Category: Blogging

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As is often the case, I follow a day featuring an Instalanche with a day of nothing, just so I can sqander those residual hitz on emptiness.

Still, you could always click over to Draft Matt Blunt 2008 to see some of the reasons why Missouri Governor Matt Blunt would make a good president in 2008. Here are two to start:

1. He’s not Rod Blagojevich.
2. He’s not Jim Doyle.

Happy Star Wars Day from Michele Catalano.

I don’t normally read left-of-center blogs, but I find Blame Bush! oddly compelling….

Tomorrow will mark the beginning of my third year with this blog.

Here’s the first post as proof.

Two years of thoughtful commentary, witty insight, and modesty, and still the same eight readers.

Thanks, guys.

Looks like John Cole isn’t on Hewitt’s side either.

I might describe this as a conservative crack-up, but I’m not a professional radio host.

Apparently, Instapundit is not on Hugh Hewitt’s side.

Let’s settle this like Floridians; one gets a box cutter, the other gets a gun store.

The first weekly Carnival of the Honkers is up at angelweave.

Hurry, for this will probably be the only Carnival of the Honkers, which makes it a blogosphere collectible.

So as I monitored my daily hits, I could have wondered why I was not getting any hits from my trackback to a VodkaPundit post in this post yesterday defending Kansas and attacking those who would attack Kansas. As Matt at Overtaken by Events discovered, the guest blogging author of the original post closed comments and eliminated all trackbacks.

Poor form, Peter.

Both Richard Roeper and Neil Steinberg spend some of their columns today pooh-poohing blogs.

Roeper:

And of course, blogs. By law, every story about the news business must include mention of the blog as the way of the future.

The media landscape is changing, and that’s a positive thing. We’re supposed to be living in a democracy in which all voices have an equal opportunity to be heard. The more platforms in the public square, the better.

Still, we need to keep a sense of perspective. The new media doesn’t yet have a fraction of the clout, power, success and influence still enjoyed by the old media.

Steinberg:

On Feb. 14, 1978, President Jimmy Carter and his guests spent an evening in the White House watching “Citizens Band,” a movie about a CB vigilante named Spider who roams the airwaves pouring abuse on those whose conduct falls short of his lofty standards of radio etiquette.

I thought of the CB craze while watching an excruciating CNN “Inside the Blogs” report on a blogger — someone who keeps an online diary — who was accredited and given access to a White House press conference, making him “perhaps the first blogger to cover the daily press briefings.”

Yowza. Though they also let in a turkey at Thanksgiving, CNN found this particular entrance highly significant, perhaps some kind of turning point, and as the protracted, painful segment unfolded, the reporter tried to present the usual piranha frenzy in the so-called “blogosphere” by actually scrolling down, on air, blocks of verbiage on her computer screen. “It’s hard to read,” she said as the text flew by.

Is it ever. So why was CNN fooled? I know producers have time to fill, but they stumbled onto a common misperception that deserves note. Stuck as always in the jail of the present moment, we mistake White House or presidential involvement for a sign of importance or respectability.

Wow, the blogs as citizen’s band radio. I posted a comment of that stripe years ago one some blog, but it’s lost to the ether. A little Google searching shows that a high number of other people have had the same insight. On the other hand, not many of us have twice-a-week columns for a major metro tabloid.

CNet reports: Spyware infiltrates blogs:

Hackers are using blogs to infect computers with spyware, exposing serious security flaws in self-publishing tools used by millions of people on the Web.

The problem involves the use of JavaScript and ActiveX, two common methods used to launch programs on a Web page. Security experts said malicious programmers can use JavaScript and ActiveX to automatically deliver spyware from a blog to people who visit the site with a vulnerable Web browser.

Spyware tools also have been hidden inside JavaScript programs that are offered freely on the Web for bloggers to use to enhance their sites with new features such as music. As a result, bloggers who use infected tools could unwittingly turn their sites into a delivery platform for spyware.

Well, when you’re not technical and you’re cutting and pasting code from unknown Web sites into your blog templates, you’re assuming that the code’s author hasn’t put a little something extra in it.

This is not new; remember when I uncovered that Bravenet counters were delivering pop-up ads when used on blogs?

No? My moment in the investigative sun, and there was a solar eclipse that day.

Lileks today:

Wednesday will have a special surprise, and yes, I know I’m sounding like a grade school teacher.

Exclusive speculation: THE BLEAT IS GOING GROUP BLOG.

You read this groundless speculation here first.

Ann Althouse posts some pictures from my beloved home state (Wisconsin, dear Gentle New Readers, if any).

Down here in the relatively tropical Missouri, I just closed the window in the home office. We’ve had them open quite a bit this spring so far.

Longtime reader, friend, and now cash cow Cagey writes in:

I was doing a Google Image search on the simple topic “legs” and there on page 6 of the results was your lovely wife. Looks like she was dusting the hood or something…

Heather had mentioned getting a large number of hits from this particular Google image search, and we speculated about the type of person who would just search for legs and go through lots of pages of hits. Apparently, the answer is a happily-married person with a lucrative engineering career who can afford some hush money if he doesn’t want his wife to know what kind of image searches he does.

Now excuse me while I investigate PayPal’s policies regarding receiving payment for silence services rendered.

A comment on my beautiful wife’s blog:

Dude i dont know who you are but to sit and make evry post about peta is probably the dumbest thing you could do ecpecially since you arnt posting about other animal rights groups like SHARK, ASPCA and so on. DO you not hav anything better to do than blog about something you clearly no nothing about? I am vegan and at the same time I respect peoples opinions they give me bc they are smart educated people and I always have time to listen to their opinions. I would never belive the things you post and write bc there is nothing you can back it up with. You just copy and paste things on your blog making it as though you know what your talking about. Grow up stop judging peoples lifestyles especially poeple you dont know. Dont judge a lifestyle you know nothing about either. You need to learn that everyone deserves respect for wanting to make a difference in the world and make some change.

You blog is as pathetic as it gets…

The troll mandates for you….	The troll then says….
Dont judge a lifestyle you know nothing about either.	You just copy and paste things on your blog making it as though you know what your talking about.
I respect peoples opinions they give me bc they are smart educated people and I always have time to listen to their opinions.	Grow up stop judging peoples lifestyles especially poeple you dont know.
You need to learn that everyone deserves respect for wanting to make a difference in the world and make some change.	You blog is as pathetic as it gets…

All this, and the troll was undereducated in the mysterious ways of English. Fortunately, gentle reader, I know you are smarter, better spoken, and have a better grasp of logic. Just in case, though, I do not have comments enabled to spare me my illusions.

As Farrah explains at Cam Edwards.com:

To run an effective, popular blog takes a significant amount of time. Time that is taken away from revenue generating activities (like a day job) and that money needs to be recovered somehow.

Here at MfBJN, we keep our costs down! Our secret?

We run an ineffective, nonpopular blog!

And we pass those savings on to you!

(Link seen on Michelle Malkin.)

Who would have thought Michelle Malkin would need to Google bait with obscenities and vulgarities?

She’s going to be number one with a bullet for searches such as topless dancers, suckin, er, you know, on videotape, and shootin bubbles up your, oh, never mind.

Meanwhile, I am still google baiting my way to the top of the search for "Brian J. Noggle is a cheesehead", where I am oddly enough mired in the third position.