The News Ain’t Free

Pay per view isn’t always in the form of sub­scrip­tions and the com­pa­nies that bring you your local news are either greedy or stu­pid or most like­ly very much both.

This morn­ing I went to one of the local TV sta­tion’s sites (KING5) to have a look at a piece of video and I learned what it real­ly costs to look at the local news on the ‘Net.

I recent­ly set my com­put­er and brows­er to ask me before installing cook­ies. Mostly out of curiosity.

In addi­tion to the KING5 cook­ies which I accept­ed (at least 4) I have to deny cook­ies from the fol­low­ing sites:

.belointeractive.com
.advertising.com.
doubleclick.net
.atdmt.com

Actually about 12 sites but they were all vari­ants of the above. That’s right FOUR dif­fer­ent adver­tis­ing net­works what to install cook­ies in my brows­er so that I can read one local news sto­ry. Not happy.

It gets worse… Continue read­ing “The News Ain’t Free”

Web Dragons and Basic Car Care for Women

I’ve been work­ing for over a week on a review of the book Web Dragons:Inside the Myth of the Search Engines. My drafts are copi­ous and they all suck for one rea­son or anoth­er. So in a fit of hav­ing to get some damn thing out by the end of the week I give you:

This book is Basic Search Engine Care for People with­out Library or Computer Science Degrees.

For more then the 20 years a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ty col­leges have offered class­es in basic car care that were aimed at women. A nice avun­cu­lar gent in a shop coat talked about things like:

  • What an engine is and how it works.
  • Which nois­es com­ing from under the car are actu­al­ly dan­ger­ous and which are just annoying.
  • How to change a tire when the AAA truck can’t come for two hours and you have a meet­ing with your boss in 30 minutes.
  • How often to take you car to Jiffy Lube for an oil change and why it real­ly does matter.
  • How to deal with a mechan­ic and not get taken.

I nev­er took one of these cours­es because I know what car­bu­re­tor means (no, it is not French for don’t fuck with it) but lord knows I have some friends and rel­a­tives who damn well should .

Search engines are just like cars. We all use them every­day, and we all assume that they will work prop­er­ly when we need them, and most of us have no idea how they work. Continue read­ing “Web Dragons and Basic Car Care for Women”

TQR — Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging

Bloggers blogging on blogging

Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging is the com­pli­ca­tion of 30 posts from April of 2007 when Chitika (a blog­ger’s adver­tis­ing net­work) held a “blog­bash” about pro­fes­sion­al blog­ging. (I’m a suck­er for pdfs, or any­thing that I can print and take away from the com­put­er and this one is nice­ly designed for the type of con­tent it offers.)

So why should I, or you, care about blog­gers blog­ging about blogging?

Look up there at the tag line and you’ll see it. “Tools, tips, and toys…” Blogging is a tool for think­ing. Continue read­ing “TQR — Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging”

right books at the right time

Today David Seah men­tioned in an almost aside to a post about learn­ing to net­work (a shared weak­ness) that he had read a cou­ple of books by Paulo Coelho and that these were, for him, the right books at the right time.
For me the right book was Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore. I’ve read and loved a ton of CM’s books since then but only Coyote Blue came by at the right moment with the right mes­sage: You are what you are, and any and all attempts to pre­tend oth­er­wise are bound to result in the old man bit­ing you in the ass.

What was your right book at the right time?

Tracking my (sparse) user base.

I spent a good bunch of time last week try­ing to set up some sort of basic track­ing for shiny and the DH’s blog obser­va­tions. There are ninety-three (gues­ti­mate) WordPress plu­g­ins that track traf­fic (most­ly by look­ing at the site’s serv­er logs.) But there is not one decent review of which ones work well and which ones don’t or even an overview (excel spread­sheet any­one?) of what sort of infor­ma­tion they make out of the raw log data.

Yesterday Google Analytics gave me the shock of my life — I had vis­i­tors. 12 in fact. The result of some tech­no­rati search­es, the men­tion of an Adam Greenfield post and the love­ly folk(s) over at //engtech who came by to see who the hell I was.

I also found out that I had com­ments wait­ing to be mod­er­at­ed. Way wait­ing — like a week. The email noti­fi­ca­tion did­n’t work. Sorry — I’ll watch much more care­ful­ly in the future.

Now if I can just fig­ure out what all those box­es and charts over on Google Analytics actu­al­ly mean…

Happy Weekend y’all.

edit­ed 25.may.07 to change the url for //engtech, who is now ter­ror­iz­ing the web-o-sphere under the name inter­net duct tape. Too cool.