Discourse.net

Smash Says Soldiers' Email Unhampered

According to Milblogger Citizen Smash, one of the stories I linked to below is false: there is no general order preventing soldiers in Iraq from using e-mail, but rather a localized rule to stop GI’s helping themselves to private bandwidth. According to Smash it’s an example of how rumors get started:

It would appear that KBR contractors at Ginmar’s camp had set up their own wireless Internet system, and some industrious GIs have since set up their own unofficial Internet café, piggy-backing off the KBR system. But now the KBR folks are upset that the soldiers are slowing down their access (poor babies), so they’ve decided to end the “free ride.”

Not, he says, a general rule blocking access. Rather, the general rule was and remains that e-mail access is spotty, and mostly a matter of private enterprise.

Hardly Anyone Reads this Blog on Sundays

Thank you to all the people who have been reading, and linking to, Discourse.net.

Below I have a discussion of traffic trends, comments and comment deletions, and other bloggy stuff. If you’re reading this directly, I’ve hidden it behind the “There’s More” link so as not to bother people who have better things to do. If you are taking the feed, my apologies.

Traffic is at record levels: more than 750 800 people a day reading this blog directly according to sitemeter, with total pageviews running at 150% of that number. I didn’t have sitemeter enabled for the first few months of the blog, but it nonetheless reports over 100,000 page views, and 72,000 visitors. On the other hand, my homepage counter, which tries very hard not to count a visitor more than once per day reports only 45,650 unique visitors to the homepage. Looking at my logs, its seems like a lot of people are finding some page here via Google or other search engines, and then going away. (If you want to know what people have been searching for during the last 24 hours, check out the colorful Zeitgiest; I suspect some of those searchers were disappointed.) The most perenially popular search term that finds this blog is “personality quizzes”, not exactly what I’d want to be known for, although this past week both “cement shortages” and “Janis Karpinski” have temporarily eclipsed it. My Google rank is higher for silly stuff like “how to pick up women” and “self deprecation” than it is for most terms linking to the posts I care most about.

Two other things jump out from this clickable sitemeter graph of the past month: more traffic, and very much a six-day-a-week phenomenon. Perhaps it’s because I tend to post less on weekends?

Of course, the real imponderable is how many people read this thing via the RDF and XML feeds. They’re full text, so no click-through is needed. (I’m more interested in readers than traffic statistics.) The Feedburner service I use suggests that I have about 1500 hits on the feeds per day, with about three quarters of the people hitting the rdf and only 25% on xml. Hits may be some people hitting many, many times, or it can be a service hitting on behalf of its readers. Feedburner’s guesstimate is, if I understand their tables right, 750 people/day, giving me maybe 1500 readers/day in all.

I have no idea how to feel about these numbers. Is it a lot? A little? In between? The TLB ecosystem suggests ‘in between’, ranking discourse.net in the 700-750 range for links (a mid-range Marsupial; I imagine I’ll become a Mammal some day and plateau), and substantially higher for traffic (180th), but still well-down the power-law curve, perhaps a classic case of what Clay Shirky calls “Blogging Classic”.

In some way I feel quite surprised that 1000 or more people, if that’s really the number, some of whom I don’t actually know even from conferences, are interested on a more or less daily basis about what I have to say. (Thanks!) The private supportive email from friends and highpowered professional acquaintances has been especially nice. (Thanks!)

The statistic that surprises me most is this one: there have been fewer comments than posts. Now don’t misunderstand - I’m not complaining. And the gap is closing as people comment more. Just surprised—am I that uncontroversial? Or is this blog just read by friends who recall how stubborn I am (“I’ve mellowed! I’ve mellowed!” I assured the visiting professor just last month. “That’s scary,” she replied.)

Part of the comment number thing is that I prune hard — I’ve installed MT-Blacklist and mercilessly killed off commercial comment spam manually, and also removed the half dozen or so non-commercial idiocies I’ve received. (The most recent had an obscene email address and a gross comment.) I have not pruned political comments I disagree with, not even the one that said the Iraq atrocities are nothing than “frat house tomfoolery,” although I find that sort of remark very offensive.

I wondered whether to post any of this — it’s a bit solipsistic, and not the sort of post I particularly like reading on other blogs. But then I figured, almost no one is reading on Sunday anyway…

Even British Conservatives Think It's a Rum Business

Even the UK’s Telegraph is running away from this one.

Rumsfeld is running this operation like a pizza parlour: Mr Rumsfeld has expressed his profound regret, although it is not entirely clear whether that is chiefly for the treatment of the Iraqis or the political damage that the scandal has caused the US government. He has, however, refused to resign, and - according to the recent polls - 70 per cent of the American public agrees with his decision.

I found it rather confusing, however, when Mr Rumsfeld also indicated that he would “resign in a minute” if he felt he could not be an effective leader. On that basis, he should be gone already: he has already proved an ineffective leader, and will be much less effective in the wake of this miserable scandal. For what has leaked out of Abu Ghraib, along with the stomach-churning whiff of chaos and sadism, is the fundamental incompetence in the running of the US military from the top down.

As for George W. Bush, the Telegraph produces the best narrative of events from a bureaucratic perspective I’ve seen yet. Read this article and ask yourself how it could be that no one told the President?

At some stages the answer plausibly is, ‘Because no one showed the pictures to Rumsfeld’ (perhaps on the theory that if you keep the pictures locked in a safe in Iraq, they’re less likely to leak?) and thus he had no chance to see just how bad it was.

But the plausibility of that answer vanishes once the Pentagon learned that 60 Minutes had the pictures. And still no one told Bush. Rumsfeld et al are trying to say it was just a mistake. No way. Too many people made that mistake. No, it’s either a massive CYA attempt gone wrong (and you’d think they’d been around too long the think the press would sit on this story for long? or are they that used to a tame press?) or, most likely, no one thought to tell GWB because, well, why would you?

(I’d sure like to know when they told Cheney — why hasn’t anyone asked that question?)