Weblogs
pharyngula | April 22, 2007Near as I can judge, Pharyngula is the third most popular blog in the entire state of Minnesota, as measured by traffic and inbound links. This is a good and distinguished place to be, and I'm both pleased and surprised that this obscure little collection of rants has ranked so highly.
Except…
It's a distant third behind the top two in the state.
The top two are right-wing kool-aid drinkin' blogs, Powerline and Captain's Quarters.
Whenever people refer to the Minnesota blogosphere, they get so boggled by the spectacle of lunacy in the top two that they never quite manage to count down to #3…
pharyngula | April 19, 2007It's that time again … time to nominate your favorite commenters for the Order of the Molly. Leave a comment saying whose name you like to see popping up in the comments threads, a few words about why you think they're molly-worthy would be nice, too, and on Sunday I'll tally them up and bestow the honorable OM on someone. You can find links to previous nomination threads on the commenters page, if you want to see what deserving people were passed over last time.
pharyngula | April 15, 2007There is a short interview with me at One Blog A Day, and they asked about you people, you know, you commenters here, and I was brutally honest. Please don't rise up and strip the flesh from my bones.
pharyngula | April 13, 2007Everyone's talking about Kos, so in one sense he's done something smart, and he's going to rake in some more ad dollars over all this attention — but in another Kos has blown it, big time. He has dismissed the death threats against Kathy Sierra as a) same old story that he sees all the time, b) nothing to worry about, and c) reason to suggest that the victim ought to give up blogging, which, of course, is music to the ears of the "psycho losers" who carry out that kind of attempted intimidation. Is Kos really so tone-deaf that he doesn't realize he has just sided with people who threatened to…
pharyngula | April 12, 2007People who have seen your photo and know your name might notice you when you pick up two-dollar hookers in the seedy part of town.
Another useful hint: when said observers later mention this fact, it is not a convincing disavowal to state that you do not hang out in the red-light district "on a regular basis."
(Hat tip to Zeno for providing this fabulous PSA. I note that Zeno is pseudonymous and does not have his picture on his blog.)
pharyngula | April 11, 2007…the Evilutionary Biologist. Another evilutionist enters the blogosphere!
pharyngula | March 30, 2007Boy, you jump on one bandwagon that starts to creak and rattle and fall apart and take a wrong turn down an ugly path, and no one lets you forget it. The Republic of T resurrects the ugly corpse of "Blogroll Amnesty Day", I'm mentioned as one of the cruel participants, andLauren and Chris get in on the act. In case you don't remember it, "Blogroll Amnesty Day", or BAD as Chris puts it, was a brief moment when a couple of the A-listers announced that they ought to clean up their blogrolls and make them more representative of their current interests, open up opportunities for new blogs to get…
pharyngula | March 23, 2007The spring of 2003 must have been a good time to start a blog — that's when I started, and beating me by a couple of months was archy. Congratulations on your persistence!
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Neural Gourmet has put out a call for everyone to blog against theocracy:
I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism, abortion rights, etc.,…
pharyngula | March 18, 2007Once again, in the nomination thread for the Molly award, two names came up over and over again, and since this isn't the kind of thing where we should nit-pick, I'll put up two winners once more:
Date
Winners
Sample comments
March 2007
Blake Stacey
He's a smart feller.whenever I'm reading a comment and thinking "Right on, man" I come to the end and there's his name.
Hank Fox
He's funny and always includes a thought provoking statement with clarity and logic.Very bright guy who comes up with the greatest metaphors to make his points.
Now I know there are a few complaints about this being a…
pharyngula | March 15, 2007Last month, I tried a new motivational tactic to reward good commenting, allowing you to nominate and select one of the commenters here for the Order of the Molly award, acknowledging excellence in commenting. Kristine Harley and Scott Hatfield won that recognition that time around. I said it was going to be a monthly phenomenon, and what do you know, another month has come by, and it's time to do it again.
This is an important award, I'll have you know. As Kristine noticed, it got some people worked up — John A. Davison is going on at some length about it, although, to be perfectly honest,…
pharyngula | March 15, 2007Write faster, everyone, you don't have much time. Bruce Sterling gives blogs only ten more years.
"There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good," Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. "Well, no, actually. They don't."
"I don't think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing."
I think he's right, and he's wrong. This idea of self-publishing and babbling on the net isn't going to go away—I expect it'll be going on in some form or another as long as…
pharyngula | March 13, 2007
I had a premonition that this would happen: that when I wrote about The Strange Case of the Woman with a Breast on her Foot someone would suggest that I should have put a "Not Safe For Work" warning on it, even ironically, perhaps. It's such a common thing, that we voluntarily self-censor; I've done it a few times myself, and have felt weird about it. Why should we be at all concerned about linking to a website that might have a picture of a bare breast (or even stranger, a nipple on a foot)? It's not as if it should be regarded as hideous or offensive, and it's a bit creepy that we so…
pharyngula | February 26, 2007DarkSyde is plugging the Yearly Kos Convention, which will be held in August in Chicago. I recommend it highly—we attended last year, and it was a blast meeting all those people. I suspect this year's event will be even bigger.
pharyngula | February 26, 2007It looks like Lindsay Beyerstein dodged a bullet—she was offered the position with the Edwards campaign that Amanda Marcotte accepted, and she turned it down. It's a smart article—there are some good lessons to be learned about blogs and politics from it.
The Edwards campaign wants decentralized people-powered politics. Ironically, by hiring well-known bloggers to manage a destination Web site, it was actually centralizing and micromanaging. Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate's netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly…
pharyngula | February 19, 2007Quite a few people have written to me asking what's wrong with richarddawkins.net…they can't get through to it, and get DNS errors. No worries, everyone—it's good news. They've been experiencing ever-escalating levels of traffic, so to cope with the incoming hordes, they've just migrated to a new and better server. Give the network a little time, you should be able to get to it in the next day or two.
pharyngula | February 16, 2007He's trying to get a rise out of me, and the best he can do is mention that squid are tasty? Pathetic.
Of course they are, and I know it. How else can one fully grok the beauty?
I must demand higher standards from people trolling for links.
pharyngula | February 12, 2007The competition doesn't like us. Especially me.
It might sting more if the complainer wasn't a fan of Steven Milloy and hadn't dissed the delightful Britney Spears—that automatically makes him a fundamentalist asshat.
pharyngula | February 12, 2007Extortion just won't work, especially when the threat is so tantalizing. Greg Laden tries to get me to join in this thinking blog meme by telling me I'll get a basement full of snakes if I don't participate. Bring 'em on, I say. Gimme my snakes!