Author: Db0

6 reasons why you shouldn't obsess about your Technorati Authority

Db04 Comments

The goodsIn recent days I’ve seen post after post (after post after post) of atheist bloggers writing a page full of links and putting it on their weblog. I was mildly amused at first but seeing people continue to do it, I decided to write a short post on why this is not only useless, but may actually harm you. First of all…

The goods
CC License: the ryan king

In recent days I’ve seen post after post (after post after post) of atheist bloggers writing a page full of links and putting it on their weblog. I was mildly amused at first but seeing people continue to do it, I decided to write a short post on why this is not only useless, but may actually harm you. First of all…

1. Who Cares?

I’m always confused on why so many people hunt this precious authority in the first place.  I can honestly say that I have never, ever found a blog from its authority. Nor have I ever rated a blog from it. Hell, I haven’t even had my opinion improve by noticing how much authority a site has.

Your technorati authority is an ego stroke, plain and simple. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about what anyone else’s authority is but his own.

On the other hand, do you know what makes me more interested in a blog?

2. Subscribers

When I see that little feedburner icon showing a decent number of subscribers I always think something like “If so many people have subscribed to her, she must have something interesting to say”.

What makes you more interested.

  • Seeing my Authority?
  • Or seeing how many subscribers I have?

Alright, alright, you caught me. I don’t really have that many subscribers (I’d wish). These are actually vjack‘s but I borrowed them to make a point [1. Btw, does anyone consider it insane how many subscribers that man has! He must be faking it somehow…I’m certain of it! :P] .

Your subscribers are much more important than your authority and you shouldn’t sacrifice the former for the later (see point 4)

3. Punishment

When you make posts like these you may assume that you are selflessly helping others bloggers get a better authority (see point 1) but what you have to have in mind is that both Search engines and Technorati are not idiots.

When Google sees a new blog having 300 links one after another, little bells start ringing, gears start turning and sooner or later you start suffering the results. Some of you might not care but seeing as you don’t really achieve anything with it, why do it?

If this kind of thing worked, do you know what would have been at the top positions? Splogs. How difficult to you think it is for 10.000 of them to join a blogroll and jump to the first places?
Don’t be annoyed that you can’t game the system. Be happy that the system cannot be gamed.

4. Annoyance

Have you had the situation where you see a new post from your favourite blog in your aggregator, opened it and was treated to a page full of linkspam? I know I have.

Have you had the situation where you see a linkback, get all excited about it, follow it back only to discover a linkfarm? I know I have.

It is simply annoying. Don’t treat your loyal readers like that.

5. Relativity

There’s millions of blogs on the internetubes at the moment and  thousands of them are vying for this all-important technorati authority. What most don’t realise is that people don’t care who’s on the top 10 (it’s usually tech blogs and lolcats) but rather who’s the authority on the subjects of one’s interests.

Technorati can’t tell you that.

6. You’re doing it wrong

Do you know why blogrolls are generally not counted by search engines and technorati? Because they are irrelevant. A Blogroll is there to show others who else you are reading or find interesting. A generic blogroll like the Atheist blogroll is something that you are not reading. You know it, I know it and Technorati knows it.

Why is it irrelevant? Because nobody uses the damn thing. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have followed a blogroll link and the same goes for the number of times I’ve had a link to me from a blogroll. If people don’t use them, why do you expect automated ranking to consider them?

Pretending this is not the case by posting your blogroll at various places and hoping they don’t notice is just wrong.  If you do want to help other bloggers do it right.

  • Link through the main article. A link through the body text counts 100 times as much as a blogroll link. This in not only because of google algorithms but because there links are used by your readers. They are useful.
  • Link to actual posts. Linking to the main page of a blog is not very helpful and most people just bounce away. If you want to do the most good, link to the permalink of a specific article you liked and that others might also enjoy.
  • Link often. There’s not better way to drive traffic to your favorite blogs than by linking to them in your articles. Point people to insightful posts they make or comment on something they write. Not only does this improve their authority, but it helps them be discovered.
  • Don’t overdo it. Linking to 100 different blogs in one month is much more efficient than linking to 300 blogs in one day.

A final word

Before I close this post I want to make sure that I haven’t given you the impression that blogrolls are not useful. Indeed a short blogroll of someone I like does make me click the links to see what I might discover. It is the humongous lists of hundreds of links that just make me blank out.

For example, the Atheist Blogroll is at the moment at 760 individual blogs! This number is pretty much unworkable for humans without extra tools but it does not mean it’s not useful otherwise.
However boosting the technorati authority is not one of them.

If you have any objections to these points or want have another one to mention, feel free to post them in the comments.

Why "our way of life" is not deserved

Db0

Mendicant outside the Kizhaperumpallam templeRecently, after my last argument on immigration, I ended up having a similar discussion with my girlfriend. While she is much more resonable in these debates, nevertheless she too had taken a protectionist stance on the whole issue of immigration. Most of the arguments were similar to the ones I mentioned before but there was one more thrown to the table that I think deserves refutation.

Mendicant outside the Kizhaperumpallam temple
CC License - credit: calamur

Recently, after my last argument on immigration, I ended up having a similar discussion with my girlfriend. While she is much more resonable in these debates, nevertheless she too had taken a protectionist stance on the whole issue of immigration. Most of the arguments were similar to the ones I mentioned before but there was one more thrown to the table that I think deserves refutation. It went as thus:

These immigrants, they know that in their own countries and under their own laws, the crimes they do here would be severely punished and this is why they come to our Germany and Europe. They know that here they will just get a “slap on the wrist” compared to where they come from.
If they commit crimes then it is only fair that we send them to the backward country they came from for we (Germans) have worked hard to have the kind of society we do and it’s not fair that they enjoy all the benefits we have achieved and ruin our system.[1. This is not an exact quote but rather the main gist of the argument as I understood it.]

On first take, one would be inclined to agree. Why should we tolerate immigrants who come to our developed countries in order to avoid the horrible societies they live in but yet they cannot respect our laws?

The answer is that this is begging the question. When one asks this, it is presupposed that the 3rd world society people live in is deserved and of their own fault and that when we, as Europeans or North Americans, have a good society, it’s because we are such great and hard-working people and we deserve our way of life.

This is false.

One has to have a very short memory or an ignorance of recent history to believe that the western or developed nations achieved this status by simply being more hardworking than the rest. The nasty truth is that the first world nations have achieved this through imperialism and shameless exploitation of other countries.

Similar to an Objectivist who deludes himself that his status in life is completely self achieved, without taking into account all the societal benefits and luck that allowed him to be who he is, so do the people who express such views completely fail to see that their nation’s status is intertwined irrevocably with the rest of the world and their history.

Great Britain would not have been so great if it didn’t have an India, Australia and Ireland to exploit. US America would not have been so united if the Indigenous population had not been systematically exterminated etc. and this of course does not stop just with history.
Even now wars are being waged by the first world nations, devastating whole societies just because the natural resources are too valuable. Brutal Dictators are being put into power just because they are friendly with the policies of the people in charge and agree to screw over their own countrymen so that first world nations can get the goods. Megacorporations are outsourcing their labour to 3rd world nations so that production, and thus costs, will be cheaper for us. I could go on…

When people from these nations flee their countries in search of a better life, we have to realise that their situation is not their own fault and our countries are partly to blame. Nobody lives in a vacuum and nobody deserves a bad life just because he has been born into it.

The only thing one can say is that they are partly responsible for their own status in life. I say “partly” because this is 90% luck as the where, how and when you were born plays the biggest role and you have no choice in this matter. Still, we have a modicum of control over our own life choices so one can feel at least a bit proud and deserving on what themselves have achieved.

But to extrapolate that and consider that one is deserving of the society one lives in is simply absurd. To further request that people who were not lucky enough to be indigenous in a western nation deserve to be treated worse (i.e. ostracized) is outright wrong.

Quote of the day: Economics

Db03 Comments

Quoth the Barefoot Bum

I am no more impressed by the assertion that “The vast majority of economists agree that capitalism is the most sound system there is for producing wealth and responding to demand,” than I’m impressed by the equally true assertion that the vast majority of theolgians agree that religious belief is the most sound system of creating and maintaining social, moral and ethical socialization.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is exactly the same way I feel every time someone brings in the “vast majority of economists that support capitalism” or whatever.

The Debate is Intensifying

Db0

Just thought I’d let y’all know that Intense Debate is stepping up their game.

The obvious thing that has changed is that they have completely revamped their hompage layout. It now feels more clean although imho the old one was not looking bad either. You can take a look at how it looks for me from the thumbmnail below.
Nevertheless, I like the new one as well and I can’t be unhappy when finally my OpenID works as well 😀

My Dashboard

The also have support for Akismet which is awesomeness. Anyone cooperating with the WordPress guys is top man in my eyes. Any money that goes to them is certainly coming back to me in the form of a better WordPress.
Plus, Akismet is pretty fucking efficient 😉

But the best part is yet to come. I’ve been waiting for their new version of the WordPress plugin since June for many sweet stuff has been foretold about it. SEO on comments, keeping your comments in your wordpress etc. Well, apparently this is coming out today as well, or at least the announcement dates. I can’t help but feel that this is partly in retaliation to the recent Disqus upgrade. Hopefully they did not rush this out for a very buggy plugin will only turn people off.

Still, this plugin has great shoes to fill. Reading about the Disqus features, my mouth waters and I need IDC to not simply catch up, but overtake them. I have faith that they will achieve it as I know some of the names working on it and that makes me feel hopeful. Add to that all the ideas I’ve given them over the past few months and I’m certain that great things are a-coming.

Still, this rapid pace of upgrades only shows how good open competition between startups is for the rest of us 😉

IDC is growing better by the week it seems and I keep finding more uses of it constantly. So, get in the game already and join my growing list of converts. Don’t worry, no mind-altering techniques have been employed, other than my charming wit of course 😉

A Quickie

Db01 Comment

OK, on rapid succession before I hit the bed:

  • I finished version 0.9.5 of Complexlife. It now includes support for stumbleupon and reddit, an option to simplify the settings menu by hading the extra options and some code improvements.
    This is 5 minor versions since the fork. Go me!
  • I finally added a favicon on the Division by Zer0. I wanted to do this for a while but I never got around to it and I also didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to use. Finally a guest post from Pharyngula gave me the idea to use the atheism symbol which looks cool enough.
    It took me a while to figure out what the correct code is but a little Google prayer and I got my divine answer.
  • We now have 22 Atheists in Scoutle which is pretty impressive if you consider it was only 4 days ago that I mentioned it. However the more impressive news is that found a fellow Epicurean blogger through the new network I setup. Coolness!
    So, for the rest of you who haven’t joined yet. What are you waiting for?! Git!
  • I now have an actual Comment Policy so I’d appreciate any opinions on it 😀

G’night!

Threads and Comments.

Db07 Comments

Threaded comments are the next best thing to happen to blogs since trackbacks. It provides fluid and concise interaction and the ability to keep easy track of the discussion and the commentors engaged.

yeah man, like totally
CC - Credit: skampy

Let me get this out first: I love comments! It is very enjoyable to interact with people who happen to read my little corner in the internetubes. Yes, seeing from the stats that 100 or 200 people have read an article is nice but how do I know if they agree or disagree. How do I know if I made a horrible mistake in thinking or gave someone a fantastic insight without realising it?

This is why, if there’s any thing I’m constantly improving here is the commenting experience. I wish it to be as easy as possible to see what others have to say and hopefully strike a conversation and this is why I have found Intense Debate Comments (IDC) to be so great for that purpose.

I’ve explained before how IDC owns Blogspot native comments and now I want to explain to you why IDC is so good if you’re as big a comment addict as I am.

I was reading this excellent post about getting more comments on things you write and it gives some solid tips of which many I plan to follow in the near future. The very first tip was the most important imho as well

1. Be active in your own comment threads.

If you’ve commented recently here you’ll have noticed that I very rarely leave a comment unanswered. The exceptions usually are when the discussion is at an end or when there’s nothing to really reply but “thanks” (and sometimes I even do that). Now, normally, in a classic commenting system, comments just fall under each other which makes them not so easy to read through. People utilise blockquotes or threading hacks to make this easier but most of the time it only become marginally better.

If I write a post and then go to bed and get 10 comments, in the old system the only thing I can do is create a long reply and just reply to each commenter by name (classic way is by prepending @name before each reply or with blockquotes). This is generally not only time consuming but doesn’t look half as good as it does with threading. Using a threaded system I can reply to each commenter directly and have it look as it should: a personalised reply. If that person decides to reply more, this allows us not  have a conversation at this point which just flows so much better. Just see my latest post as an example.

But there’s another hidden bonus when you use intense debate. When you directly reply to someone, he automatically gets an email informing him of that, along with the reply text and what they replied to. As someone who is using his emails as a primary notification system, I can tell you that being able to see their comment along with my reply makes me very eager to reply. If you want to maintain reader interaction, there’s nothing better.
Oh, and did I tell you that people can reply to comments via replying to that email? Can’t get any sweeter.

But the benefit of threading do not end here. Do you know those very complex and long-winded discussions where each person end up quoting the others points in order to reply to each. Have you noticed how each point becomes a discussion of its own and the whole answer becomes pretty much impossible to follow? Nevermind that the length of each comment is doubled due to the quotes and the extra time and checking it takes. I’ve had that. A lot. It’s ugly.

However, recently in a very…err, intense debate I asked my opponent to stop using blockquotes and instead reply once to each specific point he wanted to and I would do the same. If one of us wanted to reply to subpoints in a reply, we were to split it with blockquotes to two different replies so that the opponent can then reply to each if necessary.

To my eyes, the results were much, much more readable. You can see that even though the discussion went for quite a length and there were many points to be discussed, a third party can easily start reading a point to its end without getting confused with the rest. Compare that with this lengthy argument I had at Dailight Atheism and decide for yourselves which one is more easy to follow.
Plus, I practically reduced the size of the discussion in half by taking away all the quotation and it went much quicker due to the email notifications. I’ve now made this a comment policy at the Division by Zer0:

If you’re going to have an argument here, thou shalt use threaded individual replies and keep thy quotes to a minimum.

Of course it pays that I have a variable width template here and the comment box can be wide enough so that threading does not end up squeezed at the side. Not unless I get a 20 deep thread I guess 🙂
Still, I never understood why people go for fixed width templates and sacrifice all their screen real-estate.

I’m going to close this article here for now but rest assured that this just one of the benefits I’ve discovered with the threading through IDC. I’ll go into them in a future post.

15 Resources for Atheist Bloggers

Db07 Comments

blogosphereI thought I’d compile a list of resources for Atheist bloggers which might be useful for new members of the Atheosphere or might have been overlooked by the old ones.

Joining and utilizing these services should give you more exposure and interaction. Of course it’s not a magic recipe but if you have good content that fails to get noticed this should help.

Participate

This is the first and most important tip I can give you. If you want more exposure and readers, the best thing you can do is be a part of the Atheosphere. Don’t assume that just by writing on your own blog people are going to flock to your brilliant writing. Well, it might happen but it’s going to be much more easy if you return the favour.

How do you participate? Just read what others have to say and then comment if you have something interesting to contribute. Bloggers are generally delighted to receive comments, even it it’s the occasional “well said” and if you seem to become a regular at someone’s blog, they’re bound to visit your site to see who you are and what you’re all about.

If you want to refute, analyse or improve on what someone else said, don’t leave it as a comment. Trackback instead from your own blog. Write a normal blogpost and aim a link at what someone else has written (don’t aim at their main blog unless you have to. Go for the permalink.) A trackback is sure to make the author of the original post follow it back to see what you wrote.

Finally, if you find something particularly good or interesting, do not shy from voting, sharing, redditing, digging or anywhere else he has been submitted. Indeed, subscribe in all of these services beforehand so that it’s easy to vote up people with interesting ideas. Simply, do as you’d like other to do with your posts 😉

Atheist Blogroll

This is the classic first stop for most atheist bloggers. Joining the blogroll will not give you much more than visibility at the many blogs that have it displayed. Unfortunately since technorati changed their algorithms, appearing there does not help your authority.

The Atheist Blogroll is however a resource that some of us use as a way to create or organise other services for the Atheosphere.

Planet Atheism

Many people subscribe here for their daily news reading. By joining, you’ll appear at the feed reader of many pairs of eyes so there’s not reason not to. Unfortunately lately I haven’t been able to get in contact with the admin so hopefully this is still being administered.

Carnival of the Godless

You should use the Carnival to give some of your most interesting posts more visibility. Every two weeks these are compiled into a grand carnival and presented to the world. Posts submitted to the carnival generally get around 200 views from my experience. Not much for someone already estabilished but a nice boost for the more invisible of us 🙂

Atheist Nexus

Join the Nexus and then also join the Bloggers group to find other like you. Taking part in the forum discussions is also a great way to find blogging material to write about. This is what I’m doing anyway 🙂

Technorati

Go there, claim your blog and grab some widgets. Technorati is great at giving you some accurate stats about your popularity. Many prefer the authority widget (or bragging widget as I like to call it) but for me the simple linkcount widget is enough and a nice way to see how many people have found your post interesting enough to link back to it.

Once you join Technorati do not forget to favorite your…well, favorite blogs. Bloggers love when you do that and you may be rewarded in some way 😉

You can find me here.

Twitter

This has only started getting more popular with the Atheists lately. Most use it to notify about their new blogposts but it also serves as a handy public channel for quick discussions. I’ve had many a quick answer as well as some good notifications for events of interest. And, hey, you can’t go wrong with befriending God and Satan either 😉

You can find me here and I’ve also created a delicious tag for all the atheists in twitter. Use it to quickly populate your contacts and then tag yourself.

MyBlogLog

You can pretty much see this on every blog nowadays and most people use it for the same reason, to have the nice little avatars of their recent visitors. I’ve honestly yet to find another function to it as for statistics wordpress and google analytics give me much more powerful tools and for free. Nevertheless, that widget is quite nice as you can easily discover who reads you and perhaps find some interesting new blog from there.

Still, if you find any other great use except for the visitors widget, let me know 😉

You can find me here.

Facebook Blog Networks

If you’re on Facebook and like me you don’t like to add friends you don’t actually know, the Blog Networks should be a nice alternative to show your support for your fellow atheist bloggers. Join, add your blog and join the network of the blogs you’re reading meticilously. Leave a comment and strike up a connection.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here as well as my profile.

Scoutle

This is the newest blog helping tool I’ve found. As I understand, it is quite new as well but it has some promise. I’ve blogged about it recently so I won’t repeat what I said but I think it would be a good addition to your sidebar as it’s automated and the more Atheists that join it now that it’s still new, the more visibility we’ll gain in general.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here.

Blogged

A nice way to get a rating for your blog. If your blog is not already in you can add it and in due time an editor of the site will give it a rating. It does not stop there of course as people who read you can rate and review your blog which should give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Return the favor and then everyone is happy 🙂

You can find my profile here.

Voting Services

There’s a bunch of Popularity services that many atheists use to improve their visibility. You probably know most of them already but just in case, I’m going to mention some of the more useful ones.

It is in all of our best interests to join these social networks and vote each other up. We have 750 Atheist Blogs at the moment and if just 200 of these people were active on the voting services, the atheist voice would be hitting the headlights every day. It is a sad fact that between all of us, we are still invisible.

Reddit

I found that there is a reddit devoted to atheism just recently and it seems to be quite active. I wasn’t using reddit that much before but I started just for this. The good thing about reddit is its usability. A post that has the reddit buttons (like this one *wink*wink*) can be voted up or down just with a simple click which should make the action so painless that you have no reason not to do it.

Also, even if the buttons of reddit do not exist on the blog template, by putting the bookmarklets on your toolbar, you can vote without leaving the page either. Don’t forget to be bold as well. If the article is good enough and has not been submitted, do so yourself.

The Atheist Spot

Another voting system especially for Atheism. This is quite new and still in the process of building up a readership. It’s not as easy to use as reddit but it is certainly less abused. With the addition of the handy social buttons it becomes a bit of an easier process.

Stumbleupon

You may not think it but Stumbleupon can give you significant traffic if enough people vote your articles up. The same also apply for other people who have their articles submitted. Since stumbleupon has a limit on how many times one can submit a specific site, the page author cannot do so for every one of his articles. This, if you read something interesting, press that “thumbs up” and if it’s not there, submit it.

I don’t know about the rest but I’m delighted every time I see visitors coming from stumbleupon in a new article. I always go and thank the one who submitted it 🙂 Remember that an post on stumbleupon gets more visitors depending on how many people have given it the thumbs up. My Firefox article of one year ago got 2000 visitors in the first 2 days and I’m still getting visitors now to it (just because someone voted it up again recently). So if you see something in there, give it the thumbs up.

Another way to help is join the network of atheists in stumbleupon. Not only will you find many great articles from there but the more of us that are there and vote each other’s sumbissions, the more visitors all of us get.

You can find me here.

Blogger’s Choice Awards

I’ve already written about this in depth so I won’t repeat it here. I will only mention that there has been very little activity on this front and it’s a pity. The same things I said before about mobilizing the Atheist presence on the Internet applies here too. Consider that the Atheist Nexus at the moment has 3000 members but the highest rated Atheist blog has had just 24 votes.

PMOG

This is not strictly a bloggers resource but I consider that it has great potential to increase visibility to blog articles, including the ones that were written a while ago. It also has the potential to make your web surfing a bit more enjoyable.

Epilogue

So here ends my little tour of the resources I use for my daily traves in the Atheosphere and beyond. I hope that I’ve given new bloggers some starting points and old geezers some ideas that might not have considered before. If you have anything I have missed myself, I’d love to hear it and perhaps update this small list.

Cheers!

Quote of the day: Polar Bears

Db0

Fucking hell, I actually LOLed twice with this.

If I was an asshole God, know what I would have sent? A plague of polar bears. Yup. Polar bears falling out of the sky all over in Egypt. And they’d all be holding Qurans.

Emphasis mine. I’m telling you, that girl has an Allah-given gift for comedy.

Polar Bears! LoL!