[UPDATE June 30, 2015: Sitemeter is now out of control. First it gave totally crazy numbers - counting individual hits 30 or 40 times - and for the last four or five days it gives you the "Try again in a few minutes message." Either it's now dead - and surely a lot of users are going to abandon Sitemeter for other statcounters - or their tech people are scrambling hard to do repair work.]
[UPDATE Aug 31, 2014: Grrrr! It's not completely down today. If I check the last seven days displays I can get numbers. But everything else is unavailable. I haven't updated here for a year it seems, but I have complained in other posts, like My Love/Hate Relationship with Sitemeter. And Google Stats says I have three or four times as many hits per day as Sitementer.]
[UPDATE Aug. 5, 2013: It's been down since yesterday. Screenshot from Is It Down Right Now:
A comment said that Sitemeter is owned by MySpace. If the original creator of Sitemeter sold it to MySpace, that would explain the incredible difference in response when I first got Sitemeter and now. Then, the creator very quickly made personal responses to my questions. Now, there's no response at all, except, sometimes, a robotic one that says nothing.]
Given the number of people who get to this post on a regular basis, Sitemeter is down regularly, but for different people. I thought maybe I was getting better service because I'm paying. But now, who knows?]
[UPDATE April 19, 2013: It's been down again all day for me. This happened several weeks or a month ago, but I didn't post here. My guess is that it's gotten bigger than the original group can handle. When I first started using Sitemeter, the guy who set it up answered my emails personally and quickly. Now I don't get any answer.]
[UPDATE Nov. 4: Down again since last night. Most troubling is the lack of communication about it with users. Perhaps not enough users are paying and they can't afford enough staff to maintain things. But not communicating with us means we start speculating, and as the comments on this post show, people are looking for alternative counters.]
What's happening at Sitemeter?
It was down last night when I tried, but then it came back on for a while including this morning. But it's down again.
"We have tried pinging Site Meter website using our server and the
website returned the above results. If sitemeter.com is down for us too
there is nothing you can do except waiting. Probably the server is
overloaded, down or unreachable because of a network problem, outage or a
website maintenance is in progress..."
The few times a year that Sitemeter goes down like this only serve to remind me how much I depend on them to give me detailed information on who is visiting my blog and what they are looking at. I even decided at some point I should contribute to them for the service they provide and the additional information they offer paying users is worth it to me.
But it would be nice if Sitemeter maintained an email list of all their users on a separate server - particularly those of us who pay them - and would email us to let us know there are problems.
UPDATE Tuesday Oct. 30: Mine came back Monday, Oct. 29 and is working fine.
UPDATE: Friday Nov. 9: Down again. My my main problem is that I can find nothing from Sitemeter to a) apologize and b) explain. Like some of the commenters, I'm looking for alternatives. I don't really want to learn a new system, and my annual payment to Sitemeter still has some time to go, but I'm starting to think I have no choice if I want to keep track of visitors.
LATER Friday, Nov. 9, 11pm: They're back up. But for how long?
UPDATE Saturday, Nov 10, 5pm: They were up most of today, but I can't get them again this afternoon. I did send in a request for an explanation while they were up, but I'm guessing they aren't reading their email. They have a drop down window for you to put the level of urgency of your message, but there's only one option: normal.
SUNDAY Morning Nov. 11. 11am. Up again. Starting to feel like a roller coaster.
MONDAY Evening Nov. 12: Sitemeter was down this morning when I checked and again about 5pm, but is up now (11pm).
This blog was begun as an experiment and has continued as a labor of love. It's become an acceptable excuse to spend my time pursuing whatever tickles my brain. For the most part, spending quality time with my brain and the blog, is stimulating and occasionally seems to add some value to the world at large.
But at times I find that my self imposed schedule (at least once a day) and content standards (see below) cause me tension. Thus, a little blog self reflection is a way to
think through what is important here
share thoughts with other bloggers facing similar issues
let readers see behind the scenes, and
stall for time.
What do I think my content standards are these days? (As I write that I'm thinking there are earlier posts where I tried to do this. And that's one of the problems with blogging today - I have higher standards for myself. I'm tempted to go back and compare my current standards with the old ones. No, stop. That's overkill. Do this one now, then maybe later, compare them.) I have these battles with myself constantly. Less work doesn't usually win like it did just now. Let me try to articulate my present content standards:
Types of Content
Mostly self-generated material - I should be posting my own original work in most posts. It would be interesting to go back and see what percent of my posts are mainly original.
Enhanced borrowed material - This leads to the question of where do I draw the line between borrowed and original?
A movie or book review is original if it focuses on the review with, possibly, some clips or passages, from the original work. Or an idea from a news article should lead to either my own thoughts or other added meaning such as an overview of what a lot of people thought about the topic. The original part could include the synthesizing of facts or opinion from various sources including a description of my analytic process.
More value than just reposting other people's work as filler - Even if I just find a great idea or video or a picture from somewhere else, I should explain why its important to me to post. The percent of such posts should also be low, maybe once or twice a month at best. These should be posted either because I found something I thought remarkable and/or that would lift people's spirits. Sometimes I save things like this for a day when I don't have time to write anything.
It's ok to plug something I really like - But not just because they asked me to, or even worse, because I'm getting paid (in the broadest sense) for posting. And all such promotion should identify any connections I have with the person or organization you are promoting.
Don't post something just to boost hits - Posting a topic only because I know it will boost my ratings is
something I don't consciously do. I've learned to be aware that some
topics will get more attention and I have debates with myself about my
motives before I post.
I don't think it's necessary to set percentage goals for each type. General terms like 'most'
and not too often are good enough.
Content Quality
Originality - There's very little that hasn't been said before. One of the brutal tasks of academic writing is making sure no one has written what you are writing. I don't have that high a standard here. I do tend to google around to find out what others have said. My standard seems to be that I'm writing what is original in my experience and if I knowingly get ideas from somewhere else, I'll cite and link them.
Respect and Fairness - I try (note I don't claim any particular level of success) to treat the people I write about with respect and fairness. This means I force myself to think about them as human beings, as people who have parents and children and are struggling to find a way to their own self-respect in a challenging world. I try to see how the situation looks from their vantage point. That doesn't mean I can't raise questions about their actions, and even their intent, but I constantly remind myself that I really cannot know what they were thinking. I can only infer. Raising questions rather than making declaratory statements seems safer. Would I want someone writing about me the way I'm writing about them? The qualifications necessary to accurately express how little we truly know about the world can slow down the pace and dim the sparkle of good prose. Can, but doesn't have to.
Good Prose - This is a goal, often compromised by (self-imposed) deadlines and late night writing. Strunk and White are my practical guides to succinctness. They remind me to seek solid nouns and verbs. . . . but, I'm afraid I'm usually in too great a hurry. Oh, dear. Time waits for no word. For particularly sensitive posts, I'll proof and proof and proof to be as clear as possible and avoid unnecessarily offending readers. For most posts, I've come to realize, I'm scribbling notes to myself that I might be able to use in something later on. But almost nothing here is a first draft. Many have been played with five or ten times or more before I hit the publish button. But I'm still appalled at how many typos manage to slip through.
Process and Self-Awareness - My inspiration comes from British novelists such as Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Anthony Trollope (Barchester Towers), and Charles Dickens. [I never realized how much influence that British Novels class would have on me.] All of these writers chat directly with their readers behind their characters' backs. They talk about how they are writing the book and about what's going on in their characters' lives. They make process into substance. I've already done a post on Dickens' discussion of meandering at the beginning of David Copperfield.
These are standards that I find myself striving to meet. I'm not prescribing them for other bloggers. And I make no claims to how often or how well I achieve them, but they're what I'm aiming at. [I never bought into the prohibition against dangling participles.]
Blog Maintenance
Sometimes I think of my blog as an attic for ideas. Just write them up as they come and shove them into the blog. But even though the structure of a blog makes it easier to find things, there is a need to do some maintenance now and then.
Keeping the Pages Up-to-Date - The "Page" tabs on top make it possible to give readers an easier way to find posts on some topics. My Redistricting Page, for example, lists all the posts on redistricting, but I'm still a few posts behind.
Updating Old Posts - Occasionally, through Sitemeter, I see that someone has gone to an old post and I check it out and find it needs fixing.
Fixing errors - If I find typos, I have no problem with fixing them without calling attention to the change. That holds true if I clean up the writing by eliminating an unnecessary word or two.
Fixing Content - But if I'm changing the content or meaning, then I need to let people know I've made a change and when. I try to use strikeout and [brackets] to show what's but changed.
Fixing missing pictures or bad links - For some reason, some pictures stop working. These are glaring. Links are harder to check, but as I write this I remember some tool for checking if your old links are bad. I haven't tested this out. It's for Blogspot blogs. But google will find others.
Updates - I don't think I have any obligation to update old posts, there are just too many, but sometimes it just makes sense. If I do a follow-up post on something, I try to link the old one and new one to each other. For example, I wrote about Child's Glacier in 2011, and later that year,
a bridge to the glacier was closed for repairs and it won't
be rebuilt for at least five years. Driving to Child's Glacier is out
of the question now and it seemed relevant to add that to the original post too. But sometimes I just have to trust that readers are smart enough to look at the dates of posts, so when someone googles "Seward Highway Closure" they realize the post they found was written in 2009.
Labels (also known as tags or categories) - Grrrr. These are the reference terms bloggers can attach to posts to help search engines find the post and that form a very rough blog index - in the right column at the bottom on my blog. I'm not sure how much they are still used by search engines - based on tracking people's search terms and what posts google offers them. My labels list is pretty uneven. I have some labels with just one post referenced. There are other names or topics which show up in many posts, but I never made labels for them. I'm not sure how valuable it is to try to add labels to old posts or get rid of labels that only have one post. Mel, at Bent Alaska, has suggested this as a reason to move to WordPress, but things aren't broken enough to switch.
Blogger Changes - Blogspot regularly offers new ways to do things, new ways to organize the page. It's well past time I catch up with the latest improvements to see if there are ones that fit my needs.
Basic Review - It's coming up on six years now. It's time to update things like my profile. I should probably write a Page (again, this means here those tabs on top) about what I'm trying to do here. Then I could link to pages like this one for those who want to know why I'm doing what I do.
Generally, blogging is fun. Sometimes though, I need time for a post to germinate, and it has to just sit until I'm ready to tease it out. Sometimes, blogging is a way to avoid doing things I need to do - like battles in the Clutter Wars, or doing other house maintenance work.
So, recognizing this, I'm thinking about limiting my blog time until I get necessary chores completed. I may even take a few breaks this summer. Or maybe I'll find a way to do decent posts that don't take up too much time. Or highlight some older posts that deserve a second look. It's still an experiment in what can be done with this medium.
While searching for a post on my blog, I got this tidbit from google:
One of the most important figures of the Renaissance was Michel de
Montaigne. The writer not only gets the credit for popularizing the
essay, but for being the father of Modern Skepticism, coining the phrase
"What do I know?".
Something you'd think the caretaker of this blog would know. Well, I'll take it with a grain of salt. It could be true, to the extent that anyone can be said to coin a term. And I'm sure he would have said (written?) it in French.
So, what do I know? It seems this blog has taken me on an eclectic journey and I've come to know a lot of seemingly unrelated topics. I'd like to think they are all connected, at least by the overall theme of the blog - how do we know what we know? Below I've grabbed the search terms from a recent Sitemeter page. I think it shows the varied topics that I've somehow gotten to. (There are 25 hits per page on Sitemeter and I've left out those that didn't have explicit search terms.) I noticed doing this that a couple of the links went to useless redirect pages. You can check the Sitemeter listings at the sitemeter logo in the right hand column, down the list a ways. To see how much detailed information each visitor leaves, click on the number of any hit.
Here are a few terms people used to get to this blog that caught my attention in the last couple of months for one reason or another.
diminutive crony - Is this like a Leprechaun lobbyist? The person got to the post on Cronyism at UAA.
I got enough searches for this that I looked to see why. It was part of clue #2 in the Independence, Kansas Neewholah Medallion scavenger hunt. Here are the clues (regular font) with the answer in the bold font:
SUNDAY:
Allan and Mikael sang in this band,
the song was a big hit. Two singers for the Hollies – “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother”
Adiminutive crony, they lent him a hand, “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother”
the first two lines provide the fit. It’s a long road, with many a winding turn.
Diminutive Crony = My Brother? That's a stretch, but it's a great, old song that people should listen to today when so many of our brothers (and sisters) need a little help. So I put it here on top so you can listen while you read the rest of the post.
The medallion was found:
LOCATION: Taped underneath a big green dumpster. Adjacent to the parking lot at the 10th street baseball/softball fields
jesus of course i accept people with pierced bodies cartoon - they got to a photo of the cover of Gary Trudeau's book The Long Road Home. But I want to see the Jesus cartoon.
utozombiesbra - This one got to a post on when the first Permanent Fund Dividend check was due out in 2010. Searching the page found 'uto' in statutory and 'bra' in librarian, but no zombies. The word vampire did appear though.
ant egg oil reviews - I didn't know people were using ant egg oil. For cooking? For driving? This searcher got to the post Catching Up- Thai Bugs, which included a photo of a baggie full of red ant eggs - a delicacy for a Thai friend in Chiangmai.
is there farsi book shop in london - This got to a post from LA which included a visit to a Persian book store.
Popular, conventional wisdom which may be factually right or wrong, but which loses meaning through frequent, often thoughtless repetition
"Tommy never thinks for himself. He just repeats these blurks that he hears all day on CNN and then tries to pass it off as wisdom.
to spew, chuck, or to throw up.
when something is disgusting
Maybe it was just a typo. Maybe someone whose vocabulary includes 'blurk' can clarify.
wooden post old timey pig pen - Not too many people say 'old timey' these days. [Actually, since I wrote this, I've started to notice it again.] It's cool when the kind of word someone uses amplifies the meaning of the word itself. And this searcher got to a post (no pun intended really) with an old wooden pig pen in Thailand.
Someone else 20 minutes later got there with natural pig pen which worked, but just didn't have the same ring.
I've been noticing that sometimes two folks get to the same post, one after the other, seconds apart. Does someone clicking on a link cause Google to push that post higher for the very next person who searches for the same or a similar term? For example: what do i know (from Toronto at 9:26:26am Alaska Time) came right on the heals of explain the quote "what do i know" (from Alexandria, VA at 9:26:25am). But messing up my speculation here (or maybe there's even more going on than I know) the first one came from Bing and the second from Google. This is probably a bad example because the second one got the post with the Victor Lebow quote and the second to the main What Do I Know? page. Or maybe that's evidence that it's just coincidence. But I've been seeing this pattern lately.
braille tatoos - Never thought about this, though I have thought that surgeons should learn how to make artistic stitches so that the scars they leave have a cool design. This searcher got to a post on braille playing cards. I'd also note that tattoo has 3 t's, but bloggers who misspell words pick up readers who misspell them too.
what if i didn't get my alaska permanent fund check yet - This one came October 22 from Las Vegas. The checks were distributed October 6. But the website also says, "Applications in eligible status after September 23 and before October 21 will be distributed October 27." So it may still be coming. But searches like this stir my imagination. How many stories can you create to explain this inquiry? An Alaskan living Outside? Visiting Oustside? Former Alaskan hoping to get one more PFD check? Or a gambling addict waiting for his check? Lots of possibilities.
BTW, the searcher got to a 2010 post on the PFD, not the 2011 post. Neither would have answered the specific question. But this gave me a chance to respond to an overlooked question from Kathy in KY.
how many black us congressmen have been members of the us congress - My snarky answer: All of them. Sorry, I just can't help myself. This is not a biggie, but it shows how people can't quite say what they mean. But Google has a lot of tolerance for such people and this person got to my post on the number of black congress members. Did you want to know about black Congresswomen too?
For those of you who have no idea what I find wrong in the query, leave a comment or email me and I'll explain.
modern office lobbies with taxidermied animals - This was an image search which gave them this picture and highlighted this sentence from the post "Providence Alaska Medical and Animal Park" : "Some places have stuffed moose or bear in the lobby."
This is indeed an office building lobby, but the moose isn't in a glass case. This is Anchorage and the moose is live, outside, browsing the landscaping.
andropi - Do you think they were looking for entropy? In any case the got the post Happy Birthday, Moni, Alex, and Ropi see the andropi?). Probably not what they wanted. It said North America, on a computer using US - English and Linux but in a European time zone. (Yes, Sitemeter tells me all that, and usually the city and country too.) While computer time in Sitemeter is usually a good clue to the visitor's location when location itself is 'unknown', it reflects the timezone set on the computer. So, when I'm traveling, my computer still reflects Alaska time.
what is the name of the flower you blow on it and everything little whote thing come out when you make a wish - Google got this person to an archive page. If the searcher scrolled down long enough, she would have gotten a picture of a dandelion flower gone to seed and an explanation about making wishes. Not bad Google. But why didn't you just take the person straight to the dandelion post instead of the whole archive page?
owl to put in tower - What does this mean? Is this some sort of Harry Potter reference? This person got to this picture of a great horned owl up close at the July 4th celebration on the park strip post. There was also a climbing tower in the post.
frank "the tank" sullivan has acquired 38 plates at the flying saucer - Here's another good example of how one could use Google search terms to write short stories. Clearly there is a story behind this. Google gave him an archive page (August 30, 2011 back to Aug. 17) which includes the words: Frank (Murkowski); tank (underground storage); plates (license); and flying saucer (house). The number 38 is on the page too.
2012 number missouri delegates republican convention - Google got this person into the vicinty, but should have taken him to the exact page. This person got sent to the blog, but not to a specific page. I'd done a post recently on the Republican primaries and the possibility of selecting their candidate at the convention specifically answered this question. I'm not sure if the searcher found it. If he searched 'Missouri' on the page, he should have found it.
That's it for now, for previous such pages click here.
Watching how people get to this site offers an interesting view of how people search Google (and other search engines) and how Google handles them. Some of the more recent ones are below. For previous posts on google searches click here.
the millions sank awestruck in the dust -This person got to Susan and William Goldenberg Make Stunning Music a brother and sister team who had reminded me of another couple making music together in Richard Musil's The Man Without Characteristics. So I had a paragraph from the book that began with "The millions sank, as Nietzsche describes it, awestruck in the dust." I'd say this person found what they were looking for.
pennsylvania had to endora, sorry, endure this lady in 1972 - Who says civility is dead? This searcher (why do I think it's a woman?) even apologized to Google and corrected herself. I have no idea if she found the scurge of Pennsylvania. She got to Famous People Born in 1908, so maybe.
half moon bay beach - I've gotten this a couple of times recently. I have pictures of Half Moon Bay beach on this post and this one in moonlight. But they get sent, instead, to this post of Venice Beach, which does mention Half Moon Bay. Google, why isn't there an easy way for me to tell you that you sent them to the wrong page? I've since linked from the Venice post back to the actual Half Moon Bay beach posts.
aiff 2010 film festival scam? - Google, sometimes you exasperate me. I have posts about the aiff film festival scam. More than one. With scam in the title. And usually you send people to a film festival post that at least mentions 'scam.' But this poor reader was sent to a post of AIFF 2010 Features in Competition which doesn't mention or link to a post with the the scam aspects. Why? BTW, The Anchorage International Film Festival is legit, and weird and cool, but not the other AIFF which has changed its name to AIFA.
clearing customs in anchorage alaska flying from lower 48 - The same way you clear customs flying from New York to LA. Oh dear. There are still people who don't know that Alaska is in the United States. On the other hand, when traveling overseas where Americans aren't too popular, we can say we're Alaskans and we're always welcome. They got Flying to Light - From Seattle to Anchorage. That said, you can go through customs in Anchorage if you are flying from overseas, but not from the Lower 48.
morning discovery i shouldn't be alive - Now, that, with a little editing, would be a great first line for a novel, or at least a short story. This searcher from India (using a computer set on US English) got to this photo of sunset on Chester Creek in an archive that included an energy conference and Bridgman/Packer.
what does poop look like in litter box - This isn't as dumb a question as it might appear. They got to my post kitty litter technology, who knew? which included pictures of what I figured out, eventually, were clumps of cat piss, not poop.
money for being born in alaska- Let's get this clear. There isn't money for being born in Alaska. There is money - Alaska Permanent Fund Dividends - for people who live in Alaska and intend to stay indefinitely (ie - have no plans on moving away.) The person got to a previous Google searches post where I'd highlighted someone asking a similar question, and then linked to Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Application Time.
where's mane on the map - I'm sorry, I can't resist. (click to make the image clearer) Strangely, the searcher got a map of Africa. I've noticed, as a searcher, that Google gives you lots of choices of images, so I assume people might check out something different from what they were looking for. Is that serendipity or Attention Deficit Disorder?
hulling rice in a thai village - Usually Google does a pretty good job, as it did here. This searcher got to pictures of an old and a newer rice huller in this post (Sustainable Farming The Old Fashioned Way - Karen Village) at a Thai village.
how to wash a white rooster - No laundering instructions, but this person got to a post called Swinging Bulbul and White Rooster. There's a video of the bulbul swinging in the tree outside our Chiang Mai apartment window in 2008 and a photo of a white rooster I passed daily on my ride to work.
swoop me up 1. requesting someone to pick you up in their car. "Swoop me up for school in the morning."
The Urban Dictionary in its definition for the verb 'to ninja' echoes the first definition:
14. v. the act of stealing, swooping, or snaking something. usually the person who has been ninja'd upon does not realize it for a little while, and then they are mad when they find out that something of theirs has been ninja'd.
Hey man you ninja'd my chair. Why the hell did you ninja my book, Jordan?
Does this answer the question?
I've never thought about it before, and I'll check, but I'm guessing the reason there are no capital letters or question marks is that Sitemeter simplifies things. Sitemeter is how I see all these search terms and much more. You can see what Sitemeter tells me at the Sitemeter link in the right hand column below "Blogs of Friends and Acquaintences." Click on the number. Because I believe in transparency, I've left the data available to anyone.
Enjoy your day and reflect on how you phrase your searches and what you get.
My first post was on July 9, 2006. It was short. But as I look back, there was some hint of what was to come. It was about spittle bugs. And I'd googled enough to figure out what they were and gave some short background. I didn't have a digital camera so there were no pictures. I didn't know how to make links so there were no links. There were two posts that month.
This blog has covered a lot of ground in five years - in terms of geography, media, and content. I've met a lot of people through blogging. People I blogged about. People I met while blogging (at the political corruption trials, the Anchorage International Film Festival, for example). I met people who commented on my blog, and other bloggers.
While blogging has been around a lot longer than five years, when I started few people had a clear idea of what a blog was. Since then, lots of people have started blogs. Other Alaska bloggers have supported each other as our world exploded in August 2008 and we tried to figure out what we should be doing. Thanks for you kindnesses to me.
Anniversaries are good times to take stock, to rethink, to make changes. But one of the consequences of blogging is that a lot of things I should do, don't get done. ('Should' there is, of course, relative.) So, the serious analysis of blogging is on a pile of other unfinished things to do.
Therefore, I'm treating this like a birthday of sorts. I shouldn't have to work, I can just sit back and chit chat with friends. And maybe I can use these ramblings later for something more profound. But I have to do some heavier thinking this week, because fellow blogger Peter Dunlap-Shohl has invited me to a Hometown Alaska show he's hosting about Social Media, as he put it in a reminder email, "2:00 on July 13 also known as 'Next Wednesday.'" That's on KSKA, and those of you outside of Alaska can probably find it online eventually.
Well, I've tried to create an appropriate post here but there's just too much to say. I had to trash most of it. So I'll do a series of retrospective posts looking at different topics - including the struggle to discover what blogging is. (Of course, once we 'nail' it, then we stop learning, while blogging will continue on its merry way escaping our labels.)
So for now, I'm going to settle for identifying a few favorite and, I hope, representative posts from the first year.
My 'manage posts' page says I have 3025 published posts. Even remembering them all is hard. I get reminded of older posts as I watch where sitemeter takes people. And what makes something a favorite post?
Sometimes because I thought the topic was interesting, profound, or off-the-wall. The key ingredient was always that it rearranged my brain cells a bit so I saw the world a little differently.
Here are a few from the first year of What Do I Know?:
The Sierra Leone Refugee All Star Band Rolls Anchorage - This was coverage of a concert as I struggled to interpret the changing rules for video and copyrights in the age of Youtube, and how to use my tiny digital camera to take document events. I ended up editing what I had into short vignettes of different songs. But their music triumphs even my poor equipment and editing. This video has gotten almost 15,000 hits on YouTube, which for me is a lot. And because Anchorage is not too big, we got to meet the band members after the show.
Beyond the Headlines - Covering the Tom Anderson trial was my first intense immersion into one topic. Mostly I had to report what I saw going on, because I really didn't know enough to intelligently comment. But this post was a chance to reflect, just before the verdict was announced, on how it all might be impacting the various players involved. [Wow. I just reread this and it cries for an update now that we know what has happened for many of these players. While I didn't have a clue where things would go, at least I left things open ended enough to allow for what has since happened. Anderson has a few weeks more of home detention at his parents' place and then he's free and has work lined up with a family related business. I think he's going to be ok. The prosecutors had their days of glory in the three Alaska trials only to have it all come crashing down after the Stevens trial. Marsh committed suicide and Bottini and FBI agent Keppler are still subject to an ongoing investigation.]
Cow Parsnip - Heracleum - The blog gives me a chance to combine pictures and some research to show and tell about things I come across. This post continues to get hits and led to me to the Southeast Alaska Science Fair, where David Mendivil did a science project on Cow Parsnip and used (after asking for permission) some photos from this post.
Blogging is Like Fishing - After a year of blogging, I had some reflections. How little I understood things then. And still today.
I want to do more retrospective posts. Linking to old favorites is the easy part, but I also want to explore what all this blogging means, how it affects my life, and how I can clean up the clutter that has accumulated as I've tried out widgets to make things accessible. Some worked better than others and some definitely need to go.
And thanks for dropping by now and then. Without you, this would simply be my private journal - which isn't a bad thing. But without you, I surely wouldn't be so faithful to the blog.
Observant regular readers might have noticed I'm using a new font for the posts. Blogspot now offers a lot more fonts for bloggers to play with. I tend to like a more informal font and people have complained that the old font was too small. Bloggers, you can find them on your dashboard at Design → Template Designer → Advanced.
I'll probably experiment with this to see if there's a better permanent font. One of the problems is that you seem to have to pick a font for all posts. I understand that gives the blog a level of consistency, but more flexibility would be nice. I could, for instance, leave the old posts in the old font and then use the new font into the future. You can't go back to the old posts to compare because they've all been changed. Or I could use a unique font occasionally if it were appropriate for a particular post. It's like buying a new car and the history of all your old cars has been changed too. Same with the colors. It seems to be all or nothing. (Though you can set different fonts and colors for different parts of the blog as you can see in the second column, left in image above - page text, background, links, etc.)
[UPDATE 4pm - If this font stuff interests you, be sure to read Dean's comment below before you start playing around.]
[UPDATE Feb. 4 pm - You're right Dean, CGinWI, Anon-lurker, and Kathy. It was starting to get to me as well and I've change it (cherry cream soda) back to Georgia, but I made it 13 instead of 12 because 12 seemed too small. I learned from all the font lessons you sent me that I should go with a more common one (that's available on more computers) and let the words, not the font, do the talking. I learned a lot and I would also recommend Anon-lurker's referenced site to the list too, which also gets into accessibility a bit, meaning for those who have more trouble seeing the words than most people do. And it had this to say about Georgia:
Georgia
Georgia is like the other web fonts discussed so far in that it is wider than similar fonts meant for print design. Unlike the other web fonts, though, Georgia is a serif font, more along the lines of Times New Roman.
Georgia is somewhat easier on the eyes than Times New Roman, although high resolution screens with font smoothing technology also display Times New Roman quite well. One advantage of using Georgia is that it is not the default text of the browser. It is easier for users to see that the designer has applied some style to the font when fonts other than the default font are specified. Georgia ends up looking slightly more artistic than Times New Roman, though CSSIt's time we take back Times New Roman on the Web - external link on mezzoblue.com.) styling can certainly breathe new life into Times New Roman too. (See, for example the article It's time we take back Times New Roman on the Web - external link on mezzoblue.com.)]
Tina Delgado Update
When I monitor sitemeter to see how people get here and where they go, I'm reminded of old posts. Sometimes I have to look it up to remember what it's even about. And sometimes I realize I need to do an update. Should I make a new post too to alert people of the update? Usually, probably not.
For instance, I continue to get people googling, "Tina Delgado is Alive, Alive." When I did a post on the LA radio soundscape of the past (Oct. 2009), I couldn't find an audio. But I decided to check again today and found a 90 sec YouTube piece that will allow people to hear that, back then ubiquitous, proclamation. Here's a link to the updated Tina Delgado post. It's at the end of the video/audio that you get the real deal.
It used to be that sitemeter would take me to the google page the searcher found and I could see the hits and the other sites the searcher found as well. It also hightlighted the words in each post that were in the search terms. But now I just get sent to the page - or photo if it's an image search - they found. So I have less information about why or how they got here.
But here are some search terms - mostly google - that got people here, my thoughts, and where google delivered them.
we seen a pigeon egg on the floor what should wed do? - This Manchester searcher got to post on pigeon eggs in a nest in Juneau that had been blocked off, but probably didn't answer the question. Clearly though, one pigeon egg is too small for an omelet.
moral mushrooms - Got them to an archived post on mushrooms, but I'm not sure how moral any of them were. And there wasn't even a morel among them.
colorado house eating tiny insects - OK, so does this mean a Colorado house that is eating tiny insects? Or a house-eating tiny insects? I just got it. Termites. In any case, he got to my post on fruit flies or fungus gnats.
how compatible are 5 jan 1982 and 19 nov 1990 born - Eight years apart. Not too bad. But this Australian inquiry didn't get the answer on my post on people born in 1910.
bill allen alaska democrat - Maybe this is totally innocent, but I can't help conjuring up an image of Southern Conservatives (this came from Rocky Mount, North Carolina) turning Allen into a Democrat to show how depraved we are. There's nothing in my post about the sex charges against Allen being dropped that mentions either Republicans or Democrats. The ADN story the post links to does say,
"And he and other officials of Veco Corp. were some the most important sources of campaign contributions for the Alaska Republican Party and its candidates."
But the searcher didn't use the link to read the original.
ufo files denali state park 2009 - I didn't know Denali State Park was a UFO hotspot. My pictures were from June this year so it never got dark. But why shouldn't UFO's come by in the day too? I should have been looking up instead of down at the flowers. In any case, Google got the searcher to an archive page that came up blank when I searched it for "denali'.
what is jury meandering - Is this where the jury gets bored and they start wandering around the courtroom? This got to a post titled 'meandering' but nothing with a jury in it. Was this supposed to be jury tampering? Jerrymandering?
unnoticeable earth quack -There's a lot of these characters walking around, but you can't tell since many look like honest citizens. Anyway, this person got to a post on a noticeable earthquake in Anchorage.
what do americans call rapeseed oil - Got to a post titled, can you guess? What Do Americans Call Rapeseed? This ones from Prescot, Lancashire, UK. Sometimes people get a bulls eye.
what do americans call sex - another Brit got to the same place.
headline sept 2008 bailout -got this image from Sept. 2008.
is the family doomed - Someone in Cambridge, MA wanted to know and got to my affirmative post - The Family is Doomed.
in idaho about how many people know what a blog is - The only logical conclusion they can come to from the post they got is: none. This was called Does Idaho Exist - Why Everyone Should Study Philosophy? And the answer was no.
on 12th near commercial drive vancouver tree with red leaves and white seeds flowers in fall - Wow, someone is googling to find out about a specific tree in downtown Vancouver. And the person got this picture, which looks like red leaves, but I think it was a flower from tree at Wat Pa Dara Phirom north of Chiang Mai. The picture, in this case, has three of the words in the search terms - red tree flower. And they probably caught Vancouver from one of the archived titles.
wrapping japanese - I knew immediately what post they got to - one on Japanese cloth gift wrapping techniques. And I assume that is what they were looking for. But the image of someone wrapping up a Japanese man did flash through my head. And then I saw on stage a group of Japanese rappers. I'll assume they found what they were looking for.
i was born in alaska can i get the permanent fund money - This googler from a computer in O'Fallon, Illinois wants in on Alaska's oil money. Being born here isn't enough. You have to live here. Mostly. She got to a post about filing for an application.
opera house in oslo frozen ice - OK, so googling is something you do in the privacy of your own computer and you don't have to be perfect. But 'frozen ice'? As opposed to the unfrozen kind? Let's give the person a break. It was from Oakland, California where they never see ice outside the freezer. The person got to my post on the Norwegian Carl Nesjar's ice sculpture in Anchorage. (I better check and see if I wrote 'frozen ice.' Whew! I didn't.)
killer bugs a power stamp nasty thorms and im using them - This came from a computer in Tel Aviv. I'm sure it made sense to the searcher. He got to a post that did have some nasty thorns, but I'm not sure about the rest of what he was looking for. if u were born in 1909 in diead in 1920 how long ago was that - This one leaves me pretty much speechless. But Google got this person to a post about people asking how old they would be if they had been born in 1909.
what is alaska's daylight in years - I don't think this is like "what is Alaska's size in square miles." Maybe someone else can deconstruct what this person wanted to know. This surfer got to a page on Alaska's failed bill to end daylight savings time. Another hint from sitemeter - the location is listed as City: APO State: Armed Forces Pacific. Maybe it's a soldier who was just assigned to Alaska, or considering Alaska, as a next posting. caution paradigm invisible - This is just an interesting thought. I'd like to talk to this searcher to see what the person was thinking. The result may or may not have been helpful: Who Cut Off That Invisible Hand: Paradigm Outsiders Needed in Financial Crisis
sex drive shoe tree - some search terms exhaust even my fairly flexible imagination. Google directed this person to an archive page of posts in August 2008. There are three instances of the word drive. There's a 'shoe tree', but no sex.
I've gotten maybe half a dozen hits here from people googling "Lisa Murkowski Jew" or "Lisa Murkowski Jewish." These people get to a post about Murkowski courting the Jewish vote.
[UPDATE: Nov. 8 - I'm still getting people asking these questions. At least now they get to this page. If that's how you got here, please, leave a comment below or email me explaining why you wanted to know?]
Sitemeter offers a lot of information about people who get to this site, but it's mostly about their computer's features and their location, not their motivation.
Today I got someone who asked outright, "Is Lisa Murkowski Jewish?"
Why would someone want to know that? As a Jew whose grandparents all died in Nazi Germany, I get a bit edgy over inquiries like this. It seems to me there are two basic categories of people wanting to know:
Jews - Like any ethnic group in the US, Jews are interested in knowing about members of their group who are prominent and successful. Some may even be ready to support a candidate because she is Jewish on the (often erroneous) assumption that she would support issues they support. But Murkowski is not a name that most Jews would think of as likely to be Jewish. So my guess is that the people googling "Murkowski" and "Jew" are probably NOT Jews.
Non-Jews - I really don't know why non-Jews would google "Murkowski Jew." I'm sure there are good, reasonable explanations. Maybe readers might offer some reasons to help me out here. But I also know that there are still a lot of White Power websites out there.
I do think that a candidate's religion can be relevant in an election. If some candidates' religions play a strong role in their values and will impact decisions they will face as elected officials, then the public has a right to know this so they can vote for the candidates who most closely represent them.
But a candidate's religion doesn't necessarily predict how they will decide specific issues. Not every Mormon or Catholic or Hindu follows their religious dictates faithfully. And there are different factions in most religions that differ on important issues. One simply can't generalize from someone's religion. Every candidate is an individual. We need to see the candidates' records and the stands they take.
So I'm still curious about why someone would google "Is Lisa Murkowski a Jew?" What would it mean to these people to find out that she is or is not Jewish? Why not just google something like: "Lisa Murkowski religion"?
Just for the record, Lisa Murkowski is NOT Jewish. If you really need to know what her religion is you can check out her Wikipedia page.
I'm not sure I even want to post about this. I suddenly got a lot of hits today for the "helen louise mcdowell sanctuary, anchorage." I did a photo post on the park last year April when it first opened to the public as a sanctuary.
I have had people getting to this blog googling for the sanctuary every now and then, but never three in a row, and then more, and more, and more. Something's up, I thought. So I googled to see what else comes up with that search.
The lovely park bordering the New Seward Highway just before it gets to 36th (headed north), it turns out, was where a young woman's body was found this morning. Not the sort of news I generally cover. But being alerted to news by google searches is a blogging side effect to note for the record. My sympathies go out to the family. I can't think of much worse news for them.
My notes for this bi-monthly post mostly got wiped out because blogspot saves changes almost instantly. I hit something accidentally and everything disappeared. I hit Control Z (Undo) but it didn't come back. Blogspot instantly saved my changes and so wiped out everything I had saved for five weeks, but not posted. It was gone forever.
So, necessity being the mother of invention, I'm looking at this regular google search post from a different angle this month. It seems a lot of people have little black bugs. So, for the last three weeks of February, these are some of the ways people got to my post Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Fly or Fungus Gnat?
black bugs flying around house plants - New York black gnats in house - from somewhere in Eastern time zone. black tiny non-fruit flies - Louth, Lincolnshire, UK "fruit flies" "house plants" "fungus gnats" - Palisades Park, New Jersey fungi gnats - London fungus gnat - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania fungus gnats picture - Quebec fungus gnats versus fruit fly gnats black - San Mateo, California gnats bugs - from Friendswood, Texas. fungus gnats bananas - San Antonio, Texas fungus gnat larvae -Odessa, Texas house gnats - Pacific Coast Time how to eliminate tiny fruit fly -US eastern standard time insects homes colorado tin - Littleton, Colorado little flies in houseplants - Brggen, Germany little tiny black bugs that skip and fly and infest my house - Orlando, Florida photos of small black flying gnats - St. Louis, Missouri pics, gnats in my plants that bite - Houma, Louisiana [extension service said they don't bite] pictures of gnats and fruit flies - Vienna, Virginia picture of soil gnats - Seattle show me pictures of all gnats - Houston, Texas small black bugs in house - central Canada mall black bugs that look like fruit flies - Newport Beach, California small black flies related to fruit flies - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania small black insect fruit - from Nerang, Queensland, Australia small dark flies in my hous - Black Diamond, Alberta, Canada small flying black bugs in kitchen picture - Hawaii time zone small gnats february seattle wa - Boise, Idaho tiny black aphids on houseplants - Champlin, Minnesota tiny black flies in offic tiny black flies in seattle - Lynnwood, Washington tiny black flies on car - Bellingham, WA tiny black gnats - Liverpool, New York< tiny black insects in house thailand - Thailand tiny flies in houseplants? - US Central Time tiny fruit flies - mountain time tiny fruit flies - This one was from the US Dept. of Agriculture in Livonia, New York what are small black flying gnat like bugs in winter time - Kansas City, Missouri what are small black insects on my houseplant - Eastern Standard Time winter gnat -
And a few of the other terms that were interesting to me:
kiwi oatmeal - Got to my low calorie oatmeal post. There's a regular trickle of people searching for low calorie oatmeal, but this is the first one I've seen that included kiwi in the search. Good to know I'm not the only one who sees the potential of cooking kiwi in oatmeal. (The fruit, not the bird.)
what to do with tight stomach on botton left side and retum feel funny to can't move my bowels what to do - This one from Surprise, Arizona got to the main page.
stink pen with an ordinary matches - got to the picture (left) of S holding his bottle of homemade pig stink mitigator
pictures of elephants in the hospital having a baby - and I do have pictures of an elephant hospital in the Thai elephant conservation center post. But not having a baby.
Yahoo v. Google
This first one below is a Yahoo search with what the person got from the Yahoo search page. I don't see any of the words they were searching for (except 'a' and 'the' and 'to'.) I probably have some of those words on my blog, but you'd think they would highlight them in the search findings. i am a pharmacist in vietnam,when i live in the u.s.a do i have to study from the beginning pharmacy degree -
Here's a google search that also isn't really related to anything on my blog, but at least all six words - even if not in order - were on the page they found:
The genus is named for Hercules, who is reputed to have used these plants for medicine. Early in each year, Native Americans peeled and ate the young sweet, .... University Caucus Formation Love Fest · Alaska Community Services Lobbying ...
For people who are wondering how I know about these searches and where they come from, I use Sitemeter. You can go to the sitemeter button on the right hand column and see what information is available by clicking on the number which is around 176,000 now. Here's a picture of what it looks like. This is an image (not actual text) so the link there doesn't work. Actually, I could link it, but then you wouldn't find again, so go look. While Sitemeter gives the choice to have the data private, I leave it open so people can see what kind of data are collected.
In the last four or five days a new search engine is starting to show up in my sitemeter listings. (Well, it's new to my blog anyway) In Western script it's listed as Yandex. (Go down to referring URL):
When I click on the referring URL, I get a page like this:
Yandex is Russia’s largest internet company, whose websites attract a workday audience of more than 12 million users (as of the start of 2009) from Russia, Ukraine and other countries.
1. What Yandex Does
Give answers
Our major goal is to give answers to users’ questions.
Questions can be explicit or implicit. Explicit questions are typed right in Yandex’s search box and return answers to users in the form of search results. To answer implicit questions like “what is the weather like today”, “is there anything important going on now”, “can I drive downtown without traffic jams” Yandex offers its users specialized information services.
World-class technology
Russia is one of the few countries with homegrown world-class internet technologies. Besides Russia, local search engines lead in the US, China, South Korea and the Czech Republic.
Among the technologies developed by Yandex, many are pioneers in their niches. Yandex was the first to use Russian language morphology in information search (even before the internet came to Russia) and the first to launch parallel search (simultaneous search in multiple sets of information). Since 2002, clients of the Yandex.Mail service have been protected by Spamooborona – the first Russian internet anti-spam technology implemented in a mass online service, attracting a million-strong audience. The Yandex.News service uses a proprietary fact extraction technology to perform citation search and to form “press-portraits”. Yandex was also the first to introduce a system of text-based advertising in Russia. . .
Further down, I found this interesting:
3. Team
The Yandex team counts more than fifteen hundred people in different cities and countries. One of the documents that our new employees read first when they start with the company is “The Charter”, which begins with:
Peaceful coexistence
"Yandex is a very open company. Independent thinking, open exchange of opinions and attention to alternative points of view are strongly encouraged. Being a team player is prerequisite for all Yandex employees. Team means everyone working within the company, not only immediate colleagues. It is us together who make the Yandex loved by web users, respected by partners and clients.
People in different departments often see the same problem from different angles – this is exactly what makes Yandex develop successfully. That is why it is important to be tolerant and considerate of others’ opinion. Make an a priori allowance that a conflicting opinion is no less valid than yours."
Yandex’s major asset is its team of top notch specialists. Yandex looks out for professionals and assists in their growth by running regular specialist competitions and supporting the School of Data Analysis, founded by the company to offer free tuition for students with the goal to cultivate specialists in data analysis and information extraction from the internet, to conduct fundamental research in this field and to provide talent for Yandex’s applied projects.
Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia in terms of the number of engineers it hires. Currently, Yandex has branches in Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the US (Burlington, CA). [This continues here.]
Arkady Volozh is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Yandex
Yandex (Russian: Я́ндекс) is a Russiansearch engine, the world's second largest non-English-language web portal, and the largest Russian-language web portal. Yandex was launched in 1997. Its name can be explained as "Yet Another iNDEXer" (yandex) or "Языково́й (language) Index". The Russian word "Я" corresponds to English "I" (as the singular first-person pronoun), making "Яndex" a bilingual pun on "index".
According to research studies conducted by TNS, FOM, and Comcon, Yandex is the largest resource and largest search engine in Russian Internet, based on the audience size and internet penetration.
The closest competitors of Yandex in the Russian market are Rambler and Mail.ru. Although services like Google and Yahoo! are also used by Russian users and have Russian-language interfaces, Google has about 22.6% of search engine generated traffic, whereas Russian sites (including Yandex) have around 56.9%.[2][3] Yandex is therefore one of the national non-English-language search engines (with among others Naver, Seznam.cz and Baidu) that outrun Google in their countries.
One of the Yandex's largest advantages for Russian-language users is recognition of Russian inflection in search queries. [4]
Bet you weren't expecting to see this here. Me neither.
