magpie's shiny things

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”

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”

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?

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.

In a recent issue of Forbes mag­a­zine (May 7th, 2007) sev­er­al authors wrote short essays on the nature of net­works. One of which (titled “90 Years of Networks” by Amanda Schupak) includes a nifty lit­tle time line of sig­nif­i­cant events in the his­to­ry of net­works and net­work­ing. In the 1991 spot she includes the following:

Finnish pro­gram­mer Linus Torvalds kicks off open-source move­ment, a sort of wiki of com­put­er code, with a plea for con­tri­bu­tions to Linux oper­at­ing system.

Note care­ful­ly the wording.

Open source is now described as being wiki-like rather than a wiki being described as being open source-like.

Please don’t be tempt­ed to exclaim — but that’s a tau­tol­ogy! a wiki is a sort of open source project. You’d be miss­ing the point. This is about par­a­digm and analo­gies, not about hier­ar­chi­cal typed-classification sys­tems. The more famil­iar object is being used to describe the less famil­iar object. In the view of this writer a wiki is more famil­iar to her read­ers than open source.

That grind­ing sound you hear is my world view rub­bing up against the curbing.

PS I’d love to give you a link to the arti­cle but in the three days since I pulled it up to read, it has dis­ap­peared behind the for-pay wall. pfft.