brainwagon

My popularity over the last thirty days appears to be falling. Perhaps I should bath more regularly. Or maybe I’m just more boring this month. Update: Or, maybe people are outside.

We need a new word. The Wall Street Journal has an article about blogging as the new corporate job. I’m not happy with applying the same word to what I do and what corporate public relations offices do. To me, blogging is about exploiting the Internet as a cheap publishing medium for individuals. While coporate […]

I’ve begun to wonder if many so-called A-list bloggers do nothing more than wander around the country having dinner with one another. One blogger expressed some dissatisfaction with one of these dinners and his words struck a chord with me: Everything I love about blogging is reversed at a blogging dinner. I love that blogs […]

I must admit, I’ve been a teeny bit perplexed by one of my website statistics: the majority of my traffic appears to still be using Internet Explorer. I would like to think that brainwagon readers are a bit more discerning, and would shift to using Firefox or Mozilla, both much better choices. But over at […]

The EFF has an interesting article on Howto Blog Anonymously. What’s a more interesting question is why would you want to? It’s not that I can’t think of a reason, I’m just curious as to why people feel that they need to talk about something, and then choose to disassociate themselves from their words. Sure, […]

Over at Contentious, Amy is trying to answer the age old introspective question facing most bloggers: “Why do you blog?” I meet quite a few people who don’t understand why anyone would write a blog. To them, I mostly ask “Why do you bother talking?” Let’s be brutally honest: most of us don’t have anything […]

Russell Beattie mentioned Mike Rowehl’s new feedhacks.com blog. His major hack is a WordPress plugin that allows you to include RSS feeds in posts. For instance, by entering the tag <feedster search=”vandewettering”>, you get: Nifty!

A couple of days ago I commented on the whole podcastalley hullaballo and the role that popularity plays in the actions of blogger/podcasters. You can go back to here if you missed it all, or just wanted to review. My point was really that pursuing popularity (or more specifically, superficial measures of popularity) was kind […]

Dave has begun to come to his senses: …it all comes back to what I keep saying – do your best work, put it out there, serve the audience you care about well and then let it ride. Worry about your audience, not your ranking. Eventually everyone will realize the bogosity of the latter and […]

I’d like everyone who has downloaded one of my podcasts to run to your nearest podcasting rating service and vote my podcast down. Give it a one. Give it no stars at all. Drive it straight to the bottom. Or don’t. I just don’t care. Frankly, I don’t look at these things. I just look […]

On a suggestion from a reader, I’ve decided to try to get better statistics on my RSS subscribers by managing my RSS feed via feedburner.com. For now, what this means for you, my subscriber is that instead of my normal RSS feed, you can use the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainwagon to get the syndicated version of my […]

I went to check the PubSub LinkRanks for brainwagon today, only to find that my ranking, which had been floating in the mid 50,000 range, was now ranked closer to the 992,461. A closer inspection of pubsub indicates that positions beginng at 10 are all occupied by mystery domain deai.com. Methinks somebody has been gaming […]

I’ve noticed something which I sort of find surprising: this website has no daily readers. I’ve been scanning the logs of all the people who come to my website, and by far the majority, probably 90% of all hits, come here via Google searches. Not from hitlists on websites, or directories, or anything else, but […]

Michael Gorman explains his previous article as “satirical”. I think that his piece could be described as many things, but satire is not one of the qualities it could be said to possess in abundance. One wonders why he bothered to respond at all via the Internet, given that he only believes that edited/published work […]

This post marks the 1000th entry in my weblog. Quite a milestone for me. I hope you all have found something useful or thought provoking in it. As an idea of what topics interest me the most, here is the list of the top 10 categories: Category Name Count Link of the Day 147 General […]