Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
The Anti-Top Posting Cult
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/09/2010 - 14:48One of the strangest online cults that I have recently encountered is the Anti-Top Posting Cult. These are people that argue strongly against top posting in replies to mailing lists. If someone does top post, they attack the practice of top posting and ignore the content of the message. Perhaps this is from some insecurity or inability to respond to the content of the email messages. Whatever it is, it has been enough to drive me away from a couple different mailing lists.
When a person replies to an email, they can either put their reply at the top of the email, a practice called top posting, or they can interleave their responses into the original email or simply post their response at the bottom of the email.
The practice of interleaved posting or bottom posting is not completely without merit. It is easier for readers of an email written this way to understand the context of the replies. “I agree” or “+1” makes a lot more sense when it comes right after what the writer is agreeing with.
Yet there are also advantages to top-posting. A good writer seeks to have a compelling first sentence. If that first sentence is interleaved somewhere in the email, the impact can get lost. When I glance at an email, I typically look at the first sentence. If it is interesting, I’m more likely to read the rest of the message. However, if it begins with three greater than signs, followed by a line that I’ve already read a dozen times, I’m less likely to scan down and look for the new content. This is especially the case when I’m reading my emails on my N900 which only shows ten lines per page. Some bottom posters have written messages that I have to scroll down several pages to find any new content. Usually, it just isn’t worth it.
Top posting is also simpler for many people because of their email programs. It seems like most lists that I subscribe to, and I subscribe to a lot, are predominantly top posted. I suspect many of my readers have never heard of top posting, and have never considered writing emails any other way than top posting.
Now, I don’t begrudge people who prefer to interleave or bottom post. As I said, there are benefits to this. However, I would hope that people who prefer to interleave or bottom post wouldn’t begrudge people that top post. Unfortunately, my recent encounters with anti-top posting fanatics have been very different, so I’ve left those lists where such fanatics dominate. What about you? Do you top post? Interleave? Bottom post? Do you tolerate those who write emails differently than you do? Have you ever even heard of this sort of controversy or even care?
Juxtaposing Blog Posts and Museum Exhibitions: A Deconstruction of a Family Trip to the Whitney Biennial
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/04/2010 - 10:13”Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow.” Said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.
Miranda is home from college for winter break. Not completely home, she’s staying at her mother’s house, and she has her own life now. She’s studying art and would rather spend time having lunch with gallery owners in New York than dinner with her dad and his family in Connecticut. Of course the best of all worlds might be if she could go museum hopping with Fiona, Kim and I in New York.
Kim had to work, but we decided to take Fiona out of school for the day. She has been longing to see her half-sister and a trip to the Whitney Biennial could be a great educational experience. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, I did not expect Miranda to be up with the lark, and we planned a late morning train.
What a lark! What a plunge! My thoughts shifted to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. I discovered Virginia Woolf in my college days and fell in love with her writing. She captures a world from a viewpoint so different than I had developed growing up on a small farm in Western Massachusetts and that diversity of viewpoints I found so intriguing. Slowly, I grew out of my fascination for the outsiders that Hermann Hesse portrayed to the crazy older men of other great literature. What did Mr. Ramsay struggle with as he tried to get beyond ‘R’? What opium induced visions did Augustus Carmichael see as he shuffled past Mrs. Ramsay, reminding her of the inadequacy of human relationships.
Some one had blundered.
As I thought of these characters, various idealists from Anton Chekhov’s plays came to mind. Marcel Proust joined the fray and the opening line, For a long time I used to go to bed early comes to mind. Fiona went to bed early before the great trip to the museum, and my thoughts mingled together into strange dreamlike sequences as I drifted off that night.
The train ride in was uneventful. Fiona was full of excitement about seeing her big sister. Miranda was full of excitement about seeing the Biennial. I settled into my role of the crazy old uncle. I had thought about titling my blog post something like, “Having a Crazy Uncle for a Dad”. As we talked, I asked Fiona what she thought ‘art’ was. I explained that it sounds like a very simple question, but really, it is very complicated. She admitted it was complicated and started talking about things that are painted. I asked if a painted house, car, or mailbox is art. As we talked, Fiona decided that everything was art and moved on to other topics.
Is this blog post art? How does it compare to the video of people talking about America projected on to the cracked windshield of a 1960s era ambulance? What is the purpose of art? Miranda was less interested in those installations that were making some sort of political statement. If she were older and more cynical, I could hear her deriding anything except art for art’s sake. Yet what is the ‘sake’ of ‘art’? Towards the end of the exhibit, we looked at a painting by Mark Rothko and Miranda talked about how he resisted his work being called abstract and berated using words like ‘juxtaposed’ to describe it. We joked about so many of those little write-ups on the walls using words like juxtaposed and deconstructed. I remember the old joke about people who can’t do, teach, and wandered if something similar applied to these art write-ups. Those who can’t do art, write little descriptions for the walls of museums.
At one point during the visit, I glanced out of one of the rare windows in the Whitney to the scene outside. I remembered the old homeless man that Miranda and I had seen dumpster diving at Grand Central. What is art? What is its purpose? What do we learn by juxtaposing the homeless man against the Whitney?
More immediately, what am I doing here, writing my blog post about going to the Whitney with two of my daughters? How do blogs fit into the greater picture? Where does other technology fit in?
For me, perhaps some of it comes back to the crazy old men who look at life a little bit different. Perhaps I’m becoming one of them. Perhaps, I might even cause someone else to stop, if even just for a moment, and look at life a little bit differently. I know that my experience at the Whitney has caused me to look around a little more closely, and I hope it has had a similar effect for my daughters, as well as for others that visit it.
Some Days...
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/16/2010 - 12:36Some days there are so many different things going on, it seems impossible to plan out the day. Some days you get curves thrown at you and all your plans go out the window. Then, there are those days that both situations apply.
My original plans for today included going to New York to cover Engage Expo! for this blog as well as a couple of other media outlets. To do this, I would have to miss an important conference call with a technology client as well as several important political events.
At 9:45 today, Senator Dodd was supposed to tour the Kleen Energy Plant in Middletown, CT where an explosion recently took the lives of several workers. Then, at 1:30 PM, he is supposed to hold a press conference in Hartford about credit card protections taking effect next week.
In between those two events, starting at 11 Ned Lamont was scheduled to make a special announcement at the Old State House in Hartford, followed by a reception at City Steam afterwards. Later in the afternoon, various organizations are gathering for a Mardi Gras Style March in Hartford for Jobs and Health Care Reform, ending at the CT Business and Industry Association headquarters at 6 PM.
All of this went out the window as we received four inches of snow over night and I needed to take Fiona to the dentist for an appointment, that due to various complications ended up taking over two and a half hours.
Now, a few hours behind schedule, I’m finally getting a chance to look at my messages, and there are plenty to respond to. Fiona is sitting quietly on the couch and Kim is on a conference call.
EntreCard Dropper Analytics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 09:17Yesterday, I completed the first version of my EntreCard analytics program. Over the past several days, there has been a discussion about ‘ghost droppers’ or ‘cheaters’ on EntreCard that use some sort of script to give an appearance of having visited your site when they really haven’t.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at data from Google Analytics and compare it to EntreCard data. While many people are concerned that EntreCard drop data may over represent the number of visits, Google Analytics data may under represent it. First, it only shows people who have stayed around long enough for the whole page to load. People who visit, see that the most recent article hasn’t changed and move on before the rest of the page is loaded are not counted.
Likewise, this is based on data of people who have visited from the EntreCard drop inbox. In my case a little over half of the traffic coming from the EntreCard website comes from people’s drop inbox. Another third comes from Advertisements and the rest from other parts of EntreCard. Unfortunately, it is only easy to tell where a person is coming from if the incoming link is from their drop inbox. It should also note that EntreCard traffic makes up only a very small amount of my total traffic.
This tool only shows visits from people that you have dropped your card on. If you haven’t dropped your card on someone, your card won’t be in their inbox, and they cannot return the visit this way.
Related to this, it does not provide information about people who have visited your site because they came to it from EntreCard at some point in the past and have bookmarked the site, or who click on your ad on a different network, like Adgitize or CMF ads, again, because they’ve seen your ad or visited your site from EntreCard in the past. Martin considers this a ‘flaw’ because it is likely to under represent people who might have come to your site via EntreCard, but ended up coming via a different network. I think Martin is overstating his case. This tool does what it does, it reports the number of page views generated by having a card in someone’s drop box.
With that, I have now made this tool available to anyone who uses EntreCard and Google Analytics. If you go to EC Analytics you will be asked to give permission to my program to access your Google Analytics data. The program will then list the various websites that you have data on. When you click on the website, it will provide a list of EntreCard userid numbers and the number of pages they have viewed on your site over the past thirty days when clicking on your card in their drop inbox.
By visiting the people that are most likely to return the visit, you are increasing the chances of people becoming repeat visitors. By skipping the people that are already visiting you because of other sites, like Adgitize, CMF ads, or from their own bookmarks, you are focusing on the people that are less likely to come through other methods anyway.
This is still a first version of the program, so improvement suggestions are welcome. To the extent that this becomes a helpful tool, I may gather data from this page to provide aggregate information about which people seem to visit the most pages from cards dropped on them.
Using Google Analytics API and PHP to Ghostbust EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/13/2010 - 13:36The EntreCard community has been all abuzz about ‘cheaters’ or ‘ghost droppers’ on EntreCard. These are people who somehow record with EntreCard that they’ve visited your site when they actually haven’t. I wrote a little bit about this in my entry Cheating at EntreCard and Finding Real Top Droppers. In that blog post, I suggested using Google Analytics to see who Google recognizes as visiting your site from your EntreCard drop box.
Since then, I’ve been using these analytics to visit those people that come to my website via the EntreCard Dropbox and visit the most pages. With that, I’ve seen more EntreCard based traffic over the past couple days than I have in nearly a year. Some of that may be simply because of the buzz about EntreCard ghosts and my current rise in popularity on EntreCard. However, it does seem like a useful strategy.
People have asked if my process could be automated, and I’m starting to work on automating it. Details are provided below. In addition, people have suggested it might be good to come up with a Quality Dropper list. Using what I’ve written so far, I can come up with the quality droppers, in terms of the number of page views, that I see. However, I could make this more useful if I had similar data from other sites. If you’re interested in submitting your own data, there are a couple different approaches.
One method, for a simple one time analysis, you could go to the Google Analytics page for your site. Click on Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and EntreCard in the list. Set Show Rows to 500 to get the most data, and then click on Export TSV. Send the Tab Separated Values file to me and I’ll add it to my analysis. For ongoing analysis, if you give me read access to the Google Analytics for your page I can include your site in the automated analytics I’m building.
Send your TSV file to aldon.hynes at orient-lodge.com, or give the same address read access to your Google Analytics User Manager and drop me a note about it.
For those who want to build their own automated analytics, here is how I’ve been approaching it:
