Bloggasm

I don’t frequent online message boards as much as I used to, but I know from experience that you’ll see some of the nastiest fights imaginable–especially in political threads– in little corners of the web frequented by trolls. There have been several instances where the rhetoric has grown so heated that people posted their home addresses to try to provoke the flamers into a physical, real-world fight. In one message board I read, a person had his membership at a science fiction convention revoked because he had threatened another attendee of the con.

To my knowledge, none of these real-world fights ended up happening. But recently, a man was sentenced for driving 1,300 miles in his car to burn down the trailer of another internet troll who had taunted him.

Though blogs have been covered thoroughly by the mainstream media, I’ve seen very few spotlights on online message boards. There are many that are frequented by thousands of people every day, and they’re likely a significant portion of online media. This is just one example of the potency of online flame wars, and how they have a tendency to escalate into outright chaos.

I don’t have health insurance.

The newspaper I work for offers a plan, but I’ve been putting off signing up for it in favor of saving a buck. I have rent and other expenses every month, and like millions of other Americans in their 20s, I’ve been arrogant and put health insurance at the bottom of my priority list just so I can feel comfortable with my expenses.

NY Magazine has published an article about people like me: A Generation Uninsured, and it’s scary. It begins with an anecdote about a person named Andrew Ondrejcak who wakes up with a sharp pain in his side, and rather than going to see a doctor, he tries to ride it out. It describes his own mental agonizing over how to find a doctor while uninsured, how much it’s going to cost him, and the hassle of having to eventually be rushed to the hospital.

Like I said, as someone who could very well be placed in his situation, it’s scary. I think at the end of this month I’m going to make it a priority to join up with the company plan finally and get it over with.

On a flight between Delhi and Heathrow a woman in her seventies died. The air crew, who apparently didn’t have a plan for such an incident, decided to move her to first class:

A BRITISH Airways passenger travelling first class has described how he woke up on a long-haul flight to find that cabin crew had placed a corpse in his row.

The body of a woman in her seventies, who died after the plane left Delhi for Heathrow, was carried by cabin staff from economy to first class, where there was more space. Her body was propped up in a seat, using pillows.

The woman’s daughter accompanied the corpse, and spent the rest of the journey wailing in grief.

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This video is pretty shocking. After seeing this, I will never get my car serviced at a Jiffy Lube. And you wonder why people hate taking their cars to mechanics.

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One would think that an atheist would view all illogical and unproven religious philosophies with equal disdain, but this isn’t the case. I find Mormonism to be sillier than Christianity, for instance, because its believers must reach a new level of intellectual dishonesty in order to believe the things they do. And I think “The Secret,” a new philosophy that is being endorsed by Oprah, to be especially harmful and ridiculous. In a recent Salon article, Peter Birkenhead tears Oprah a new one:

Books like “The Secret” have created, and are feeding, an enormously diverse market of disciples, and they’re thriving in every corner of the culture, in megachurches and movies, politics and pop music, in sports arenas and state boards of education. Oprah has far more in common with George Bush than either would like to admit, and so do the psychics of Marin County, Calif., and the creationists of Kansas. The believers come from all walks of life, but they work the same way — mostly by bastardizing and warping source materials, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, to make them fit their worldview. On Page 23 of “The Secret” you’ll find this revealing doozy: “Meditation quiets the mind, helps you control your thoughts.” Of course, the goal of meditation is precisely the opposite — it is to be conscious, to observe your thoughts honestly and clearly. But that’s the last thing the believers want to encourage. The authors of “The Secret” sell “control” in the form of “empowerment” and “quiet” in the form of belief, not consciousness.

The writer argues that this particular brand of snake oil is more harmful than its predecessors because it has such a powerful and influential figure behind it. Hell, even my brother has purchased the book and read it.

In early 2005, over 20 book bloggers banded together to use their combined forces to promote good books that weren’t widely known. This group, called the Litblog Co-op, chooses four books a year — one for each season — and then writes extensively about them on their group blog located at http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/. Since they first started, they’ve managed to get over 1,300 links from bloggers and have a Google Page Rank of 6:

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to go research the Co-op for an article I was going to write, only to find out that they’ve for some reason been blacklisted from Google and other major search engines.

Anyone who has even a basic understanding of Page Rank and Web Rank would know that with over 1,000 incoming links, many of them with the anchor text of the words “Litblog Co-op,” Googling those words should easily bring you directly to the site. However, when you type “Litblog Co-op” into Google, not only is it not the first result, it doesn’t even show up on the first page.

Confused, I dug deeper into this to try and find out why the correct results weren’t showing up. First, I searched for “Litblog Co-op” on MSN and Yahoo, and as you can see, I got the correct results. Next I searched for it at AOL and Ask.com — both of which use Google software — only to find that they, too, weren’t giving up the correct results.

After this startling discovery, I dug even deeper, only to find out that Google isn’t even indexing the site at all. I unearthed this by searching for specific phrases within quotation marks to filter out all other websites. As you can see, the only thing indexed in Google is the LBC atom feed.

Given the above information, it’s my recommendation that the LBC move their website to a different URL that isn’t blacklisted from Google. If their true goal is to promote these books, then they’ll want the valuable search engine traffic that comes from the three search engines that combine together to make up over 90% of all internet searches. If I were the LBC, I would take this very seriously. Search engine traffic is very valuable.

UPDATE: It appears that the Litblog Co-Op is looking into the issue and they’re possibly going to move to WordPress.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As I initially suspected, there was a no-follow link in their source code which was deflecting Google bots. I emailed one of the Co-op bloggers and they’ve located the no-follow link and got rid of it.

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I, like many peope, am addicted to the show 24. But unlike some, I enjoy it for its entertainment value, not for any political messages it conveys. A New Yorker article this week –Whatever It Takes– confirms that several of the creators of the show are indeed very conservative. Not only that, but they have strong connections with conservative political figures and meet with them regularly. Also, right-leaning journalists are using examples from the show to give credence to their arguments that torture can produce good.

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