Blogging about Blogs
In which I apologize to Astrology fans everywhere…
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010OK, so it all started back in August of 2009, when I saw on one of those “Born on This Day…” sites that Leonard Bernstein and Billy Ray Cyrus share the same birthday. I thought this was somehow ironic, and posted it under the heading “Proof That Astrology Is Nonsense.”
Fast forward to April of this year, when I turned the concept into a (mostly) weekly series, showing photos of pairs of celebrities who shared the same birthday and were somehow “odd couples.” Eight of these posts went by with the usual reaction – an occasional comment or a “Like” from the Facebook crowd.
But then yesterday, I published my ninth post of the series (George M. Cohan & Franz Kafka), and started receiving multiple messages from folks who were upset about how I was over-generalizing, over-simplifying, under-valuing, and speciously criticizing the field of astrology. None of which was the point, of course, as much as it was to highlight weird pairs of celebrities. That said, astrology? Really? Is nothing up for free ridicule anymore? Ah well, live and learn.
In any case, I’ve renamed the series Unlikely Twins, and have removed just about all references to astrology and/or horoscopes. Hopefully, we can all now share a weekly chuckle, and leave the arguing to important matters – like politics. Or whether the World Cup is getting in the way of a perfectly good baseball season.
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(And oh, by the way, Happy Birthday to both Ringo Starr and Gustav Mahler, composers of Yellow Submarine and Kindertotenlieder – Songs on the Deaths of Children, respectively…) |
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Unlikely Twins | 9 Comments »
Brandon’s Blog
Sunday, June 13th, 2010
Last night, my younger son, Brandon, asked me, “Daddy, can I have a blog?” When I asked why he wanted a blog, he told me he wanted to post pictures of baseball fields and funny houses. Of course, no father could possibly argue with such sound logic, and so, without further adieu, I present to you all: Brandon’s Blog.
It also has a place of honor on the top menubar of this site, in case you lose the URL and need a fix of ballfields and funny houses.
In the spirit of encouraging young bloggers, if you’re reading this and are so inclined, please take a peek over there, rate some pictures (Funny, Cool, or Interesting), and maybe even leave a comment. I’m sure he’d get a kick out of that. Thanks!
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Family Matters | 5 Comments »
Man Bites Dog Story: Facebook drives blog traffic
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Lileks, 2/5/10:
Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day.
(Jason Bennion has some interesting thoughts on this too, which I will link to as soon as he gets his blog back up & running).
On balance, I can’t say I disagree with Lileks. Popularity-wise, Facebook is to blogging what blogging was to personal homepages back in 1995. That said, there are some counterexamples.
Take the week of January 25-29, 2010, for example. Someone (and who knows, really, how these things get started) declared it “Doppleganger Week” on Facebook. The idea was that you’d replace your profile picture with a picture of a celebrity who you’ve often been told you look like. So, by the end of the week, rather than reading status updates from your friends Joe, Mike, Janet and Kate, you’re reading updates from Charlie Sheen, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and Demi Moore. A waste of time? Sure. But hey – it’s one of those communal time-wasters that gives everyone something to schmooze about for a while, and isn’t that really what Facebook is for?
Now, flashback about 3.5 years ago, when someone sent me a link to a celebrity face recognition service. It being 2006, I blogged about it, rather than Facebook sharing it or tweeting about it. The resulting blog post contains a lot of celebrity images and links to pages about those celebrities, which not only makes it a valuable resource for Doppleganger Week, but also gives it enough Google Juice (hat tip: Jeff Jarvis) to show up at the top of the list in all sorts of queries about celebrity images.
The result? Here’s Facebook’s Doppleganger Week as viewed through my Google Analytics stats:
For the two weeks prior to Doppleganger Week (Jan 11-Jan 22), my little corner of the web here garnered 665 pageviews, with the Celebrity Look-Alike post accounting for just 18 of those.
For the following two weeks (Doppleganger Week actually seemed to last more like two weeks – Jan 25-Feb 5), the Celebrity Look-Alike post received 389 pageviews on it’s own, an increase of just over 2,000%. The site as a whole had 1,045 pageviews in those two weeks, a 57% increase.
The Celebrity Look-Alike post went from 2.7% of my traffic to a whopping 37% of my traffic during Doppleganger Week(s).
All thanks to Facebook. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to cross-post this blog post on my Facebook wall, in hopes of getting that crowd to click over here and read it. Because I’m old-fashioned that way…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 6 Comments »
The Twelve Sentences of 2009
Friday, December 11th, 2009In the first of two Ilya-inspired posts (the second being “How People Found Me” – coming soon!), here are the twelve sentences that started off each month of 2009 here at I Should Be Sleeping:
January: Happy New Year to all!
February: Given the current state of the U.S. Economy, the following new rules will be instituted for this year’s annual Groundhog Day celebration festivities:
March: A few weeks back, Time Magazine published a list of the 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis, in which it details the 25 people (or groups of people) that it considers most “blameworthy.”
April: The New York Times ran an interesting article last week about the impending obsolescence of voice mail.
May: Jeff Porten raised an interesting question about the water boarding of 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, which led me to do some more detailed reading on the subject, specifically the International Red Cross Report on Detainee Abuse, and several of the Top Secret DOJ memos from May, 2005 that President Obama recently declassified (Memo 1, Memo 2, Memo 3, Memo 4).
June: As some of my readers are aware, I have been resisting joining the two newest social networking trends – Facebook and Twitter – for quite some time now.
July: It seems the new iPhone 3GS is not a big fan of direct, prolonged sunlight:
August: Sorry I’ve been away so long – its been a combination of being busy with non-blog things, a dearth of short, pithy things to say, and a host of longer, meatier topics that I’d like to discuss, but haven’t had the time to write about.
September: I’ve just returned from my first indoor baseball game – the Minnesota Twins played host to the Chicago White Sox in the soon-to-be football-only Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome here in Minneapolis.
October: This story was related to me at a leadership seminar today.
November: [Halloween was] very successful, thank you.
December: So many blog-worthy things going on in the world all at once!
And, like Ilya, they are generally reflective of what was going on all year, but in no way insightful or coherent when viewed together. Ah, tradition – how your sweet comfort frees us from the need to make sense of the things we do each year…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 2 Comments »
If I’ve Told You Once, I’ve Told You a Thousand Times…
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009Today is quite a significant milestone in the extremely insignificant world of I Should Be Sleeping. This is my 1,000th blog post. In honor of this prestigious, yet highly inconspicuous occasion, I present you with some fun facts about my little corner of the web:
- My first post was on May 8, 2005 and was entitled Hello World. Those who studied the ancient art of C Programming with Kernighan and Ritchie will understand. Everyone else will recognize it as a friendly greeting.
- It took me 1,648 days to write 1,000 posts, or roughly two posts every three days. That’s not a bad pace to keep up over a period of four and a half years, if I do say so myself.
- My posts have encompassed eighteen different categories, ranging from Politics (20%) to Technology (18%) to Sports (8%). A full 30% of my posts have been about Random Events or Weird News Stories. All of this strikes me as very representative of the things I think about, which I guess makes sense after all this time.
- I’ve received 1,677 comments, or roughly two comments for every three posts. Since I joined Facebook in late May of this year, though, my comment rate has jumped roughly 50%.
- I only have detailed stats going back to January, 2007. Since that time, though, more than 54,000 visitors have graced these pages, taking in almost 82,000 pages. Extrapolating across the life of the blog, it is very likely that I’ve received upwards of 85,000 visitors and have served upwards of 130,000 pages.
- My post popular post in that time have been my Review of a January, 2006 Billy Joel Concert at Madison Square Garden which has garnered over 6,200 visits and sixty-six comments. Also insanely popular was my reprinting of Premiere Magazine’s Twenty Most Overrated Movies of All Time, which has been seen more than 5,500 times (almost 2,000 of them on the same day – August 28, 2008 – when someone tagged it on stumbleupon.com).
If I’m being brutally honest about my progress, I’d say I’m reasonably pleased with what this blog has become – a place to record my thoughts, an opportunity to learn a bit about running a modern web site, and a chance to watch the web grow from a static medium to a dynamic medium to a socially networked medium. I’ve made some legitimate friends here, and have made the acquaintance of a few interesting, if not notable, people (a few of whom have sent me free stuff!).
That said, I’d love to see the site “go viral,” and become a place where dozens of people I don’t know discuss the topics I throw out there, but I haven’t found the time nor the secret, magical ingredient to make that happen so far. After 4.5 years and 1,000 posts, I think it’s safe to say it will probably never happen. Then again, you can’t win if you don’t play.
So, to sum up, I thank you all for being a somewhat-willing part of this. If you’re still reading at this point, you are likely one of the 5-10 loyal readers who have provided more than half of the traffic described above. A special thank you to you guys as well.
Here’s to another 1,000 interesting things to say!
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 4 Comments »
Linking WordPress to Facebook – My non-ideal solution
Sunday, June 21st, 2009Warning: This is one of those technical posts that won’t make much sense to many people, but will be a goldmine to those who have exactly the same problem I was just working on. OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin:
A few weeks ago, I became both a Blogger and a Facebook user. One of my first tasks on Facebook was to find a way to link my blog posts to my Facebook Wall & News Feed, so that my Facebook friends could read my posts without me needing to cross-post them.
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Tech Talk | 4 Comments »
Minor Blog Maintenance
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009Lately, I’ve found myself using the “Recent Comments” widgets on other blogs more frequently, in order to keep tabs on comments I’ve made, whether or not people have responded, etc.. That realization led to a second realization, which is that my blog didn’t have a “Recent Comments” widget.
As you can see on the right sidebar, this travesty was finally rectified this morning. Astute observers will also notice that I’ve also made the hyperlinks on the right sidebar consistent with the rest of the site, and have finally figured out how to get bullet points to show up there without destroying the site layout.
As is typically the case with updates to a blog template, most of this matters more to me than to any of you, but I will ask my regular readers (the few, the proud!) to let me know if anything looks askew on their particular combination of hardware, operating system, and web browser.
Thanks all…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 5 Comments »
Encouraging New Bloggers
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Yesterday, I received a pageview from a new domain, StuffImThinking.com. Intrigued, I clicked through and found a brand new Wordpress blog with one entry and one item in the blogroll (yours truly).
The ALT text for the link says, “Brian Greenberg’s blog (I don’t know him, but I do read his blog!)”
Well, Mr./M s. StuffImThinking – I don’t know you either, but I’m glad you take the time to stop by around here. Good luck with the new blog – I’ll return the favor and check in once & a while myself. We micro-bloggers need to support each other, after all…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 3 Comments »
Some Template Updates
Saturday, February 14th, 2009I’ve been playing around with the template here at Familygreenberg.com. And is often the case when I do that, I call upon my small but loyal group of regular readers to throw some feedback my way. Here’s what I think I’ve done. Please tell me if you see anything differently on your end:
- Header Image: Inspired by Jeff Porten’s “images of things in his life” and Ilya Burlak’s “horizontal image that doesn’t take up a lot of space on the page” styles, I give you the new Familygreenberg.com header image! (Huzzah!) I’m especially proud of getting the site name in the upper-left and the current page/post title in the upper-right. It’s the little things that make me happy, really. Anyway, thoughts? Comments? (Oh, and if you really miss the “cloud,” it still lives over at http://www.familygreenberg.com, which redirects users back to the homepage).
- Font and Justification: The Veranda font and full-justify spacing were starting to get to me, so I migrated to Georgia font (heck – if it’s readable enough for The New York Times, it’s readable enough for me), and good ol’ fashioned left-justification.
- Small changes to the footer text. Not that anyone ever reads it anyway…
- I changed the Bold tag so the text is black, rather than the grey it used to be (the grey always seemed less emphasized than the rest of the text to me…)
- Some tweaks to how I get images to left & right justify. This shouldn’t be visible to you, but if you don’t mind clicking over to this post and making sure the first book cover image is right-justified and the second one is left-justified, that’ll be a good test for me.
That’s about it for now. Other suggestions for things I can do to pretty up the place are welcome as well, of course…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 4 Comments »
Blog Schwag
Friday, February 13th, 2009In the mail today:
My complimentary copy of Drink, Play, F@#k, as promised by the book’s publicist, Martin Wilson, in the comments of one of my previous posts.
This marks the first time anyone’s ever sent me anything because of something I’ve written on my blog, so first of all – as the kids might say: W00T!
Secondly, my mission is now to uphold my part of the bargain, which includes reading the book and posting my review back here at I Should Be Sleeping.
Watch this space…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Random Acts of Blogging | 3 Comments »