Category Archives: Discourse.net

Two Million Views of Discourse.net

Some time in the last couple of days, while I was distracted, this blog had its two millionth page view according to the deeply flawed Sitemeter metric. The far, far stricter unique counter, which won't count you more than once a day, hasn't even hit a million yet. Then again, in this day of RSS newsreaders, I suspect that about half my readers never hit the blog at all but just take the full-text feed.

This blog is a strange enterprise: it's neither narrowly focused on one subject, as are many of the best law blogs, nor is it run by a collection of interesting people as are many of the others. I suppose it's a bit quirky. Perhaps that reflects something about the author.

I remain humbled by the wonderful people who seem to think my hobby is worth their time and especially those who write to me or post comments. Over time, some readers have been kind enough to describe themselves, and you, kind reader, are invited to join in (names optional) if you are so minded.

Posted in Discourse.net | 5 Comments

But Not R-Rated

cash advance

That high?

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

As Bad as US News’s Law School Rankings

Spurred by this post, I went to technorati.com to see what Discourse.net's rankings were.

According to technorati.com, this blog currently has an “Authority” of 229, and a “rank” of 23,628.

Authority seems to mean no more than “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”. That's not “authority” — at best it is a measure of inter-blog popularity. And rank is just a measure of relative inter-blog linkularity: “Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest [sic] Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.”

When I started blogging, I cared about this sort of stuff; now I can't seem to care very much. Is that a sign of maturity, or that it's time to stop?

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

Boo!

eye-camera.jpgHappy Halloween.

Only scary posts today!

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Library of Congress Collecting Law Blogs

This email I received today appears from the headers to be a genuine message:

To Whom It May Concern:

The United States Library of Congress has selected your Web site for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Legal Blogs. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. We request your permission to collect your Web site and add it to the Library's research collections. We also ask that we be allowed to display the archived version(s) of your Web site.

The following URL has been selected:

www.discourse.net

With your permission, the Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your Web site at regular intervals over time. The Library will make this collection available to researchers onsite at Library facilities. The Library also wishes to make the collection available to offsite researchers by hosting the collection on the Library's public access Web site. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Internet materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them. If you agree to permit the Library to collect your Web site, please click the following link to signify your consent. This link also includes a separate consent for permitting the Library to provide offsite access to your materials through the Library's Web site.

[very long url]

For several years, the Library of Congress has collected Web sites within certain themes or topics for which we were required to seek permission for each new collection developed by the Library, even if permission had been granted in the past. As our collections have grown, we have had to contact some Web site producers repeatedly. To reduce this duplication and to save site owners from having to respond to multiple requests for information, we are now requesting permissions for the Library to collect, over time and in varying frequency, sites of research interest. Your site has been identified as a Web site of interest related to Legal Blogs. If you grant this permission, we will capture your site for inclusion in our Legal Blogs Web Archive and may also include it in any future collections. If in the future you no longer wish to be included in the Library's Web archives, please contact us and we will cease collection of your URL.

Our Web archives related to government and law are important because they contribute to the historical record of national events, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were born digital and never printed on paper. For more information about our Web Archive collections please visit our Web site at (http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/).

If you have questions, comments or recommendations concerning the Legal Blogs Archive project,please e-mail the Library's Web Capture team at webcapture@loc.gov at your earliest convenience. For more information about other Web Archive collections please visit http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

Thank You,

Web Capture Team Library of Congress Washington, D.C. webcapture@loc.gov http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

———- LC Reference: Legal Blogs 90311 CD

What a great idea. I'm delighted to be a (tiny) part of it.

Posted in Discourse.net | 5 Comments

Where’d My Clock Go?

The clock in the left margin is (was?) powered by clocklink.com, which seems to be having some troubles today:

Unable to request URL from host www.clocklink.com:80: tried all of the host's addresses:

1. www.clocklink.com/216.230.241.101: Connection refused
2. www.clocklink.com/216.230.241.102: Connection refused

I hope it's temporary.

Posted in Discourse.net | 3 Comments