Listics

Spending so much time sorting out blog tools that there doesn’t seem to be time to write. Too bad too, because I have a little whimsy bubbling up titled “Fundamentalism, forgiveness, and the zeitgeist of excess and regret…” That may be what I’ll call it. It’s my take on a theoretical swipe at fundamentalism as an expression of completed nihilism, a little something I ran across linked out of wood’s lot, to wit:

…power in its mature (nihilistic) phase — sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will — desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism — the New Protestant Ethic — that will not be suppressed.

Wrong-o, of course. What it’s about is the dread, the dark fear and conviction that too much fun was killing us, that all those parties were leading to too much sex and drug abuse, and that although it would be nice if there were some theosophical or otherwise metaphysical way out of our mess like the hippies said there was, there is really only one superstitious construct that is viable in a post-enlightenment age, and that is the faith of our fathers… the faith that when we die there WILL be pie in the sky, the faith that there is a devil even worse than the demons we saw for ourselves in those dark nights of the soul that we contrived in the age of loud music, free love and large motorcycles.

Jesus saves. He saves you from thinking about the great dark spaces before and after life. He saves you from your own base inclinations. There’s a big thing that needs writing here but I’m hooked on the Ultimate Tag Warrior and can’t come out and play until I’ve figured out the CSS pieces.

Ironic, ain’t it? I mean, what’s a blog for?

I like the idea of connecting with people every day through this blog. I feel rewarded when I can see that hundreds of people have dropped in. At the old place, I was getting an average of 500 or so people every day, but a majority of those were folks from Google who were dropping in to see a picture of June Carter or looking for arcane information on skunk poop, or something.

It was time for Sandhill rel. 3.0 to emerge. This is a web publishing effort that is more intentional and more controlled than Sandhill rel. 2.0. It’s a chance for me to experiment and to share what I learn, a chance to do more interesting things than you can do with a Typepad blog.

The traffic here is building up. I’m glad to see real people dropping in. I don’t see many Googlers yet. But the Technorati ranking has me baffled. They say,

A few years ago, Web search was revolutionized by a simple but profound idea — that the relevance of a site can be determined by the number of other sites that link to it, and thus consider it ‘important.’ In the world of blogs, hyperlinks are even more significant, since bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, which creates the sense of timeliness and connectedness one would have in a conversation. So Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who’s linking to whom) underlying these conversations.

Now if ‘rati is monitoring who links to whom, why do some of the more prominent LLs (Listics Linkeurs) not show up in the list of who’s linking here? Take RageBoy himself, and his blogging buddy Chris Locke. Both of these guys have links here, and I can see that people follow them based on monitoring my traffic counter, but Technorati doesn’t show those links at all. The Lockeian links originate as simple sidebar links, “blog rollage,” but they represent something, and it doesn’t look like Technorati notices them.

When Mandarin MEG hooks me up through her quilt (Hi Michelle!), it shows up, but it doesn’t move my ranking off the place it’s stuck. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that the blog’s the thing, and the rankings can’t be allowed to be that important or seppuku would be the only alternative for all but a handful at the high end of the traffic curve. Even so, it would be nice to understand better how Google finds its way here, how Technorati ranks one blog over another.