Diesel Sweeties just doesn’t seem to understand the true existential pain of being an evil robot, relentlessly blunt and unable to fully relate with other human beings. That’s the only explanation I can find for their latest offering. On a completely unrelated subject, I’d just like to take this opportunity to apologise to many of my straight male friends.
The most interesting contribution to the debate on the Bloggies so far has to be on Metafirda. She has produced a list of all the categories and ranked each of the nominees by their position on Blogdex. If the Bloggies are just a popularity contest then her theory is that she should be able to predict the winners. I did something similar last year by comparing Oscar winners with their positions on the IMDBs top 250 films.
Now of course this kind of enterprise is rife with assumptions. The first assumption is that the number of links to a site measures its current popularity. Clearly this isn’t necessarily true – links that were popular in the past but haved waned recently will get high positions. Newcomers will not. Unfortunately these figures are all we have to work with – we don’t have access to the stats of each and every site on display (and not all of the sites are comparable anyway).
Nonetheless an analysis of any differences between the results of the Bloggies and Blogdex’s rankings should help illustrate the kind of processes that are going on – they should give us a clearer idea of what it is that the Bloggies are measuring and more to the point, whether different categories are more involved than others. For example – while “Best Webring” is almost certainly going to be given to the ring that most webloggers have chosen to subscribe themselves to, “Best Tagline” will probably be voted for people judging the respective merits on the spot. I’d be really interested in seeing a comparative tally of the results with the predictions after the awards – perhaps as a combined Fairvue/Metafirda production. End
It may be less high-tech than the Segway, but there’s a lot to be said for the reinvention of the tricycle.
What would it mean to go professional as a weblogger. I’ve been thinking about this today – would it be possible to get £800 a month from people for weblogging? That’s pretty much the least amount of money that I can live on (Londoners would understand). And would it be possible to get that amount of money consistently? Could you make a career out of this stuff? And how would it work? Amazon donations? Tipjars? Paypal subscriptions? And what would be the obligation in return?
Pop Quiz – if the 1000000000th second of my life will be around twenty past two in the morning of Saturday March 27th 2004 then when was I born? [Useless dates related to your birthday]
And another day’s mail comes and goes without any money arriving.
Don’t waste your time here – go and read something funny.
There are a number of people out there who don’t like the Bloggies. A fair number of people didn’t like them last year either. Just as a matter of interest, I’d be really interested in hearing some of the reasons people think they’re a bad or ridiculous idea. Mail me with your opinions. I’m not saying I’ll reply to them all, but I might write something longer about some of the debate surrounding them later if I get some good comments.
And the frustration continues… A good meal after the frustrations of this morning, everything was looking shiny and new – and more important manageable. But it only takes one e-mail to throw everything up in the air again and leave me dealing with potential financial collapse.
I have a huge overdue bill for web-hosting to deal with at the moment. It was supposed to be paid at the beginning of the month, but uncleared cheques meant that it turned up in my inbox several days later – unpaid. By the time this had happened, it looked like I would have to wait until I got paid the final time for my last full-time job. Although this meant leaving things to the last possible minute, it should have worked – except I didn’t count on not getting paid by any of the people I’ve recently worked for in time for the end of the month.
In essence this means that both plasticbag.org and barbelith.com may disappear on or shortly after the first of the month – precisely the same time, in fact, that my rent will fail to clear. This is not the right way to live one’s life.