Category: Blogs & Blogging

Most popular blogs

Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs list is based on links from blogs, to blogs, in the last six months. Here’s the top 15:

  1. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
  2. Engadget
  3. PostSecret
  4. Daily Kos: State of the Nation
  5. The Huffington Post
  6. Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog
  7. Instapundit.com
  8. Crooks and Liars
  9. Michelle Malkin
  10. spaces.msn.com/members/samzhu
  11. dooce
  12. Thought Mechanics
  13. Blog di Beppe Grillo
  14. Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide
  15. spaces.msn.com/members/locker2man

NewMexiKen comes in at number 40,804, which sounds awful until you realize that 40,804th out of 25.5 million ain’t bad.

7,000

Every once in awhile NewMexiKen deletes an entry from months back, for example ones I notice with nothing more than a broken link. And there are many that I deleted along the way, some right after I posted them because they just didn’t seem right.

So, when you get right down to it, there have been many more than 7,000 entries in the 29-plus months this blog has been in business. But, two items ago the official count reached 7,000. That seemed like a milestone worth congratulating myself for.

Award-winning history blogs

The Cliopatria Awards for history blogs as reported by History News Network:

Here, then, are the winners, short identifications of them, and brief explanations of the judge’s rationale for their decisions:

Best Individual Blog: Mark Grimsley’s Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

“Blog Them Out of the Stone Age is the finest example of the application of a historian’s passion and tradecraft in the new medium of blogging. It combines research, analysis and pedagogy issues with a keen desire to engage with the broader public.”

Mark Grimsley is Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University

Best Group Blog: K. M. Lawson, Jonathan Dresner, and others, at Frog in a Well

“After much thought, the judges chose the Frog in a Well project as a whole, rather than singling out any one of its constituent parts: not only do they feature overlapping personnel and a considerable degree of shared identity and purpose, all have been characterized by diverse contributors, strong historical content and consistently high quality writing. Both individually and as a whole, they represent a great achievement and a model to inspire and challenge in the
future.”

K. M. Lawson is a graduate student in history at Harvard; Jonathan Dresner is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, Hilo. They are joined in Frog in a Well/Japan, Frog in a Well/Korea, and Frog in a Well/China by a number of other professors and students of east Asian studies.

Best New Blog: “PK”‘s BibliOdyssey

“BibliOdyssey has only been on-line since September of last year, but has already amassed a significant following for the dramatic and thought-provoking historical images and books featured there. This unusually visual blog by “PK” brings together a wide variety of on-line materials and original scans, and will provide teachers and researchers and hobbyists alike with rich graphic and bibliographic sources.”

“PK” blogs pseudonymously.
…

Best Writer: Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted

“Timothy Burke writes strong, clear prose that advances interesting ideas and moves debates in new directions. His energetic and considered writing stands out even in such a competitive category as this one, and reaches out to historians, other academics and non-academics alike with great skill.”

Timothy Burke is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore.

Not included in NewMexiKen’s excerpt are the awards for best post and best series of posts.

Link found at Political Animal.

Persons who make anonymous and annoying comments

… on this blog will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Language in the “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005,” signed by the President last week, amended the Communications Act of 1934, so that now:

Whoever — … utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate … communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet … without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person … who receives the communications … shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

NewMexiKen wonders if the commenter’s IP address could be sufficient identification to be a legal defense against the “anonymous” stipulation in this statute.

Traffic

34,481 visits to NewMexiKen from 21,097 different IP addresses in December. 104,268 visits total for October, November and December.

For the year 2005, just more than 420,000 visits.

The 49,974 visits last April are still the most in one month.

Horse sex story was online hit

At The Seattle Times, columnist Danny Westneat bemoans the fact that sex sells.

By tallying clicks on our Web site, we now chart the most read stories in the online edition of The Seattle Times. Software then sorts the tens of thousands of stories for 2005 and ranks them. Not by importance, impact or poetic lyricism, but by which stories compelled the most people to put finger to mouse, click, open and, presumably, read.

Which brings me back to sex with horses. The story last summer about the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw was by far the year’s most read article.

What’s more, four more of the year’s 20 most clicked-upon local news stories were about the same horse-sex incident. We don’t publish our Web-traffic numbers, but take it from me — the total readership on these stories was huge.

NewMexiKen has been wondering how to boost readership. That $25 I’ve made this month on ads isn’t really what I’d call life-changing money. The moral of Danny Westneat’s lament seems to be that, on the web, first and foremost, sex sells. Waiting for people to search on Ron Howard’s brother (long-time number one search item at NewMexiKen) isn’t going to generate enough visitors. Maybe it’s time I tried posting nude photos of Ron Howard’s brother.

Seattle Times link via BoingBoing.

A Visit from St. Nicholas

It was on this day in 1823 that the famous poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” was first published. It begins, “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

Fourteen years after its first publication, an editor attributed the poem to a wealthy professor of classical literature named Clement Clarke Moore. In the last few years, new evidence has come out that a Revolutionary War major named Henry Livingston Jr. may have been the actual author of “The Night Before Christmas.” His family has letters describing his recitation of the poem before it was originally published, and literary scholars have found many similarities between his work and “The Night Before Christmas.” He was also three quarters Dutch, and many of the details in the poem, including names of the reindeer, have Dutch origins.

The Writer’s Almanac

Here’s more on this from NewMexiKen two years ago.

I’d like to thank the members of the Academy

Oops, wrong award.

NewMexiKen actually would like to thank Jess at Life…or something like it for naming NewMexiKen the Best New Mexico Blog among the 2005 /2006 LOSLI Blog Awards (The Golden Thongs).

As long-time readers know, NewMexiKen is always second-guessing the merit of doing this blog. When I’m away — for example, visiting The Sweeties — I particularly realize what a fulltime job I’ve made blogging into. I find it difficult to make even a few entries without many hours at the computer. Then I ask, what’s the point of such an effort? Does anyone care? (Rhetorical questions, folks; answers neither required nor desired.)

So, for me, winning Jess’s award is especially pleasing. Thanks for the encouragement Jess, and congratulations to you for such a fine effort compiling the awards.

And congratulations to all the other winners, too. Be sure to take a look at Jess’s winners, where you will find, I’m certain, many, many worthwhile websites.

The ads

The Goooooogle ads have generated more than $9 in as many days. I’ll try not to spend it all in one place. The ads that appear on this, the home page are the most boring. I guess Google gets confused with so many varied topics and just punts. On some of the single entry or category pages though, the ads are kind of interesting.

Which isn’t to say I want you to go browsing around NewMexiKen just to look at the ads. Most visitors to this website do come in via the single entry or category pages.

And, after all, it doesn’t do any good if you just look. You actually have to click on an ad (or two or ten) for anything to happen to my bank account.

All Googlie

NewMexiKen is having an unusually high number of visits today. The busiest day ever, in fact. I became curious. Is it my superb story-telling about the Kennedy assassination or Christmases past? Is it the wittiness of the “best lines of the day”? What could it be?

Eureka! I have found it!

If you do a Google Search on Good Things About Being an 18-year-old Mayor, the number one pick is NewMexiKen. Which is nice. I’m glad. The strange thing is that my “Good Things About Being an 18-year-old Mayor” is from a Letterman Show Top-Ten and NewMexiKen is number one on Google but Letterman is number two (as this is written).

Blogroll

I’ve been working on the concept and format for quite a while, but today I am finally unveiling the new NewMexiKen Links Page — “A Page of Links to Some of the Web Sites and Blogs Referred to by NewMexiKen.”

This new page (reached in the future by the button in the sidebar under the random Sweetie photo) is very much going to remain a work in progress, as I am always finding new web sites I like and deciding that others are no longer interesting or useful. This is especially true of blogs. As the lists lengthen or shorten, and the categories come and go, I will have to move things about some I’m sure, but I’ll try and respect your kinetic memory.

I read nearly all of the blogs listed via RSS. I find that’s the only reasonable way to see what’s new at dozens of continually updating sites. I find RSS less useful for newspaper and magazine sites, though most publish much of their content that way. I guess I still like browsing a busy, complex site much in the way one browses through the pages of the dead-tree versions of these publications. Futhermore, these large publications (The Huffington Post and Slate are two web-only publications to which this also applies) publish far too many items to sort through via RSS. Better to glance quickly at a page and see if anything stands out.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Searching

Four search topics are each generating just under five percent of the searches that bring folks to NewMexiKen — largest college stadiums, Louisiana 1927, “iTunes redux,” and Ron Howard’s brother. “iPod user manual” brings in about a percent-and-a-half of the searches; “Omarosa nude” just under one percent.