And who can blame them? Technorati, if you're unfamiliar with it, is one of those services that watches activity on the web, and then puts up metrics and ranks and scores, and tries to distill the flux into something simpler and more comprehensible, which often reduces to telling you how many people are trying to find pictures of a naked Paris Hilton. When the mob votes, it always seems to lead to the lowest common denominator. The We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party is trying to subvert all that with a campaign to push the WAAGNFNP into the upper ranks of Technorati's odd WTF category. A "WTF" is a user-written blurb that tries to identify a hot topic and explain something about it—any member of Technorati can write a blurb, and also vote for it, and the WTF page is another ranked list of these popular blurbs. Get in there and rock the system!
There are no Pharyngula blurbs, sad to say, and even sadder, I used to be on their Top 100 Favorited Blogs, and I've slipped off the list lately. Don't forget, new people, you can click here to increase my Technorati favorited rank.
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I wrote a WTF about bee colony collapse disorder....and it promptly dissapeared under a pile of "brittany no panties" and entertainment news. :(
It would be a cool idea to seek out and boost the science stories.
OT, but check out this giant sea worm in FL. (via Fark, who described it as "Keith Richards' lower intestine")
I saw that today in a link from Digg.
Looks like it prefers to stay hidden under the rocks.
Is anyone other than me having problems accessing Pharyngula lately using FireFox? It hangs at "read m1.2mdn.net" and never gets to the blog. IE accesses it, but I don't normally use IE.
I'm hard on your heels, PZ! I added one of those "Add this blog to my Technorati favorites" button to the sidebar of Halfway There and my blog has now been listed as a favorite by two (two!) different people. Wow!
Of course, I'm one of them...
I hadn't realized this trend. I mean I knew people were going crazy about Technorati favourites but now the WTF. It's hard to keep up with all that!
Naked pictures of Rotifers performing auto-erotic maneuvers would bump up your ratings PZ.
And I'm all for it. 100% and all the way.
PZ: "When the mob votes, it always seems to lead to the lowest common denominator."
But of course. When you narrow the bandwidth down to a minimum (which is usually a "mob"), you get crap (low information) at the other end. A mob isn't just a large group of people, but a large group of people with low bandwidth. You wouldn't call a symphony a mob, right?
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Is anyone other than me having problems accessing Pharyngula lately using FireFox?
working fine for me.
Is PZ going to have a thread on the GO P debate? They just had a show of hands on who believes in evolutio n. About 50% of the candidates do not.
How could they believe in evolution? The Republicans are dominated by entropy - they're not much different from rocks and other dead things.
Earlier today I accessed Pharyngula from my office using IE. This evening I used Firefox to access it from home. No problem in either case.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.