if you choose to let it show, not just when you have something to prove, but in the moments of kindness as well.

Stephanie Pearl McPhee is Overrated – My Mean Post about the Yarn Harlot

I hate to disappoint an audience, but I have a few confessions to make.

I have no opinion of Stephanie Pearl McPhee.

I don’t even know what she looks like.

I don’t knit.

And I don’t have anything mean to say—or at least, not anything mean to say about the Yarn Harlot.

So what in the hell is this post about, you may ask?

It’s about some very interesting search traffic that I’ve seen on another blog over the past few days. Google searches and blog searches for phrases like “Yarn Harlot mean post” and “Stephanie Pearl McPhee is Overrated”.

I assume this is all detective work related to the Yarn Harlot's recent post about blogging etiquette. She advanced the apparently controversial view that bloggers shouldn't go around insulting people in public. I don't know to whom she was referring, and I don’t much care. As I said, I’m not a knitter. I probably wouldn't know the guilty blogger if her blog was pointed out to me, nor would I know the person this mystery post apparently insulted.

I’m fascinated, though, by the concerted effort to ferret out that post and get to the bottom of someone else’s business. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the Yarn Harlot essentially pointed out that some things shouldn’t be aired in public—and although I know nothing of the circumstances, her point was absolutely valid in the abstract—and it…um…generated a lot of publicity.

So what search term brought you to this post? And what were you really looking for?

Quote of the Day # 4

I sincerely apologize for thinking this is funny, but my favorite line of the day is, "I accidentally deleted my blog today."

Please don't think that I find the FACT of that funny--surely it's sending chills down the spine of every writer reading these words. I can only imagine the sinking feeling, the struggle to remember what the most important things posted were and whether they existed in any form anywhere else, the disbelief that there was no "undo" button. But the reverb of those six little words just made me laugh. (Okay, "accidentally" isn't so little, but it's a very ORDINARY word.)

Here's the initial post on the revived blog in it's entirety:


Accidentally deleted the wrong Blog! To pissed off to even Blog about it now lol.


I'd love to know how often this kind of thing happens. Or maybe I wouldn't. Maybe it would make me afraid to touch my blogs.

Quotes of the Day

Since I know myself well enough to know that my newly conceived "Quote of the Day" will not be a daily occurrence, I'm starting out with two quotes...that way I'll be ahead of the game and I can skip a day without falling behind when life gets busy!

From author Patrick Rothfuss's blog: So profound was my non-productivity that a nearby Buddhist monk was embarrassingly upstaged. He was so thrown off his groove that not only did he fail to reach nirvana, but he broke into a nearby pet store and promptly punched a kitten.

From BubbleDumb: Plus, did you ever notice how the patient in Operation always had his fucking eyes open? You've pretty much failed the game before you've started! Patients are meant to be asleep, not wide awake with a worried expression on their faces.

Yammering about Yammering about Yammering

I never claimed to be sweetness and light, but some days I'm crankier than others. Today, I'm a little peeved about the endless blogs about blogging and alleged writers writing about writing instead of writing.
I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of humor columnist Barb Cooper, and she's right in the middle of a couple of "writers" who are too busy talking about what makes a writer and who should get to say what makes a writer to...well...write anything of substance.
In fact, the whole Rockstories blog seems to be (in its own words) writing about writing about writing. And we never find out what in the hell it has to do with rock.
Light. Sweet. Crude. has a little more variety--its author takes a break from her stand on how she's a real writer even though she's just blogging to tell us about how her husband comes in (I'm dead serious--check it out yourself) and shows her his penis while she's writing.
If I had more time on my hands (like some bloggers obviously do), I'd start counting the number of bloggers out there blogging about writing instead of writing.

So I'm not a Big Fan of Blogs...But I love Disney Princesses

Let's overlook for a moment the fact that I have five personal blogs and eight professional ones. It's all in a day's work, mostly. I'm not a big fan of blogs. That is, I don't get why a lot of the people who blog blog, and I don't get why a lot of people who talk all the time about how they don't like to blog start blogs, and I REALLY don't get why people read blogs. I mean, industry blogs are one thing. Blogs that provide commentary on recent developments in your field, blogs that provide little informational bulletins about things you need to know about...that I get. I guess if you're a teenager and your favorite rock star has a blog and you don't realize that he actually pays some PR person to write the blog for him and doesn't even know what it says, then you might have an inclination to read the blog. But just wandering the internet reading about how other bloggers burned their toast this morning or had a revelation while stuck in traffic or wish they'd remembered to kiss their husbands goodbye?

Um.

Yeah.

This evening, though, I ran across a blog post about Disney Princesses.

Let me just say that I have deep appreciation for Disney Princesses. DEEP. It's not that I especially like them (or even that I did when I was a child). It probably comes as no surprise to you that I'm not much of a romantic. "Someday My Prince Will Come" is not exactly my theme song. I find happily ever after sort of unlikely, and there's a part of me that thinks it would be sort of cloying even if it turned out to be true. Okay, a big part.

So why the love of Disney Princesses?

It's not the gowns (though I really like the pink one Cinderella has on BEFORE the fairy godmother got involved...I always thought her own dress was better than the magical one).

And it's not the veracity for sure, because I've ALWAYS been bothered by the fact that everything ELSE turned back to what it was before at midnight, but the glass slippers remained. Oh, sure, I told myself it was because they were the only wholly created item, while everything else was some other item or creature in disguise, but I didn't really buy it.

It's this: I have an eleven-year-old daughter. Eleven. You know, BALANCED ON THE VERY FINE LINE BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE? And she loves Disney Princesses. She's occasionally tempted by Green Day posters and such, but thus far she has eschewed them in favor of keeping her room Pink. Princess comforter, outrageously priced (but gorgeous) Princess blinds, Princess sheets, Princess lamp, Princess posters, some....Princess THING I can't even identify that scrolls Cinderella and the Prince across a lighted background. You get the picture. And it's a picture of a little girl's room, at least for a minute longer. It's a picture of such excitement over Cinderella III that I end up letting her open the DVD the night before her birthday so we can watch it while it's still the weekend. It's a picture of a child/teen who sometimes tries to get out of the house in make-up, but sometimes plays INSIDE in a tiara with a magic wand.

I'm a fan of Princesses, and especially Cinderella, whom I have always preferred in her apron with her hair loose and her head covered by a scarf. Frankly, until I saw this blog today, I didn't even know that the Princesses were under attack. But this lady, whomever she might be, has it covered. I don't even have to defend those Princesses. And even more surprising, I found myself reading the post before...and the one before that.

It's Not About Knitting...It's About SEX!

Recently, I voted (though no opinions had been solicited) a hearty "NO" when the author of the So the Thing Is Blog wondered aloud whether her blog was becoming a knitting blog. Good news...the latest entry is about sex.

Of course, she did the whole Seinfeld thing; it doesn't SAY it's about sex. But trust me--it's about sex. And maybe it's good that it's done discreetly, because, you know, it's a family show over there. Not so this blog, so I'm going to call it like it is. She advocates, via advice from an unnamed friend, having sex twice a week as a means of improving communication in marriage.

I think it works. Of course, I'm not married, but when I was, I developed a theory that marriage was much happier and easier for everyone if you had sex every day. That's right--not twice a week, but every single day. If you gave it the same priority you gave to things like eating dinner and showing up at work and showering, it could really improve everyone's attitude. I suggested this to other married friends and at various times various of us experimented with it, and it worked. I never heard anyone say that it didn't. Interestingly enough, it seemed to make no difference whether or not one or both partners actually WANTED to be participating--the feeling of closeness increased, regardless. The tension and intolerance for little annoyances decreased, regardless. It seemed, all in all, to be the key to a happy marriage.

So why, then, doesn't everybody do it?

Partly, I suspect, it's one of those vicious circles--the worse you're getting along, the less inclined you are to make love. The less you make love, the worse you get along. And so on and so on. I think that the generally accepted view is that of course you're going to have less sex if you can't stand each other, but my absolutely non-scientific and small-scale study indicates precisely the opposite...you'll be able to stand each other if you just make it a point to have more sex.

You may have noticed that, despite having discovered the foolproof means of maintaining a happy marriage, I'm divorced. So is at least one of the friends who participated in my experiment with positive results. So what went wrong?

It's not so much a flaw in the plan as it is a balancing. It works, but is it worth it? At least some of us, obviously, decided that it wasn't. And that's pretty representative of marriage as a whole, isn't it? There are so many little things that, if we did them consistently, would significantly improve our homes and marriages and the way we live together, but we don't do them. It isn't because we don't know they would help, it's simply that we can't or don't or won't make them a priority. Maybe it's more important to be right. Maybe it's more important to get some fucking sleep. Maybe it's more important to watch the latest episode of X-Files. And maybe that's because we don't view marriage as the framework of our lives, we don't start out willing to work at it, we start out with a fairy-tale vision and never expect that a lot of times, it's going to be as much fun and require as much effort as cleaning up the bathroom after the sewers back up.

But we don't just move out of our houses when that happens, do we?

Recently, I offered the opinion that it's just too damned easy to get married. I still believe that, but Danny Bonaduce provided a surprising counterpoint to my argument this week by...getting divorced. You see, Danny Bonaduce has been married--or so I learned this week--for sixteen years. And if their story is to be believed, he's been married to a woman he didn't know, a woman he married in Vegas while he was drunk so that he could get her into bed, and who introduced herself as his wife the next morning. Sure, the marriage is ending, but they've made it longer than a lot of couples who planned their weddings in advance, stone-cold sober and for what they thought were much better reasons. That doesn't mean I think instant weddings are the way to go now, but it does go to show that if you're committed enough, you can make almost anything work. They must have had sex at least twice a week.

Blogging about blogging about blogs

I wrote a column once, years ago, about making money writing books about making money writing books about making money writing books. Comical as it was, it was a wholly viable plan, and the column was triggered by my realization that the author--whose name I've since forgotten--of The Well Fed Writer wrote a book about making a living as a freelance copywriter, but in interviews copped to the fact that most of his income (the vast majority, if I recall correctly) came from the book about how to make money as a freelance writer, not his actual work as a freelance writer.
Today, I'm taking on blogs. Recently, a friend of mine commented that she hated her blog, and it came as no surprise to me, because nearly everyone I know who has a blog hates it. Of course, there are bloggers who get paid to blog, and bloggers who have one particular subject they're passionate about and seem to be happy writing about, and bloggers who simply seem to journal online and be fine with it. Some of the most successful of these include naked pictures of themselves, which raises a whole different set of questions. And some include details of their sex lives; in fact, some serious litigation and some Capitol Hill firings recently followed the disclosure by one Congressional aide, on her blog, that another Congressional aide she'd spent some time with like to spank her.
But those seem to be the exception. These days, it seems that the average person has a blog. It also seems that the average person has no idea what to DO with said blog, and fluctuates between annoyance that he has this blog that he's now obliged to keep up with and guilt that he doesn't blog more often.
Interestingly, it appears that no one ever reads, or even sees, most blogs. If you check out the pages you'll find that the vast majority of blogs you find when flipping through blogger or a similar system have no page rank, and that Google hasn't even indexed them. That means no one even knows they're there, unless the blogger has sent out links. Often, he hasn't, because a lot of people seem to be embarrassed by their blogs, when they're not busy being irritated that they have them or shamefaced that they haven't posted in so long. So the source of the guilt associated with not posting is a bit questionable--it isn't as if there's an audience out there who's being let down.
On the other hand...the blogger isn't a blogger without blogging, right? And the prospective blogger must have thought he had something to say when he started the blog, or he wouldn't have taken the time to choose the colors and set up the blogroll and create his log-ins and slect the settings and all that, right?
So go ahead. Post.
No one's looking, anyway.