My Friday McBush Bashing is growing out of control as the news world goes all Palin all the time (and as she hides from the media in a secret undisclosed location — in the best GOP Veepish sytle).
Do I let it keep growing, or do an interim edition?
('Soulmate' reference for those who came in late)
Paul Caron counts blog stuff, and he says that Discourse.net is 15th in the new Law Prof Blog Rankings.
I'm continually grateful for (and bemused by) the size the of the readership.
Readers are invited to describe themselves, and of course are always welcome to comment.
The folks at Mapstats seem to have fixed their visitor location reporter, so I've restored it to my sidebar. Hello to my visitor from Podhori, Hlavni Mesto Praha, Czech Republic! Please note that, unlike John McCain, I am aware that Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore.
(And Happy Bastille Day to any French readers and Francophiles everywhere.)
This might be a good time to remind readers, especially those who read via the partial or full-text RSS feeds that I welcome your participation in the comment threads too.
Incidentally, why is that so many more users of RSS feeds choose the partial rather than the full feed? Not that I'm complaining, I'm just curious?
I’m pleased to announce that my brilliant young colleague Ben Depoorter will be guest blogging here until the end of the month. I may post occasionally, but my internet access will be erratic as I travel about for a while.
Ben is multi-lingual, multi-cultural, mutli-talented (he paints!), and a prolific writer, primarily in law and economics and property law. He’s also very funny – for an economist.
I’ve invited him to post on any subjects he likes; it should be interesting.
Mapstats, from Blogflux, the people who provide that nice little list of locations of recent blog visitors that runs in my right margin, seem to have had some serious problems this week.
For a while their widget was holding up the rendering of this page. Then that got better, but the actual cities being reported on the right didn't change for almost a day. (It is possible I messed up the code in some way while trying to fix the problem, but I don't think so.) Then it went back to not rendering.
So I've killed it off at least temporarily and sent an email asking what is going on. Pity. I liked it.
The folks at Wikio sent email saying
Wikio is the number 1 news aggregator in Europe, indexing over 55,000 English-language sources. We have only recently launched our Top Blog rankings … We have designed our rankings so as to make them the most comprehensive on the Internet – you can check them out in full and get more details on how they are compiled.
And they sent me this:
Now, in my view, being # 893 (which is what this showed on the day I posted this item) on almost any European blog list is pretty good for a small-time US operation like this one. But does it mean anything? Apparently, that number is a result of mating a Google-like ranking with a TLB Ecosystem-like ranking:
The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.
Blogrolls are not taken into account and Wikio only counts links from the last 120 days. We thus hope to provide a classification more representative of trends in the blogosphere.
Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.
So it's part popularity contest, and part weighted popularity contest. But does the attention of crowds measure wisdom?
Jotwell Blenderlaw