The Deets

Paul Graham has an interesting post on forum & blog trolls where he explains the factors he thinks contributes to rude behavior by members. Anonymity plays a role, but so does the forum’s acceptable culture:

The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum. Trolls are like children (many are children) in that they’re capable of a wide range of behavior depending on what they think will be tolerated. In a place where rudeness isn’t tolerated, most can be polite. But vice versa as well.

I don’t know if children is the best term for trolls since that would imply that moderators are like parents. I think moderators are more like bouncers who keep things under control and kick out people who are behaving badly.

There’s a sort of Gresham’s Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture.

That’s dead on. Why would anyone leave a thoughtful comment on a YouTube video or Digg post if it’s just going to be buried alongside all the rudeness? We see a bit of this locally on the occasional degraded MNSpeak thread (although it’s not consistently crappy like YouTube or Digg comments).

For those of you who’ve missed it (aka. most of you), the Pioneer Press has been running a blog that’s specifically about Target called OnTarget (registration may be required).

What kind of stuff will you find on the OnTarget blog? Hold that thought for a second. Keep in mind that Target is one of the Pioneer Press’ largest advertisers. Now what kind of stuff would you expect to find? Exactly.

The Daily Mole’s Steve Perry has been reading OnTarget so you don’t have to. He mined a few gems from recent posts that help illustrate the hard-hitting off-the-cuff reporting we’ve grown to expect from blogging “journalists”:

TC Morning Roundup: When Target struggles, Gita struggles

Pi Press reporter Gita Sitaramiah files a sad, terse little dispatch to say that local retail hero Target posted a below-forecast 1.1 percent sales increase in November. But over at her On Target blog (previous Mole item), Sitaramiah bravely them cheers them on. Couple of excerpts from the past week:

“Not that anyone needs another excuse to Christmas shop at Target, but now you can feel better about loading up that red shopping cart.”

“Another effort has been the addition of TargetLists… Move over brides and parents-to-be, now anyone can start adding to a list of potentially welcome gifts from Target.”

Admittedly, those gems were hand-picked to prove a point. Here’s what Gita’s posts look like when the pom poms are put away:

Driving Sales

If you’re going to buy your fake Christmas tree and decorations, you better plan to spend. Target tucks the stuff in the back of stores so you’re tempted by digital cameras and designer sheets on the way back there.

The seasonal stuff is in the back? Like, in the same spot where they put the back to school stuff in August, and the Halloween stuff in October? Color me informed.

As Da Mole pointed out on the 3rd, the OnTarget blog was pretty much the only site in town that didn’t touch the Target Rounders story that blew through town last week:

Target pays college students to give it some Facebook loving

The meta-meta-scandal: On Target, the Gita Sitaramiah-authored Pi Press blog devoted exclusively to Target news (and previously covered at the Mole), has not breathed a word of this–in fact, it hasn’t been updated at all since November 29!

While a blog like OnTarget could work, I don’t think it’s something that’s going to work when associated with a company so largely dependent on Target for revenue.

What I’d like to see is an OnOnTarget blog that covers the OnTarget coverage of Target. That’s something I’d read.

Google has a new feature that lets you see how many subscribers a given site has through Google Reader. This isn’t a measure of all subscribes to a site but just those subscribing through Google’s Reader (and probably personalized homepages on Google). For example, the number below for Technology Evangelist represents around 1/4 of the site’s total subscribers and for The Deets it’s showing around 1/5 of the total subscribers.

I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few. I put this together based on Minnesota sites I read or know about. I have not included subscriber numbers from traditional media sites (with the exception of blogs contained on media sites like Jason DeRusha’s).

Rank  Readers    Site
1	1410	  Powerline
2	926	  Pharyngula
3	599	  Technology Evangelist
4	210	  MNSpeak
5	124	  Blogumentary
6	 77	  Minneapolis Metblogs
7	 63	  More Cowbell
8	 51	  Girl Friday
9	 50	  Roadguy
10	 36	  Chow & Again
11	 36	  St Paul Real Estate
12	 28	  Garrick Van Buren
13	 26	  Aaron Landry
14	 24	  Jason’s Deblog
15	 22	  Tech~Surf~Blog
16	 21	  The Deets
17	 21	  MNBeer
18	 19	  Bex Huff
19	 18	  Big Time Attic
20	 16	  Doodledee
21	 12	  Real Estate Snippets
22	  9	  Afterglide
23	  9	  PF Hyper
24	  6	  bencredible
25	  6	  Twin City Sidewalks

How to Look Up Subscribers

Login to Google Reader (if you’re not already using it, you should be), click the “browse” link on the left, then search for blogs near the bottom of the page. The resulting page lists the subscriber data.

If you find blogs I’ve missed or want to share additional findings, please do so in the comments.

Diablo Cody has relocated her blog, Pussy Ranch, from CityPages to Blogger.

If you haven’t read her stuff, check it out. Hilarious.

She says the reason for her move was the pain of uploading photos to the Citypages server. I can’t say that I have experience with that, but I can tell you that Blogger may not be the #1 choice for blogging. Personally, I think she would have been better off going with a Wordpress hosted blog. That would give her more control over images and site design than what Blogger offers.

Looking at the state of local media site’s blogging platforms, I have to say that most of them suck or haven’t really been thought out. They’re missing basic stuff like comments, trackbacks, easy image or video embedding, RSS feeds (or at least well designed RSS feeds), and limited integration with the rest of the sites.

If I had to name one local media site with the poorest blogging strategy to date, I’d say the Pioneer Press holds that title. It’s a mess.

Aaron backed me into a corner at the Calhoun Beach Club to tell me how much he hated the “Recent Commentors” feature in the sidebar of The Deets.

He explained how stupid it was that it showed who the most recent commentors were but didn’t mention which post they had commented on. He gave me a stern look and said, “You can do better.”

Or, something like that.

Whether that happened or not is water under the bridge. The important thing here is that “Recent Commentors” has been changed in a variety of ways. It now mentions who commented, on what they commented, is followed by a list of “Recent Trackbacks” which lists who’s been writing about posts on The Deets and which posts drew their ire or praise.

There is still at least one bug in the current system. But rather than point it out, let’s see if you can guess what it is.

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted. I’ve been really busy . . .

Zander breaks down what it takes to be a typical blogger in an awesome post that includes this frame about the hot high school pole vaulter girl who’s sweeping through the blogosphere.

Apparently, she doesn’t dig the attention she’s receiving for her hotness, so I’ll spare her a link.

PS: If the first line of this post makes little sense, you haven’t checked out the cartoon on Zander’s site yet.

On Thursday night, write a post for Technology Evangelist announcing that the TE podcast is replacing Don Imus on CBS.

Watch a few influential bloggers fall for it, thus amplifying the story.

Spend Friday responding to emails and doing an interview with NPR’s Jon Gordon from Future Tense about the fall-out.

[Update (Wednesday): Captain Capitalism has now posted my comment, so the example no longer hold, but the rant outside of the example is still valid.]

Here’s something that bugs me about issues bloggers. You know, people who have a blog where they take a stance - political, economic, religious, etc. - and consistently publish information on that topic. So far, no problem. People can blog about whatever they want. What I have a problem with is the comment policies of some blogs in this category.

Here’s my take: If you’re going to host an issue blog, and if you’re going to allow comments on said blog, you should allow comments from anyone who’s willing to contribute an on-topic comment.

The incident that’s managed to get me worked up happened at a local blog called Captain Capitalism. The blogger is a fundamentalist capitalist who publishes commentary on the news of the day through his fundamentalist view. On a recent post, found here, he posted a graph from the Economist that shows Columbia’s economy improving over the time with the commentary:

“Again, it’s amazing what happens when adults take over.”

Captain Capitalism is clearly pleased with Uribe’s policies.

I decided to drop an on-topic comment mentioning that one of the “adult” decisions made by Uribe was to impose a 1.2% tax on the liquid wealth of higher income Columbians, and how different that is from the “sacrifices” George W. Bush has asked of America’s higher income citizens in a time of war - tax cuts.

My comment was moderated and never published by Captain Capitalism. It’s been two days, and he’s since posted another post to his site, so I don’t believe it’s a case of not getting to it yet.

In my opinion, Captain Capitalism and other bloggers like him/her should:

1. Remove the comments feature from their blog if they’re not going to allow them.

2. Or have a clear comments policy that says, “comments from people who don’t share my fundamentalist world view will not be posted.”

That way, people will know what they’re getting: rebuttle-less fundamentalist commentary. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just a little disclosure would be nice.

Very cool:

Word Spy - shoefiti

shoefiti (shoo.FEE.tee) n. One or more pairs of shoes tied together by the laces and dangling from a powerline or other type of overhead wire.

And they even called shoefiti.com “oddly compelling,” which pretty much nails it.

Big Roll vs. Small Roll, originally uploaded by edkohler.

Here’s something I can’t figure out. Why do some people go for the big roll over the small roll when there are two rolls to choose from for TP?

Why go for the larger roll when the smaller one works just fine?

I go for the smaller roll, assuming that it can be easily replaced when empty. Two half-used rolls could lead to throwing away perfectly good TP or, even worse, a TP shortage at one’s time of need.

I’d love to hear the perspective of a Big Roll user. What motivates you to break the unwritten rule of TP consumption?