Eight years ago, a fellow writer set up his own blog and invited me to set up my own blog on his site. Jon stopped blogging (far too soon, in my opinion), but allowed me to maintain my blog on his site for over five years and still graciously hosts the archives from that period. I probably wrote more and quoted less in the early days, but it’s now hard to remember what I did online before I became a blogger.

I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, and I collected the “best of 2005″ for last year’s anniversary post. I guess this year requires a look at what I posted in 2006 (and may still have some relevance or interest):

January, 2006

• Woodbutchering, New Year’s style and Woodbutchery, part two, as I got some sawdust flying around the basement.
• Jon live-blogs the debate, where Jon sets the standard for commentary on political debates in the minimalist style.
• Woodworking follies (I was doing a lot more woodworking in 2006 than I am now).
• Why scrutineers are important (yes, a frequent repost, but still relevant)
• Missing the point of “intellectual property”, at the intersection of 21st century law and 14th century technology.
• Austin Bay on the Canadian Forces, a friendly fisking of Bay’s complimentary view of Canadian troops and disparaging view of Canadian politicians.

February, 2006

• Replacing the Browning High Power? Conditions for Canadian troops in Afghanistan indicate that a new standard side arm is needed.
• Harper’s new cabinet. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first cabinet had some unexpected and controversial choices.
• More on the ethical side of healthcare: a case where medical ethics, economics, and basic humanity all rumble for supremacy.
• Another myth … busted. S.L.A. Marshall, faux-historian (or should that be “fabulist”) of the US military experience. He’s the one who promulgated the myth that most American soldiers were too cowardly to fire their weapons in combat.
• Guest Editorial: Union and Management. Brendan McKenna on the adversarial nature of labour relations (and rediscovering the old truth that companies often get the unions they deserve).
• The Tiger takes down the ID card proposal. Disparaging Stockwell Day’s mandatory internal passport proposal.
• Well, at least I’m not this bad… some thoughts on the decline of “collecting” hobbies.

March, 2006

March was a particularly fraught month with serious work deadlines, followed by a vacation at a hotel that didn’t offer internet access, then a debilitating cold, and a business trip. As a consequence, blogging suffered a sharp drop in output.

• Daunte Culpepper traded by Vikings? It may well have been the right decision, but it ushered in the quarterback-by-platoon era that lasted until 2011 when the Vikings finally drafted Christian Ponder.
• Will MPAC be reined in? I’d documented our run-in with the folks at MPAC in 2004 and 2005. Others were having much worse experiences.

April, 2006

• Trying to understand Afghanistan. About how we in the post-tribal West fail to understand the structure of everyday life in tribal societies.
• They make it sound so … unappealing. On the dramatization of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series.
• A Florida motel that James Lileks missed. A few photos from a Florida motel I stayed in. It’s full of “character”.

May, 2006

• Oil prices. Examining implication “that Canada wasn’t considered a “well-established liberal democracy”! And the Fascists [had] only been in power for a few months!”
• Conspiracy theory top 10 list, where the polarity of currently popular theories is highlighted.
• The play’s the thing. Visiting the youth theatre group we used to work with in Stratford, being able to watch the stage combat without worrying intensely (I used help out with basic fight choreography).
• A possible answer … to the question of why we have troops in Afghanistan (on the life and death of Captain Nicola Goddard, RCHA).
• Doors. It took a few months, but there was finally more woodworking progress to report.
• Mid-century comic books. From early comics to blaming NASA for the suspended animation of the space program in a few short sentences.
• The mystery of “Canadian Content” rules. I didn’t like ‘em then, and I don’t like ‘em now. But if you’ve got rules, at least try to have them make some kind of sense.

June, 2006

• Completed Cabinets. Finally got those bookcases out of the basement and into the office.
• Accidental humour. A cameo appearance by the once-obscure former Ontario premier Bob Rae.
• Today is P-Day. The kingdom of cats is disturbed by the arrival of a new pet.
• More puppy pictures. Canine cuteness.
• Saturday Puppy Pictures. The cuteness continues, with the horror of the first bath.

July, 2006

• Mister Ghost asks “What does Canada stand for?”. An odd one, as it’s a link to another blog where I have an extended go at answering that question (it’s the very last item in the post).
• Soccer stadium to be built in Toronto. I’m glad they built it, but I still wish it had been funded privately rather than with involuntary “contributions” from the taxpayers.
• O pleez spehr mi! Yet another silly attempt to “simplify” the language.
• Saturday evening photos. Playing around with the new digital camera.
• Red Ensign Standard 44. One of the last instances of the once-common blog round-up post.

August, 2006

• Travelling by air can be fun. My top travel tip garnered from this little gem of a trip is “don’t try to travel at the same time some would-be terrorist launches their new operational plan”.
• Travel restrictions, British style. The British security theatre festival’s latest season.
• Another nice game, with a good result. One of the weekly soccer game reports, this one from one of Victor’s better games of the season.
• Guilty Money. Emiliano Gonzolez is rescued by police after being in the hands of a desperate gang of dollar bills. 124,000 of them.
• User-friendly technology. My computer starts to act out-of-sorts.

September, 2006

• Carnival of Liberty no. 61. I hosted the weekly Carnival of Liberty round-up for the Life, Liberty, Property (LLP) blog group on my birthday.
• How not to fire someone. Being fired is a traumatic experience. With care and attention to detail, an employer can make it far worse for the employee being terminated.
• To fall just short of fame …. Photos from the end-of-season soccer tournament, where Victor is seen demonstrating heading the ball while highland dancing.
• QotD: Mutability of Human Sexuality. A vintage quote from Dan Savage — NSFW, of course.

October, 2006

October was another light-blogging month, as my employer of the time had been taken over and we were all busy trying to be seen to justify our continued existence on the payroll. Mid-month, along with most of my department, I got a termination notice.

• Sorry for the extra-light blogging lately. A short note of thanks to the readers who sent good wishes at the awkward moment of termination.
• Algonquin Park in Autumn. A few small photos (I was trying not to destroy Jon’s bandwidth cap in those days) from a pleasant drive in the southern part of Algonquin.

November, 2006

• This could get ugly. Ontario starts introducing roundabouts to replace some low-traffic intersections.
• Why did the Republicans lose? Explaining why the GOP was “beaten like a rented mule” in the mid-term elections.
• “… a serious flaw …” An unforeseen drawback to blogging.
• Most recent project. A minor home improvement project bloated out to full-day workload by the use of science. Or powertools.

December, 2006

• Unscheduled downtime. Power outage and a badminton tournament.
• A bright new day … for unions? How unions could change to remain relevant in the modern workplace.
• Absurd to the nth degree. Young teens charged with, in effect, being young teens.

See the whole thing at The Oatmeal.

First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.

[. . .]

To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.

So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.

That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.

It is no insult to the hard work and good faith of either newspaper reporters or media-beat writers (and I’ve been both) to acknowledge that their conflict of interest in this story far exceeds that of, say, academic researchers who occasionally take corporate money, or politicians who pocket campaign donations from entities they help regulate, to name two perennial targets of newspaper editorial boards. We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter.

This goes a long way toward explaining a persistent media-criticism dissonance that has been puzzling observers since at least the mid-1990s: Successful, established journalism insiders tend to be the most dour about the future of the craft, while marginalized and even unpaid aspirants are almost giddy about what might come next. More kids than ever go to journalism school; more commencement speeches than ever warn graduates that, sadly, there’s no more gold in them thar hills. Consumers are having palpable fun finding, sharing, packaging, supplementing, and dreaming up pieces of editorial content; newsroom veterans are consistently among the most depressed of all modern professionals.

Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.

The judgment — part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven — found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper’s website.

The historic change to media law would break with tradition by using government funds to replace an industry council that acts on complaints, in a move fiercely opposed by companies as a threat to the freedom of the press.

The proposals, issued yesterday by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, also seek to widen the scope of federal oversight to cover print, online, radio and TV within a single regulator for the first time.

Bloggers and other online authors would also be captured by a regime applying to any news site that gets more than 15,000 hits a year, a benchmark labelled “seriously dopey” by one site operator.

The head of the review, former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, rejected industry warnings against setting up a new regulator under federal law with funding from government.

[. . .]

“News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply,” the report states. It says this would be enforced through the courts.

The council would absorb the supervision of radio and TV current affairs by Canberra’s existing regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which ran the “cash for comment” investigation into talkback radio over many years.

The council would scrutinise online news sites that get more than 15,000 hits a year, clearing the way for government-funded action against amateur website operators who comment on news and current affairs. Greg Jericho, a prominent Canberra blogger on national politics, said: “The level of 15,000 hits a year, or about 40 hits a day, is seriously dopey.”

Some media executives privately dubbed the News Media Council as a potential “star chamber” because it would not have to give reasons for its decisions, which would not be subject to appeal

There’s a petition site at http://www.freespeechaustralia.com/ for those Australians who’d like to register their opposition to the new council.

Some excerpts from a Menzies House email from Timothy Andrews:

It is clear from the report, in particular paragraphs 4.31-4.42, that silencing climate realists is a major reason for these regulations: it is unashamedly explicit in this (and even uses the dirty trick of using polls from — wait for it — 1966 as evidence the media is pro-climate skeptic, and that — wait for it — only the ABC is unbiased!)

The size and scope of the proposed Super-Regulator is breathtaking. They will have the power to impose a “code of ethics”, force you to print views you don’t agree with as part of a ‘right of reply’, take you to court, and even make you take pieces down! Even personal blogs that get only 40 hits a day will be covered! To make matters worse, the SuperRegulator “would not have to give reasons for its decisions” and the decisions “would not be subject to appeal.” Even climate change websites in other countries like Watt’s Up With That will be covered by this!

[. . .]

11.69 Another aspect of jurisdiction concerns how the News Media Council will exercise its power over all internet publishers. Foreign publishers who have no connection with Australia will be beyond its reach. However, if an internet news publisher has more than a tenuous connection with Australia then carefully drawn legislation would enable the News Media Council to exercise jurisdiction over it.

Well, unless Australia is going to claim jurisdiction over the entire internet, I would imagine it will only prevent Australians from visiting foreign sites. I guess it’s a good thing that they’ve been getting friendlier with China: they can order up their national firewall from the same division of the People’s Liberation Army internet force.

James Delingpole points out that the usual suspects are involved in the process:

You can read the full 400 pages here, if you’re feeling masochistic. But Australian Climate Madness has a pretty good summary of the key issues of concern, starting with Pinkie Finkie’s proposal to create a new super-regulator called the News Media Council [missed a trick there, didn't he? surely Ministry of Truth would have been more appropriate] which will impose its idea of fairness and balance not only on newspapers but even on blogs with as few hits as 15,000 a year.

But whose idea of fairness and balance?

It’s an astonishing fact that of the 10600 submissions received by the inquiry no fewer than 9600 were boilerplate submissions from left-wing pressure groups, led by Avaaz “a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, poverty and corruption.”

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that emerged from the Department of Homeland Security in November, Washington has written permission to collect and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to DHS, the definition of personal identifiable information can consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.”

H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.

I don’t have a complete series of annual numbers, as the tools under MovableType (the old site) and WordPress (the current site) don’t provide quite the same slices of data. I installed SiteMeter on the old site a couple of months after I started blogging and it shows 414,416 unique visits from 17 August, 2004 to today (and it still gets around 100 visits per day, even though I haven’t been posting there for more than two years).

Since I switched to the current site the traffic has been going up, although the big blogs don’t have to worry that I’m drawing too much of their readership:

• 2009: 58,121 unique visits, 131,825 hits (site went live in July, stats date from mid-August)
• 2010: 328,374 unique visits, 825,381 hits
• 2011: 413,463 unique visits, 1,118,497 hits

That concludes our occasional dip into the statistics. Thanks for coming by, and especially thanks to folks that link to my blog.

Update: I happened across this bit from July, 2009 on the old blog that still seems relevant:

I’m not sure why I’ve been blogging for five years … it’s certainly not the money, booze, and groupies! I’ve thought about stepping away from the keyboard every now and again, but I don’t actually write as much as I once did, so large chunks of my “blogging” time are actually copy-paste-and-code sessions, rather than writing.

The blogroll has certainly diminished in importance over the last couple of years. The Red Ensign bloggers, my primary affiliation, has diminished to about a dozen active blogs, of whom perhaps 5-6 produce the vast majority of posts. Other blogrolls I’m on have similar profiles of activity. Blogrolls don’t matter compared to when I first started blogging back in 2004.

I remember worrying about SiteMeter and the Ecosystem, as they showed me what my visitors were reading, where they came from and where they went. Time has also not been kind to the ease of gathering that sort of information, as more readers come in from search engine results, RSS feeds, and goodness knows what other channels. If/when I move the blog over to the new site, I may not bother including the links for those tools. They’re no longer all that useful or informative.

I do miss the cameraderie of the early blogging years … but as more of the early blogs go dark, the replacements are less likely to be bloggers and more likely to be Twitterers, Facebookers, YouTubers, Farkers, Slashdotters, and all the other Web 2.0/New Media options that are now available. What was that old expression about the only constant being change?

Google made secure search the default option for logged in users last month — primarily for privacy protection reasons. But the move has had the beneficial side-effect of making life for difficult for fraudsters seeking to manipulate search engine rankings in order to promote scam sites, according to security researchers.

Users signed into Google were offered the ability to send search queries over secure (https) connections last month. This meant that search queries sent while using insecure networks, such as Wi-Fi hotspots, are no longer visible (and easily captured) by other users on the same network.

However Google also made a second (under-reported) change last month by omitting the search terms used to reach websites from the HTTP referrer header, where secure search is used. The approach means it has become harder for legitimate websites to see the search terms surfers fed through Google before reaching their website, making it harder for site to optimise or tune their content without using Google’s analytics service.

I’d assumed that there had been some kind of change in the way Google was handling searches, because even though Google pretty much disappeared from my logs (having been the #1 referring site forever), the volume of traffic remained about the same.