Category Archives: Discourse.net

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?

April 22 is Enough About Me Day.

Please, if you have not done so before, visit this link and post something about yourself if only to satisfy my curiosity about what kind of people read this thing.

And, by the way, thanks for coming by.

In a comment on the previous post, “Asperger Syndrom DVD Available for Educators”, Brett Bellmore complains about the snap.com preview tool I installed on the blog. I think he has a point.

Back when I installed this thing, it had a one-click on/off toggle that you could invoke from the left margin of the blog. So if you didn't like it, you clicked once, set the cookie, and it never bothered you again.

But that option seems to be gone: at least today, the toggle isn't working right, so if you want to make snap stop snapping, you have to go to their page. That's not nice.

I've disabled the snap, and will only bring it back if there's popular demand in the comments below.

According to The Race to the Bottom: Faculty Blogs and Influence: The Top 50 Most Influential Law Blogs (In Order) this here blog is tied for #17 with Workplace Prof Blog, Prof. Rafael Gely's far more serious production.

As you would expect, many of the top 50 are group blogs.

What shall I do with all this power and influence?

This blog offers you a variety of different feeds for your reading pleasure.

There's the partial feed, which just gives you the start of each posting. Currently that seems the most popular of the services.

There's the full feed, that has the whole text of each posting. This feed has only one third as many subscribers as the partial feed, perhaps because autodiscovery services tend to find the other one.

And there's also the (separate) comments feed which gives you all the comments on the blog (but doesn't include the postings).

I also offer a suite of specialized feeds, one per blog category, and there's a full listing of them below.

Continue reading →

I find Dreamhost to be pretty decent web hosts, although I also could give you a short but pungent list of complaints (timeouts, timeouts, timeouts). But give them credit, when they screw up, they are world champions at writing apologies.

This morning I got a large bill that clearly wasn't due. I wrote back. They said it was my bill. I wrote back. Then I got The Apology:

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we've accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

I'm really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; I've already removed all those bum future charges on your account (######) and already refunded the $####.## charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there's no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won't happen again. There's no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,

Josh!

And, indeed, a more detailed explanation is now on their blog, at Um, Whoops..

This sort of stuff works on me. It is very hard to stay mad.

Update: More at Unofficial Dreamhost Blog, DreamHost Accidently Bills Customers $7,500,000.