1. Good day, Jeff.
I admit I took federal money, and if you did, too, you better explain yourself.
As you know, the Maggie Gallagher artifiscandal means that all of us bloggers should disclose our revenue from the Federal Government. I disclose on my blog that I took the Pell Grant in college and became a paid lackey of the powers that be. If you did, I’d recommend you disclose, too.
Cannot be too careful, you know.
Brian J. Noggle
Yes. In fact, I’m into the government for some $60K +. But I’m willing to give it all back in trade. Like, say, if George Bush ever needs someone to deconstruct Shakespeare’s The Tempest? I’m all over that shit.
2. See, what’s important to remember is that Muslim terrorists are only reacting to the BUSH regime’s Zionist policies and American oppression of the Islamic faith.
(The .jpg is captured from a St. Paul newspaper dated 1937. 1937.)
-Kyle
They had jpgs in 1937? Man, Am I ever behind the times…
3. Jeff,
I just noticed that your Ecosystem rank is 101. We’ve got to do something to push you into the top 100.
CITIZEN JOURNALISM DEPENDS UPON IT!
Steve
Well, I appreciate that, Steve. But I don’t put much stock in the ecosystem link rankings. After all, there are sites that are way ahead of me who get maybe 15% of my traffic. How is that possible? Don’t know—maybe one day NZBear will disclose the code. But I suspect his link counting heavily favors those who do a lot f tracking back—that is, essentially link themselves on other blogs—but who knows.
Still, because advertisers tend to rely on the ecosystem, I wish I could get a handle on how it works. For what it’s worth, Blogpulse had me ranked 27 in terms of times linked in 2004.
4. Must-read
Craig Caughman
Sure.
5. Check out the pic…that SpongeB is such a salt-water tease.
Profshade
Heh. Good stuff.
The other night, O’Reilly assured his viewers that there’s “no way Johnny Depp deserved a Best Actor Oscar nomination over Jim Caviezel [who played Christ in The Passion]”—and then, moments later, told FOXNews’ Entertainment guy Bill McCuddy that he “wasn’t going to watch that dopey Finding Neverland.”
What a tool O’Reilly is.
6. Jeff, did you see Peggy Noonan’s column in today’s WSJ? This is a shocking statement coming from her:
“Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as–ugly imagery coming–garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage–the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists–pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.”
Essentially, she is making the case for leaving dictators in place, and that the oppression of people can sometimes be OK if it is convenient to us.
It seems to me that Peggy had speech-writers’ envy in her first column, and that she dug herself a really deep hole explaining herself in this column.
Rusty [ultraloser]
I think Rusty is correct. I happened to be watching FOX for the Pres’s inaugural speech, and Noonan was on the panel that reacted to it. Her initial reaction was that the speech was “breathtaking”, though it did overreach slightly in a couple of spots toward the end.
The next day, she penned a column that foregrounded those overreaching problems (as she perceived them) and forgot, suddenly, about all the “breathtaking” portions she had commented on earlier.
And now, suddenly, she seems to be throwing in with the foreign policy realists—who have done more to stoke the fires of discontent in the middle east over the years than George Bush will ever be able to do, even were he to begin bombing the hell out of Iran and Syria.
Regarding # 2… did Jimmy Coulton ever amount to anything?
swimdad
Dear <blogger>,
Thanks for posting the merge-mailed form letter verbatim on <blog name> so that everyone else I sent the letter to will recognize that their blogs are not special in my eyes and they’re not getting exclusive link-whoring content.
Brian J. Noggle
P.S. Your proffered stallion has nice molars.
Damn, sounds like Noonan is angling for some CIA or State dept. gig with shit like that. Has she been bought off? Seems to be going around these days.
Good day, Jeff.
Your country needs you, Secret Agent CITIZEN JOURNALIST, to deconstruct the text of The Tempest. As always, should you, the Grand Kleagle Hood, the apple, or any inanimate object mention support for freedom, liberty, or democracratic movements abroad, the State Dept. and Peggy Noonan will disavow any knowledge of your existence. Good luck.
This comment will self destruct in 5 seconds.
Boom!
Jeff, there’s a scorch mark in your carpet. I don’t think it was there before.
Jeff, remember, there’s a big difference between a scorch mark in your carpet and a skid mark in your boxers.
Speaking of Boxers, do they have the film rights optioned yet.
And both are very different from a rug burn on your bum.
Or so I hear.
Jeff,
I can’t claim to be an expert on the whole ecosystem-linking deal, but I did do some looking into it back when I did a couple of entries on the topic. My thought is that the biggest single factor is being blog rolled by other ecosystem blogs.
If you look at lower traffic / higher ranked blogs, they are usually part of the Free Alliance, or Blogdom for God, or some such mega blog roll. Near as I can tell, that infuences the link ranking more than anything. If correct, it’s my main issue with the system. The code does count blog roll links. Look at your link details at all the blogs with one link to you – it’s the blog role and those make up the vast percentage of every blogs links on any given day.
You can have all of two readers. But if you are on every large blog role, you’re basically guaranteed a high rank by links.
On the traffic front: Some of the raw hits have to do with where you are blogrolled. I get more “passive hits” off of being on Malkin’s blogroll than I get from a active, featured links from some smaller bloggers. (Of course, these featured links are generally more emotionally meaningful for me, but still . . . )
The formula that remains elusive is “incoming links” vs. plain old traffic–and I’ve never been sure what that is. (Isn’t it actually published on TTLB somewhere?)
Yep.
What links does the TTLB Ecosystem count?
All links from a scanned weblog to any other weblog (i.e., links from a weblog to itself are ignored). This includes links within posts, and ‘permanent’ links in a weblog’s blogroll
here
Peggy Noonan, Ted Kennedy, and all these other losers would have been one of the those anti-freedom advocates telling us to get out of Germany after WWII because of the partisans that were killing people.
I guess it was also too bad communism fell, because now all those nasty ethnic wars started up. It’s better for them to be alive under oppression than free if they use their freedom to start wars. The sillies.
Peace In! Freedom Out!
(I thought they were called the “Democratic” party?)
Eyes On The Ball News
Noonan is another case of someone who wrote for Reagan but apparently never read anything he wrote or listened to anything he said.
Dan, Attila Girl, that’s exactly it. Some links drive traffic, some don’t. (Jeff is still my top referer due to one featured post.) I checked the blogs ranked near Protein Wisdom in the Ecosystem, some of them had fewer daily visits than my blog and less than 1/20th what PW gets. So those blogs are on a bunch of blogrolls, but have few readers. Trackbaks only help the ranking at blongs like Jawa and Wizbang, where they are displayed on the front page.
I just joined one of the smaller “alliances” and saw my ranking get bumped, but traffic also jumped…and remains higher. Sometimes you just need the exposure to new readers. I figured at #101, PW could jump to the front page at TTLB, and perhaps some new readers would discover it.
N.Z. does publish pure traffic rankings as well, but I have doubts about the accuracy of sitemeter.