just a lowly edtech geek, mumble mumble university of calgary
From the monthly archives:
I’ve been having a heck of a time battling sploggers at UCalgaryBlogs.ca – roaches that create accounts and blogs so they can foist their spam links to game Google (thanks for providing spammers with such a powerful incentive, Google).
There’s an option in WordPress Multiuser to ban email domains – provide the domains, one per line, [...]
{ 8 comments }
1:06:20 PM: If this works, all of my tweets will be gathered into a single updating blog post, until I send the liveblog stop code.
1:14:35 PM: now, if this works, it’d be even cooler if I could have it pull all tweets based on a hashtag – either my one, or everyone’s.
1:17:46 PM: hmm… Could it be passing over tweets that start with @jimgroom – that could be a killer feature. wish I’d thought of that…
1:19:31 PM: yeah. the twitter –> blog liveblogging plugin seems to skip tweets that start with @ but includes all others. #hashtags?
1:23:00 PM: OK. This Twitter Liveblog thing is pretty fracking slick. I think I’m going to try this for the next event I’m at. Very cool.
1:32:20 PM: that’s interesting – my tweets getting pulled into a single updating blog post, with comments happening on the blog post as well.
1:34:24 PM: http://twitpic.com/jinnt – How does it handle links? Twitpics?
1:45:33 PM: New post: Trying WP to Twitter (http://cli.gs/G1LhR)
1:55:14 PM: this liveblogging thing looks really promising. I’ll definitely keep it handy…
I posted this on a course blog, but it’s not public so I’m reposting it here.
I just ran a silly experiment to see what dollar value people somehow attach to social capital. Technorati offers a utility to generate a dollar value to see what “your blog is worth” – again, a silly number, but perhaps an interesting way to view the abstracted concepts that compose “social capital”.
My blog is worth $125,327.88.
How much is your blog worth?
I think I’m almost ready to retire. Technorati says my blog is worth over $125,000 US.
Of course, it’s a completely silly and relatively arbitrary dollar value. There’s no way anyone would pay me anything for my blog. That’s just plain ridiculous. BUT, the calculation is based on the value of the website WeblogsInc.com when it was purchased by AOL back in 2005. Loosely, what it’s doing is calculating the “value” of a Technorati rating (which includes the number of websites linking to a site, and their value, etc… in a similar way to Google’s PageRank algorithm) and then calculating the value of a given website (usually a blog) based on that base value. The description from the blog post that Technorati used to create the algorithm:
In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has now provided us with some numbers traditional media are willing to pay for a blog. Looking at the numbers above, one can try to guess at the value of a link from an external site. a single link on the weblogsinc network represents 0.002258559942180087 percent of the overall network.
At the different rumored price points from AOL, it looks as follows:
Link $25 million value 30 million value 40 million value 1 $564.64 $677.57 $903.42 I don’t know if those values are based on any real rationale but it’s nice to dream up the value of one’s blog based on this.
Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?
Not quite. The incremental value is in the size of the network and the underlying tools. Jason and Brian have been working on developing a blog authoring technology, called BlogSmith, that sits at the core of their network and one has to believe that AOL saw some value in the software too. However, one can easily say that blog valuations are going to be easier to make after this deal since it provides the first yardstick in that space.
So, it’s a calculation of what “traditional media” outlets would pay for a website based on the number of links tracked through Technorati. Not a real world representation of “social capital” but maybe a simple, concrete way to think about the abstract concepts (even though the dollar values are insanely inflated).
OK. I’m a dork. I made some ringtones today to use on my iPhone, based on short clips from Battlestar Galactica. Maybe someone else will find them useful. Please don’t sue me. They were all made from very short sound clips I found online.
I’m using “BSG – Phone Ring” as my ringtone (it’s the sound [...]
{ 5 comments }
It’s time to pick up the Formative 10 Films series, after abandoning it after the fourth entry…
Red Dawn. 1984. A bunch of misfit high school kids work together to defend their town from an invading Russian military force. Patrick Swayze as the cool older brother. Charlie Sheen. Lea Thompson (I had such an ’80s crush [...]
{ 11 comments }
I was extremely fortunate to have been a part of the fantastic YYCPhotoBook 2009 project. It’s a community-based photography book project, featuring 32 different Calgary photographers ranging from amateurs to high-end professionals. The goal was to show the city from various perspectives, outside the traditional stereotypes and stock-photo views. From start to finish, the project [...]
{ 2 comments }
Hey! Look at me! I’m a big time blogger now!
I’ve finally gotten sick of smacking down spamroaches. WP-Spam-Free is still doing a decent job, but it’s letting enough crap through that it’s overly annoying – for me, in despamming the site, and for people who have subscribed to comments by email or RSS because they get spammed. I’ve just re-enabled Akismet, and will be running it alongside WP-Spam-Free for awhile to see if they can double up and plug the holes…
Today was the annual Kickoff event – the home opener for the U of C Dinos football team, combined with a party welcoming students to campus for another year. This year, the whole family went to the game, and we had a blast. Also, this year was different because it was the first time in [...]
{ 0 comments }
Being a writer in a world that features Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment.
and
I know that if we as a society approached depression and mental health with the same dedication and persistence with which we approached drunk driving or smoking or, hell, littering in the past, we’d bury a lot fewer of our brothers and daughters and heroes.
genius. fucking genius.
