Category: Blogs & Blogging

Great web site

The site has a decidedly historical bent, as you might expect, including dailiy “On this day in history” features. There’s a fair amount of cultural commentary – including the iPhone, Paris, Ratatouille (the movie), Harry Potter, and so on. There’s comparatively little, and fairly brief, political commentary. The writer has a great voice and a charming personality, and the commentary is very thoughtful.”

Wow, don’t you wish I was still good? The review by MyDD was written two years ago.

Ouch!

I’m fine, sorta, and not traveling or away from the computer or anything.

But every once in a while my chronic spinal degeneration becomes acute back pain, and so it has been since Saturday. It began when I was folding laundry. Last time I ever do THAT!

Sitting at the keyboard long enough to get some blogging going just isn’t too appealing. And I’m even crankier than usual besides.

Send pizza and painkillers.

When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone …

[M]any people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

From When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone … , a brief New York Times article on the subject.

Ah Choo or Boo Hoo

NewMexiKen’s allergies are so bad, it’s as if I were crying full time. As a result, when I see something mildly interesting on the internets I think, “Wow, that’s so funny it made me cry,” or “Wow, that’s so touching it made me cry,” or even “Wow, that’s so aggravating it made me cry.”

I fear I’ve been posting a lot of stuff here that probably isn’t that good — unless, maybe your allergies are making you cry too.

You still here?

• 15,000 is a very fascistic number and makes me quite uncomfortable. A prime number would have been much better. (The first prime after 15,000 is 15,013.)

• I miss sharing but not the sense of having to share, of having an empty blog every morning in need of feeding. Some have said, post less often or fewer items. But, of course, the whole point of this site has been to dazzle the internets with limitless quantities of wisdom, whimsy and wit.

• Ron Howard’s brother still generates a surprising number of page views every day. So does burning the Zozobra.

• I can see (from the website stats) that some people are still dropping by every day or two even after I haven’t posted anything for six weeks. This is very gratifying.

• But only a few have mentioned the coda at all. Perhaps some readers assumed I’d be back (fair enough) or perhaps they didn’t care (also fair enough). Not hearing from certain individuals, however, was discouraging.

• April 19th (see also this and this) really ought to be a national holiday and not just a holiday in Massachusetts. (And even in Massachusetts it has been bastardized into the third Monday in April.)

• I don’t want to write about just one or two topics. Or, if I do, I don’t know what they’d be.

• I don’t like the name NewMexiKen. I really never have.

• To be honest, I had more than seven regular readers.

• Two of my grandchildren are playing football this spring. Each is quarterbacking their team. One is a grandson and one is a granddaughter.

• The Susan Boyle video made me cry. I will be so disgusted if we find out, as some have suggested, that the whole thing is a gimmick. Whatever, the woman sure can sing.

• The hosting service is paid for until May 20.

NewMexiKen’s Sources

For a long time I maintained a separate page of links to many of the sources I consulted in writing this blog. Eventually I realized it was quicker to find most things on the web — including familiar web sites — by Googling. Further, I was reading most blogs via their RSS feeds. I almost never went directly to the site in a browser.

Ultimately I dropped the links page (and only one reader ever asked me what happened to it).

Recently I’ve found the number of bookmarks (favorites) accumulating again. Some sites, like newspapers and The Huffington Post for example, publish so much I can’t review it all in an RSS reader. I find I need to browse some front pages (like we did with print) to see what’s new and interesting on those sites.

So I am building a new links collection. Most of the links will be to websites that are not easily followed with RSS, but I will include some blogs as well.

You can find this evolving list at NewMexiKen’s Sources.

Still not blogging

Charles P. Pierce has a funny rant against sportscasters and makes a good case against the Arizona Cardinals. He begins:

I can tell you exactly when I began hating the Arizona Cardinals, and it wasn’t when they came to Foxborough in December, took one look at the falling snow, and decided they would commit public consumer fraud for the balance of the afternoon. No, it was sometime midway through the BCS national championship game between Oklahoma and Florida. For those of you who missed it, Fox television announcer Thom Brennaman treated Florida quarterback Tim Tebow in a fashion that I am absolutely sure violates the anti-stalking statutes in at least five states.

The article “The awfulness of Billy Joel, explained” by Ron Rosenbaum for Slate Magazine has been linked to by everybody on the internets but me, so here it is. It is amusing.

‘Burque Babble has a best line:

“With the steely eye of Death almost at hand, the small, furry creature known as Analog Television may perhaps be saved by brave Congresspeople and a new President with bold ideas that evidently include saving small, supposedly outdated entertainment options.”

And Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly has a best line too:

“The right howls, the media blares, Democrats decide it’s not worth the bother.”

And there’s Calculated Risk.. I just read it for the graphs. Go look. “In Phoenix, house prices have declined more than 40% from the peak.”

Personally housing prices in Phoenix will have to go down another 140% before I’d ever consider living in that hell hole.