Now, I get that there’s no one right way to blog and people can write whatever they want to. In practice it seems like this ends up meaning that people mostly write about themselves, with varying amounts of other stuff they’re interested in. One could argue that the extent to which the author assumes their life will be interesting to others is a measure of self-centeredness; I don’t think it’s an absolute measure but a correlation seems likely. This would explain why most teenagers blog.

However, even aside from the issue of self-centeredness, how do people decide which things about them are important enough to blog? Scanning my own blog quickly for something to go off of, I see a bit of religion, a gas price that doesn’t look that bad any more, my car going crazy, more political commentary than I’d like but it is that year (%@#*&), some overdue housecleaning and how much better it would be with a helicopter, a lolcat, something that looks like a D&D session, an obnoxious test, my rant on taxes and the economy, some blathering about the meaning of life or something, a triscuit, and a series of posts involving my stolen cell phone. That’s not an exhaustive list; it’s more like the low-hanging fruit. So basically, I notice a lot of stuff to rant about, and a lot of quirky stuff. Other people would probably say that noticing funny stuff and going off on annoying stuff are reasonably typical of me. So, within certain limits, the stuff I think and talk about becomes the stuff I blog about.

Here’s where the anthill comes in.

My sister got married about a week ago. I can’t point you at it in her blog because she hasn’t posted anything about it. Her haircut, however, got two posts. Maybe this is just my crazy idea, but I’m pretty sure that getting married should be at least as important as a haircut. I hereby present this as evidence that society’s values are fracked.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I did once blog a haircut. Once. And I haven’t gone and gotten married.)

So yeah…it’s like we’re related or something.

The bad news: I broke the Wall of Shame. Apparently when I added all the new IPs I went over the size limit for the database field that holds pages in WordPress. Now, I know that MySQL is what it is, but…oh great and powerful WordPress Development Team, a warning message would’ve been nice.

The other good news: After a significant redesign and a stop by Google Cache for essentials like the awards list (yes I have it backed up, but I would’ve had to unzip the backup and either get really lucky with a text search or set up a clean installation of WordPress to find it), the Wall of Shame is back up and running.

Fight back against spammers, or there’ll be even more tomorrow. It’s internet natural selection. Or maybe spamlection.

There’s not a whole lot of skill involved in solving word search puzzles, though of course people like me manaage to come up with systems for it, and when it’s done, it just kind of sits there.  Yet people would rather do anything, even something patently pointless like a word search (or adding music to their freaking Myspace), than do nothing.  Basically, the Word Search Effect works because people like to do stuff.

In this part of the timeline, that means people spend time on sites where the interaction goes beyond “click here for next page.”  We don’t just read other people’s sites, we make our own.  Then we enter “the blogosphere” and set up our sites so that other people can comment on them, and we run around commenting on other people’s sites.  And don’t get me started on wikis.

So, here’s something you can do.  Yes, you right there.  In addition to commenting on my blog (you know you want to) I’m going to let you start labeling the posts with tags.   You can put the same tag on posts you think are related.  Standard fair warning, I may mess with it because this is in the final analysis my site…don’t be gross, don’t be mean, and if there are two very similar tags (like cat and cats, for example) I’ll probably combine them.

Just click on a post title and scroll to the bottom of the post to get started.  Have fun!

For the record, I do not have a problem with legitimate good-faith excerpts. To me, this means that your site would have its own stuff going on, you and I happened to be talking about the same thing, I said it first, and you yoink a small part of my post, link back, and say your own stuff too. Leeway as to some of the details available at my discretion.

What I have a problem with is obvious sploggers (I’ll go into why it was obvious in a later post) yoinking my content for their own crappy purposes. They are for zapping.

Fortunately…the one in question, according to two different whois searches (one with the registrar of the site in question) is not just US-based (i.e. DMCA applies) but located in Scottsdale. I can dramatically deliver paperwork in person, if I want to.

So, this is obnoxious…but it could be a little bit fun too.

And I think this is cool.  Yeah, I need a life.