I’ve noticed that many bloggers in the Atheosphere are quite prolific and popular, but instead of doing what most would expect, that is move to their own domain and manage their own hosting, they either remain in free hosting services (like the Atheist Ethicist) or just get their own domain but remain hosted (like Atheist Revolution). To my continuous surprise, there’s quite a lot of them.
This intruiges me and I would like to know the reasons why you belong to the above group. To this end, I’ve started the following poll [1. If you choose point 7, I’d love to hear why in the comments] [2. Note that you can select 2 choices]:
[poll id=”2“]
Now rest assured that there is a method to the madness . I am not just doing it for my own amusement but I will actually utilise the results I get for your benefit. I will reveal the how and why in one week, once I have (hopefully) enough answers.
if you are an Atheist who has been blogging for a while, has even a medium audience and still uses a free blog hosting (wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal etc), please take the poll. You can make up to two selections and your answers and comments will affect my follow up post.
I would really appreciate if you spread the word to others in the Atheosphere that might not read this, so as to increase the sample.
Cheers!
UPDATE: I replaced the 6th question (currently 0) with “Other” please use that if the current choices don’t represent your reasons.
If the image wasn’t funny enough by itself, the quote kills me.
If the image wasn’t funny enough by itself, the quote kills me.
– Hello, Ikea help line? I can’t put my bæd together, the optical illusion wasn’t in the box.
– Ah, that happens a lot with our non-euclidian R’lyeh product line. Hold on, I connect your with our dedicated support.
– Ia, Ia ! Cthulhu ftaghn ! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl ftaghn ?
– Damn Swedish.
Born in Greece, he now lives in Germany, and has been in the tech industry most of his life. His site is not your average blog, ranging in topic from the his love for music to the immigration policies of Europe. His blog is an homage to how the power of technology to connect people and the pursuit of living a thoughtful life.
Born in Greece, he now lives in Germany, and has been in the tech industry most of his life. His site is not your average blog, ranging in topic from the his love for music to the immigration policies of Europe. His blog is an homage to how the power of technology to connect people and the pursuit of living a thoughtful life.
All I can say is that I’m terribly ashamed of making a boatload of spelling errors. I honestly don’t know what got into me. Seriously, it’s not that English is my second language, I generally spoke england very best. I think I must have been tired or something.
If I can't gratuitously spam you with my pics on my own interview, when will I? 😛Anyway, you’ll notice that in this interview Lenny listened to the advice of commenters and customized the interview to my own interests and persona and as a result I got to bore you all to tears with Epicurism and tech stuff. 😛
Nevertheless, this kind of customized interview makes it very better for the interviewed person to give more details as they are writing about things that excite and interest them. I won’t hide that some of the original questions (that were replaced) left me with a blank. For example, I don’t have any favourite books on Atheism 🙂
OTOH, the new questions ended with me writing a goddamn chapter 😛
So, head over to read about my wonderful personality and then come back to tell me how much I rule/suck. I’ll be waiting.
The Beijing Olympics are growing more and more ridiculous by the day. The International Olympic Committee seems to have a perverse idea of what it means to represent the event. They have the impression that it means total behaviour control of anything having even a remote connection to Olympics.
It really looks like for the IOC and the Chinese totalitarian government is a match made in Nirvana. It really goes to show how the IOC wants the rest of the world to act and how they would if they could…
Can I ask why people are falling over each other to host the damn things? It is simply an extravagance of corruption, steroids and shallow nationalism. The costs are extreme and the aftermath is a country’s economy in ruins.
You know what the Olympic games are? A parasite. They move into a country and start sucking the life’s blood of the nation, replacing it with cheap nationalist pride. Once bursting red with money, they detach and go hunting for their next victim, leaving their previous host’s economy in ruins and no t angible benefit. All the while the parasite grows in power and starts pushing other hosts around to accomodate it.
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…
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.
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.
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 shouldwe 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.
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 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 😉
The Beijing Olympics are growing more and more ridiculous by the day. The International Olympic Committee seems to have a perverse idea of what it means to represent the event. They have the impression that it means total behaviour control of anything having even a remote connection to Olympics.
Recently, after 
Just thought I’d let y’all know that 
