Category: Blogging

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.

Dear Blogosphere, or just people who don’t like it when there’s too much purple on my beautiful wife’s occasional blog and not enough posting:

For Christmas, I gave her a Nintendo Game Cube with Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime II. I guess I have exacerbated the lack of posting for the next few months. Sorry.

Perhaps you could just read the posts here instead.

Sincerely,
Brian J. Noggle

Just to let all six of my readers know, I, too, will take a Christmas hiatus.

I probably won’t post between 10pm Christmas Eve and 6am on Christmas morning because I don’t want Santa to skip my house because I’m awake.

Posting will resume on its regular irregular schedule at 6:01 Christmas morning.

Thank you, that is all.

Cori Dauber, the Ranting Professor, demonstrates apostasy:

Via Instapundit, rather than just link to the apology, I’m linking to Lileks wonderful response where, as always, you need to scroll down past the blather about his daily life — unless you care about his trip to retrieve his daughter’s Barbie — but keep reading past the Guardian’s apology because the section on Bill Maher and the Canadians is just too good to miss.

Obviously, Dauber does not embrace La Vida Lileks as she should. Why, since I have become an acolyte, I have found more meaning in my life. I clean house amid my paying home-based job during the day. I pilgrimmate to my local Target for household wares. I make snarky and sometimes clever turns of phrase on my Web site (thanks for visiting!). I seek to emulate Lileks in all aspects of my life.

Lileks’ daily Bleats serve as a guide for my day-to-day existence.

To call it blather is to undermine my very being. How dare Dauber? How dare she, indeed!

Stephen Green, who rumor has it was banished from St. Louis for making a remark about the Chicago Cubs that could be construed as anything other than an insult, allows a guy to use his blog to utters promulgate more heresy:

No drinking-related discussion would be complete without a link to the pride of New Orleans, Chris Rose, who’s my personal favorite newspaper columnist. Check out his take on the Presidental debates, and marital relations (trust me, it works).

Green‘s "associate" has contradicted the blogma that James Lileks is the Most Holy Newspaper Columnist, both regular and extra syndi.

I’d say he should be stoned, but he’s already half way there in an airport in Florida even as we speak.

Friends, don’t let him plea for mercy with the admission

I once bought a broken Donkey Kong, Jr. arcade game for $35. It took another $12 and about an hour to fix it (it’s since been traded for the sweet Asteroids Deluxe that graces my den). Makes me just chuckle in an evil fashion at anybody who pays two grand for one of these.

Yea, verily, for I have looked in the Most Hallowed Tome of the Revered and have found his name lacking. Of course, mine was, too, but I had been removed during an audit after changing ISPs. What’s Green’s associate’s?

Except he’s a witch. Or a heretic. Scroll back up and see; I’ve been on Killer List of Video Games so long in my "research" that I have forgotten what I was accusing him of.

UPDATE: Someone using the name "Stephen Green" in an e-mail has taken umbrage at this post:

Will Collier wrote that piece, not me! And we’re up two games to nothin’.

-S.

Upon further review, I have determined that the post on VodkaPundit has been attributed to this "Will Collier" fellow, but as I replied to my e-mail correspondent, I have never seen Stephen Green and Will Collier in the same place. Of course, I have never seen Will Collier or Stephen Green in person, so perhaps I have seen them together and have not known it. But don’t confuse me.

Ergo, I have corrected this piece inline in red.

The rebuttal from the e-mailer claiming to be Stephen Green, and indeed the post itself raise two more scandals:

• The e-mailer said And we’re up two games to nothin’. revealing that he is a Yankees fan or is trying to slander Stephen Green as a Yankees fan. Don’t confuse me, I am doing old-fashioned investigative muckraking blogournalism here.
• If Will Collier has the Asteroids Deluxe, Green is sacrificing some geek cred by not immediately enumerating his video game collection. Sure, he’s got a new wet bar we all covet, but that cosmopolitanism cred, and the exchange rate for pure geek creds is low.

Courtesy of Spoons.

While the mice are away, the cats will play…with Spoons, who has nothing better to do.

Instapundit reports reports over 8,000,000 hits last month and predicts that he’ll see a traffic drop after the election.

Hey, this site had 3,000 hits last month, and I think it will drop after the election, too.

Actually, I think it will drop this month without an Instalanche to spur about a third of the total monthly traffic in a single day.

But I don’t write for the casual Internet readers. I toss off my insights for my own gratification and for you, the discriminating Internet reader.