Publishing

Web Traffic Counts: Is Compete Any Good?

I occasionally cite web traffic stats from Alexa and Compete, two services that measure traffic across the entire web. It's probably worth pointing out that I have no idea at all whether they're accurate. Compete publishes a monthly count of site visitors based on data from two million U.S. Internet users, so I can compare its numbers directly to the stats I get from Google Analytics. Since the latter is based on actual traffic, it's a reliable metric. For the Drudge Retort, Google Analytics ... (read more)

2007/10/12

Eleven Years as the Dark Humor Man

Exactly 4,200 days ago, I began Cruel Site of the Day, a demented parody of Cool Site of the Day and other award sites. I had just left an interactive TV startup in Denver that went broke the day our product launched and was starting my own web development company in Pekin, Illinois, a town outside of Peoria where the air smells like corn, marigolds and hopelessness. As Wall Street was making overnight dot-com millionaires out of a bunch of insufferably precocious twentysomethings like Marc ... (read more)

2007/10/01

Running an Online Community's Better in Moderation

Robert Sayre has joined my comment moderation crusade: I try not to delete comments, really. But I don't feel sorry folks who've taken the time to write something like "What the ---- are you talking about?" and left it at that. That sort of thing will be deleted. A regular part of my life lately has been catching hell from Drudge Retort members who don't like the site's moderation policy, which has shifted over the years from non-existent to lax to capricious to hardass. I feel like it had to ... (read more)

2006/11/04

Liberal Site Raw Story Frames News Articles from Other Sites

The liberal news site Raw Story makes a regular practice of framing articles from other media sites, displaying the pages at a Raw Story web address with additional advertising. This technique was the subject of a widely publicized copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit in the late '90s between a small news site and several media giants. Some examples from Raw Story's current front page: British to evacuate consulate in Basra after mortar attacks, The Telegraph Zoo celebrating rare dove ... (read more)

2006/10/30

Creative Commons and the Eldred Decision

Lawrence Lessig quantifies how well Creative Commons is doing: Creative Commons launched the licensing project in December 2002. Within a year, there were more than 1,000,000 link-backs to our licenses (meaning at least a million places on the web where people were linking to our licenses, and presumptively licensing content under those licenses). Within two years, that number was 12,000,000. At the end of our last fundraising campaign, it had grown to about 45,000,000 link-backs to our ... (read more)

2006/10/19

Help! Help! You're Being Repressed!

An excerpt from a recent comment to Workbench: Ha! I beg you to censor this! It will be the premier coup in my lodge, Rogers -- proving every single word I've written ... I granted his wish and deleted the comment. Fear of being called a censor used to work on me, because I believed that a commitment to free expression on the Internet meant giving wide latitude to readers who took the time to comment, even when they were hostile, abusive or obscene -- especially when I was the target of their ... (read more)

2006/08/15

New Wikipedia Subject: Kathy Sierra

All of the talk about last week's BlogHer conference reminded me of an effort I began last December to add overlooked female technologists to Wikipedia. In a discussion with Shelley Powers, I said that the encyclopedia is one area where gender disparity is easy to rectify. Someone just has to take the time to write comprehensive, neutral biographies that will pass muster with the site's editors. A person's presence in Wikipedia tends to attract new bios for people of similar background and ... (read more)

2006/08/02

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it. I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima. Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Russian Novelist's Biggest Mystery: His Identity

There's an interesting profile in today's San Francisco Chronicle about Grigory Chkhartashvili, a Russian translator and intellectual who was inspired by boredom to start a new career as mystery novelist Boris Akunin, the creator of the kickboxing, czarist-era Russian detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin: His novels ... wear their period politics lightly. Each plays on a familiar genre. There's the contract killer, the spy and the picaresque swindler. There's a closed-room mystery. And the sixth ... (read more)

2006/04/30

RSS: The Joy of TextInput

I've written 21 computer books in the past decade, documenting thousands of subjects in tree-killing detail. One of my pet peeves as a technical writer is covering something that readers are unlikely to need and should never, ever use, like the discussion board component in FrontPage 2000. I devoted an entire chapter to it in Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours, a mistake I rectified in subsequent editions. (Buy a copy of the book on Amazon.Com for 92 cents!) FrontPage 2000 ... (read more)

2006/03/29

Read More Entries