Today is the first anniversary of this blog. I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve ignored it, I’ve used and abused it. I thank you for the interaction, and the support. Now…I will be making some changes around here very shortly, and if you’ve been reading regularly or have subscribed, you may want to stop now.

After the surprising increase in traffic during my most recent Google Garbage™ experiment, I’ve decided for the time being to spend some of this blog’s precious PageRank on more such specious pursuits.

The fact is, posting a bunch of nonsense is good for business. I supposed the television networks figured this out decades ago, didn’t they?

Putting up posts on hot topics and/or “long-tail” niche keywords has made me a pretty nice little chunk of change over the past few months, here and elsewhere. Apparently this is how kids can make money these days. Since I don’t particularly have the time to do much else, that’s what I’ll be using this blog for, at least for the foreseeable future.

This is just to announce the change to the handful of readers who have stuck around through the garbage posts. If I have anything interesting to say or show, I’ll probably post it at my Tumblr blog.

Again, I suggest you unsubscribe and stop reading now, or you’ll find yourself reading about car radiator repair, rapid drug detox, natural snoring remedies, home surveillance cameras and Bowling Green State University.

Thanks all!

Deepak Chopra, SFGate.com, Nov. 30, 2009

“The perils of skepticism”

If you’ve ever used Google Alert, you know the jolts it can deliver. Whenever anyone in the blogosphere decides to blow a poison dart your way, Google is happy to deliver the news, along with the more positive mentions, of course. Most of my stinging darts come from skeptics. Over the years I’ve found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can’t abide speculative thinking. And as the renowned Richard Dawkins has proved, they are also very annoyed by a nuisance named God.

Statistically, cynical mistrust is correlated with premature sudden death from cardio vascular disease. Since the skeptics who write venomous blogs trust in nothing, I imagine that God will outlive them. In the interests of better health, these people should read scripture, or at least a poem, twice a day. Doctor’s orders.

I’ve debated skeptics, including Richard Dawkins (I spoke with Dawkins for over 90 minutes on camera in Oxford. He extracted 30 seconds from the dialogue and dubbed me the enemy of science.) and am amazed that they mistake self-righteousness for happiness. A sort of bitter satisfaction is what they reap. No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others. Typically they sit by the side of the road with a sign that reads “You’re Wrong” so that every passerby, whether an Einstein, Gandhi, Newton, or Darwin, can gain the benefit of their illuminated skepticism. For make no mistake, the skeptics of the past were as eager to shoot down new theories as they are to worship the old ones once science has validated them.

It never occurs to skeptics that a sense of wonder is paramount, even for scientists. Especially for scientists. Einstein insisted, in fact, that no great discovery can be made without a sense of awe before the mysteries of the universe. Skeptics know in advance — or think they know — what right thought is. Right thought is materialistic, statistical, data-driven, and always, always, conformist. Wrong thought is imaginative, provisional, often fantastic, and no respecter of fixed beliefs.

So whenever I find myself labeled the emperor of woo-woo, I pull out the poison dart and offer thanks that wrong thinking has gotten us so far. Thirty years ago no right-thinking physician accepted the mind-body connection as a valid, powerful mode of treatment. Today, no right-thinking physician (or very few) would trace physical illness to sickness of the soul, or accept that the body is a creation of consciousness, or tell a patient to change the expression of his genes. But soon these forms of wrong thinking will lose their stigma, despite the best efforts of those professional stigmatizers, the skeptics.

OK, maybe he’s just a self-righteous douche.

Why the absence? Fitting this blog into my time was daunting, especially for a perfectionist like me. I was spending 2 hours writing and re-writing posts other people would have finished in 20 minutes. From here on out, I’m setting a 1/2 hour rule. If it’s not done by then, I’m putting it aside and coming back to it.

Updating every day was too high a goal, although I kept it going for quite a while. I’ll go at it a little more modestly from here on out.

And finally, every post doesn’t need to be 500 words.

Nice to be back.

That’s still a lot of people, no doubt. But it’s still a baby learning to crawl when compared to facebook, or even myspace. Hell, it’s not even as popular as friendster, which is apparently only still used by a few people in the Phillipines.

But wait, you say – Twitter has 14 million members! Well then why is daily traffic only about a million? Well, for a start: 1) lots of those “members” aren’t real people, and 2) the proliferation of bots, spam, fake “marketing” tweets and just plain boring “what I had for lunch” updates are driving away real people in droves.

Am I going to predict Twitter’s death? No, not just yet. It’s too early in the disease cycle. But this is one very sick baby. And ugly, too.

Clicking on the a suggested related topic then returns the new results, and presents related queries for the new search. As you keep exploring related topics, the old searches remain onscreen, represented as the “tail” of your current search:

The related searches could use some work – so far I haven’t found them to be incredibly useful, and overall the Google Wonder Wheel is a bit of a toy. But what a toy it is – I’ve spent quite a bit of time enjoying it so far. Hopefully as the experiment continues, the results will get better.

Another less flashy, but more useful feature that comes along with the Google Wonder Wheel is the new Timeline view. A search on “baseball” seen in Timeline view allows you to zero in on results related to a certain year, and even month. For example, by clicking through to May of 1862, I can see that the Star Spangled Banner was first played at a baseball game on May 15th of that year:

The results aren’t perfect- some irrelevant content slips through based on passing uses of the search term – but for researchers and students, this will be pure gold.

Several other alternate views are included in the Google Wonder Wheel experiment as well, including longer textual excerpts, and a different type of image search which presents images from relevant pages inline with search results.

The Google Wonder Wheel has been dubbed an prototype, and is only available to some users. However, if you’d like to give it a spin, all you need to do is set a cookie in your browser to tell Google you’re participating. Here’s the trick:

Go to google.com. With Google loaded in your browser, paste the following code in your address bar and hit return:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Nothing happens…at first. But now perform another search in Google, and on the results page you’ll notice a small “Show Options…” link just below the Google logo. Click this, and you’re off and running.

Now the question is: will this change the way you search, or is it just a toy?

Result: Like a “fun-sized” candy, life is made byte-sized, interaction relieved of character. Twitter is to conversation as porn is to making love.

OK, now it’s your turn.

[Inspired by Phil Baumann's Twitter Pitch in 140 Characters. Thanks Phil.]

• It is currently mid-February. It might be a good idea to wait until December is a bit closer before making our “best of” lists.
• By various counts, there are at least 200 million blogs in the world. Either Time spent an incredible amount of time and effort on this, or…well, they didn’t. The fact that most of their choices can be found on Technorati’s list of the most popular blogs would suggest the latter.
• Though a list of 25 items could easily fit on one page, Time puts each and very entry on a separate page. This is designed to get 25 clicks and 25 page-views from every reader, inflating Time’s perceived popularity. It’s actually pretty smart, but also rather annoying to the reader.
• This is basically their version of linkbait – the method used by bloggers to get others to link to their posts (as I did above), increasing their rankings in Google. Lists are the most common form of this technique – anytime you see a blog post starting with a number (“25 best ____”, 5 Ways To ____”, “10 New ____”), you’re looking at linkbait. Including when I do it.
• Time’s post also incorporates two other well-known forms of linkbait: the “useful” post, and the “controversial” post. Casual readers will be attracted to it as a useful list, tech-savvy types will be complaining all day about it on their blogs – as I am doing now. See how it works?

As a kicker, in case they didn’t generate enough controversy, there’s a list of the 5 Most Overrated Blogs, sure to get a few more people ticked off, and generate five more page-views per reader.

Oddly enough, Gawker.com went from last year’s “best” to this year’s “most overrated”. Apparently in 2008 “Gawker’s relentlessly critical, headache-inducing cynicism” was a good thing, but in 2009 “the economic downturn and the near-collapse of Wall Street has made Gawker’s snarky worldview seem not only cruel but pointless.”

Oh, Time. The zeitgeist is getting sore from you having your finger on it.

As a service to you the reader, and because my annoyance knows no bounds, I present here Time’s lists on one page. The only value Time adds for your clicks is a screenshot of each, and a short paragraph seemingly written by someone on the way to work.

Time’s 25 Best Blogs 2009:

1. Talking Points Memo
2. The Huffington Post (down from #1 last year. Perhaps it was that little plagiarism problem.)
3. Lifehacker
4. Metafilter
5. The Daily Dish
6. Freakonomics
7. BoingBoing
8. Got2BeGreen
9. Zen Habits
10. The Conscience of a Liberal: Paul Krugman
11. Crooks and Liars
12. Generación Y
13. Mashable
14. Slashfood (“Slashfood is food for thought”…ugh. Didn’t they teach you about lazy writing in journalism school?)
15. Official Google Blog
16. synthesis (the choices are getting a bit better – this is a pretty thoughtful, interesting one)
17. bleat (a “pop culture ephemera” blog – not bad, but much like 100,000 others)
18. /Film
    
19. Seth Godin’s Blog (bleh. Self-important aphorisms daily from a self-proclaimed web guru, followed by slobbering fanboy comments. No thanks.)
    
20. Deadspin: Sports News
    
21. Dooce (riding out her micro-fame. I don’t care about your OB-GYN visit, really.)
    
22. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman (they had blogs on the frontier?)
    
23. Said the Gramophone (how did they choose one mp3 blog?)
24. Detention Slip (something about education apparently)
25. Bad Astronomy

Hey Time, what was your mission again?

Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.

http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com

…which they describe succinctly:

 Make your own “Obamicon” — your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster.

[...]

Take your picture with a webcam or upload a photo, choose your own message, and submit to the gallery. 

It requires Flash Player 10, which took me about 20 seconds to download and install, and there is a quicky email registration. 

Then it’s pure fun. Upload a photo or use a webcam to take your pic. Mac iSight users: right click the frame, click “Settings”, and choose “USB Video Class Video” (sic).

Then choose your tagline. Think: as Obama is to “Hope”, you are to “________”.

I thought this really captured my spirit. I tried one in drag for “Change”, but it didn’t quite work out…

Have fun!

I can report to you today: the question has been definitively answered.

This morning I awoke to an email from my friend Paul, which read in part:

They had a piece on the news last night about Twitter, and having Twitter parties and I was mortified. 

 

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/video?id=6600808&rss=rss-cs-wls-video-6600808

 

Not to sound like a wet blanket but JC, give me a FN break. 

[Editor's note: I advise you to watch that video on an empty stomach.]

I wrote back:

I think this is part of the normal cycle of anything new becoming popular: the local news story about ______ parties. 

Probably because old people vaguely remember having parties themed around the fads of their day, like ”hula-hoop parties”. This gives them a frame to understand new things. 

The report follows the classic pattern: the lead anchor takes a dismissive tone, the younger reporter is in the know, and (go figure!) the wacky weatherman’s been tweeting for months!

The next phase - techie backlash - has already begun in some quarters, with blog posts complaining about Twitter being misused by all the new people, and how much better it was in the old days of…what, 2007? 

If history is any guide, I would expect this to be followed by a proliferation of spam, more system outages, more attempts at Twitter-killing apps, a Google tweet search, Twitter SEO and full-time Twitter experts, a generally agreed-upon “authority” ranking (which will then be gamed by scammers with paid fake followers), news stories about the dangers of predators on Twitter, a “get rich quick with Twitter” late-night infomercial, and an annual Twitter convention with an embarrassingly stupid name.

And in the end, especially here in the U.S., we will use Twitter not despite its 140 character limit, but because of it. We will communicate in 140-character segments because that is all we have to give.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and a new art form will develop. I hope so.

But please, keep your lunch plans to yourself.