Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2017

And another blogiversary rolls past

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Blogs aren’t as relevant today as they were a decade ago, but I’m still recording over 1.7 million hits every year (1,701,503 according to my WordPress stats page, which translates into 1,287,505 unique visitors). Those numbers are down a bit from 2014, which is still my peak year for overall traffic, when 1,766,068 visits were logged (2015 was down to 1,741,859, but it was the first decline in traffic year-over-year since I started blogging in May 2004).

While I’ve (almost) always had a daily quote of the day post, in the last few months, I’ve been adding a video of the day as well — I know a lot of people are more visually oriented than I am, so I’m trying to avoid the “wall of text” look that the blog sometimes gets when there’s a lot of written material unrelieved by graphics, photographs, or videos. Am I striking the right balance for you, the readers? Should I be scraping the Wikimedia archives for more graphics to spice up the postings visually?

Earlier anniversary postings:

March 19, 2017

QotD: Social media and the mentally unbalanced

Filed under: Health, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I should also add here that, in my limited experience, social media is God’s gift to grandiose psychiatric patients. None of them are “a guy with a Facebook page”. They’re all “social media celebrities with hundreds of followers”. It’s always “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I HAVE HUNDREDS OF FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER! EVEN [NAME OF TWITTER PERSON I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF] FOLLOWS ME! THIS IS GOING TO GO VIRAL!” One patient even told me, in a threatening manner, that his blog had over a thousand hits. “You mean a day?” I asked. “No, total,” he answered. Then he wondered why I was so utterly failing to look impressed.

Scott Alexander, “The Case Of The Famous Physicist”, Slate Star Codex, 2015-07-03.

January 1, 2017

Blog traffic in 2016

Filed under: Administrivia, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The annual statistics update on traffic to Quotulatiousness from January 1st through December 31st, 2016. Overall, the traffic dropped slightly from 2015, which in turn was down a bit from the peak traffic year of 2014:


Over eight and a half million hits. That’s a pretty good number for an obscure Canadian blog.


The final count of visitors to the blog will be about 2,500-3,500 higher, as I did the screen captures at around 10:30 in the morning.

December 23, 2016

QotD: How not to do scientific journalism

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Something has happened at Slate. Until relatively recently, Slate‘s science page produced so much amazingly good content that we were tempted to link to them multiple times per day. In our 2013 list of the Top 10 Science News Sites, we awarded them an honorable mention.

But, that was then. Now, for some reason, Slate‘s science page has partially abandoned its strong tradition of in-depth analysis to promote an angry, opinion-driven reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians.

This is counterproductive. Science journalism that forsakes its primary mission of science communication to engage in partisan culture wars does a grotesque disservice to the scientific endeavor and is doomed to fail. Just ask ScienceBlogs, which has become a shell of its former self because, as the New York Times described, it became “Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd” that utilized “redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric.” Slate‘s science page is heading toward a similar path.

Alex B. Berezow, “Slate‘s Science Page Has Gone Crazy”, Real Clear Science, 2015-05-25.

May 20, 2016

Mommy blogger blows the whistle on Mommy blogging

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The actual blog post by Josi Denise has been removed (go to the original URL and you get an “Account Suspended” notification), but Robert McCain quoted perhaps the key part of the post here:

YOUR MOMMY BLOG F–KING SUCKS.
NOBODY IS READING YOUR S–T

I mean no one. Even the people you think are reading your shit? They aren’t really reading it. The other mommy bloggers sure as hell aren’t reading it. They are scanning it for keywords that they can use in the comments. “So cute! Yum! I have to try this!” They’ve been told, like you, that in order to grow your brand, you must read and comment on other similar-sized and similar-themed blogs. The people clicking on it from Pinterest aren’t reading it. They are looking for your recipe, or helpful tip promised in the clickbait, or before and after photo, then they might re-pin the image, then they are done. The people sharing it on Facebook? They aren’t reading it either. They just want to say whatever it is your headline says, but can’t find the words themselves. Your family? Nope. They are checking to make sure they don’t have double chins in the photos you post of them, and zoning in on paragraphs where their names are mentioned.

Why? Because your shit is boring. Nobody cares about your shampoo you bought at Walmart and how you’re so thankful the company decided to work with you. Nobody cares about anything you are saying because you aren’t telling an engaging story. You are not giving your readers anything they haven’t already heard. You are not being helpful, and you are not being interesting. If you are constantly writing about your pregnancy, your baby’s milestones, your religious devotion, your marriage bliss, or your love of wine and coffee…. are you saying anything new? Anything at all? Tell me something I haven’t heard before, that someone hasn’t said before. From a different perspective, or making a new point at the end at least if I have to suffer through a cliche story about your faceless, nameless kid.

You’re writing in an inauthentic voice about an unoriginal subject, worse if sprinkled with horrible grammar and spelling, and you are contributing nothing to the world but static noise.

No blogger, Mommy- or other, wants to be told that nobody is reading their posts. Something like this could ruin your whole day…

May 10, 2016

Twelfth blogiversary

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

From blogs being “teh new hotness” in the early 2000s they’ve evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) into a much quieter backwater of the internet — still relevant (at least to some), but no longer the big thing online. I’ve been forced to reduce the pace of postings since my health issues right before the new year, and I doubt it’ll return to those heady days of 5-6 new entries every weekday. In spite of that, I still get a fair bit of regular traffic here (yesterday was an unexpectedly busy day with 9,525 recorded visits), but overall traffic to the blog looks to have peaked in 2014, when 1,766,068 visits were logged (last year was down only a bit at 1,741,859, but it was the first decline in traffic year-over-year since I started blogging in 2004).

Earlier anniversary postings:

February 24, 2016

Blogging will continue to light for a few days at least

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:21

As you may have noticed from a post the other day, we’ve just moved into our new-yet-quite-old house and are up to our armpits in packed boxes and not yet properly set-up furniture and “things”. It will take a while for us to clear paths through the debris, so blogging will be something I neglect for most of the day and perhaps post something a bit later. The QotD posts are queued for at least a week in advance, so there’ll be something to see each morning…

February 23, 2016

First the move, then the unpacking 

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:22
 

The boxes of books in my new office

 

January 8, 2016

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:36

I’m finally home again from the hospital. It was, by far, the longest hospital stay of my life (the previous being two days when I got my tonsils out at age 11 or so). Just the walk from the ward down to the parking garage left me feeling I’d put in a full day’s work down in the mines. Nearly two weeks of pretty much no physical activity leaves a mark. On the bright side, I lost ten pounds or so … but now I’ve got a bunch of pills I’ll need to take at various points during the day. Plus the joy of trying to find a doctor to provide after-care and monitoring (there may be parts of the GTA where doctors accepting new patients are plentiful, but Durham Region isn’t one of them).

Blogging will probably continue to be below normal volume, but I should manage a bit more than just the auto-posted QotD entries from now on.

Thanks again to those of you who’ve contacted me through various channels. Your words of support were very welcome.

December 31, 2015

Blogging will continue to be light

Filed under: Administrivia, Health, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 18:37

I’m sharing this post from my iPhone while reclining in my bed in the Intensive Care Unit at Lakeridge Health in Oshawa. I’ve suffered a totally unexpected health setback on Tuesday evening and I don’t know when I’ll be able to resume blogging. There are still several postings in the queue, but once they’re posted, the blog may go quiet for some time. 

My best wishes to all of you in 2016. I hope to be back to a relatively normal life as soon as medicine and rest will allow. 

June 4, 2015

Posting will be irregular for a few days

Filed under: Personal — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:56

Yesterday afternoon, my sister suffered a massive heart attack and was rushed to hospital. She died late in the evening, never having regained consciousness. She was 51. I will be doing whatever I can to support my brother-in-law Gord, my niece Samantha (who is due to deliver her first baby any day now), my nephew Jimmy and my mother.

There will be a few pre-scheduled items posted on the blog, but I don’t expect to be actively posting anything for at least a couple of days.

Hilary Mallett obituary

May 10, 2015

It can’t really be eleven years already, can it?

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Once again, I almost missed my own blog’s anniversary. It’s now eleven years since I started blogging … but I won’t say it seems like yesterday (it seems like maybe two or three years ago, actually). In rather the same way that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, I still don’t really know what I’m trying to do with the blog. It just keeps dragging me back when I think I’m done with it…

Earlier anniversary postings:

February 27, 2015

WordPress theme updates

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:22

This morning’s WordPress update appears to have messed around with the theme I’ve been using for the last several years. Most of the formatting looks to be okay … except that I’ve lost the banner graphic at the top of the page. I don’t have time to fix it properly now (not to mention that I don’t remember what I did back in 2009 to get it working in the first place), so I’ve just dropped a placeholder banner there (it’s the banner from the old MovableType site, actually).

February 20, 2015

My Twitter word cloud

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you’d like to generate one of these for your own (or someone else’s) Twitter account, the instructions are here.

Click to see full-sized at imgur.com

Click to see full-sized at imgur.com

Because I use my Twitter account primarily for auto-posting links to my blog, the word “post” is by far the most common word, followed by “qotd” for my daily quotation posts. After that, it seems pretty representative of what I’ve been blogging about for the last year or so.

February 11, 2015

Farewell to The Dish and Andrew Sullivan as a blogger

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Megan McArdle wasn’t a blogchild of Andrew Sullivan (as such relationships used to be known), but still regrets his decision to pack it in:

Long ago, when blogging was a fresh new form that attracted a lot of chin-stroking journalism, Glenn Reynolds said something that stuck with me: Journalism is a lecture; blogging is a conversation. That’s not as true as it used to be, and it gets less true every day, as old bloggers leave and are not replaced. Ezra Klein attributes much of this to social media, which is certainly part of the answer; Facebook does not reward Part Seven of a back-and-forth about affirmative action. It wants neat, self-contained, authoritative statements about The Way the World Is, preferably ones that bolster your ideological commitments by eschewing caveats, ambiguity or serious engagement with the other side. As I frequently joke with my writer friends, the ideal blog post for the social media world would be headlined: “Everything You Already Believe Is Completely Correct, and Here’s Some Math You Won’t Understand That Proves It.”

I imagine that a number of bloggers breathed a sigh of relief when the form became less conversational — no need to respond to all those uncomfortable questions the other side is raising! The great thing about Andrew was that he kept up the conversation. He is passionate in argument, and he and I have had some fierce disagreements over the years. But right up to the end, he kept asking uncomfortable questions and offering answers from both sides. That’s pretty rare, and pretty admirable, and I’m deeply sad that one last vestige of the old days is soon to be no more.

But the problem with the old model of blogging is not just social media; it’s that blogging is exhausting. Two or three items a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but it takes a long time just to find something you want to write about. And the slowly dying ecosystem of other blogs makes it harder, because there’s no longer a conversation you can just easily hook into. Instead of plopping yourself down at a table where people are already talking, you have to wander through a room filled with people who are speaking to an audience through a megaphone and decide which of these oratorial topics might interest your own audience and a few thousand of their Facebook friends. It’s much lonelier, and consumes more energy, than it was in days of yore. This is why I spend so much time on my comments section; it is the one remainder of the old back-and-forth that made me love blogging in the first place.

Most of us, one way or another, stopped doing what we used to do. I write fewer, longer items; others stopped blogging entirely. Andrew kept up the volume, even increased it, but by the end, it took a staff of 10 to do it. It’s no wonder he burned out; the wonder is that it took so long.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress