Posted on

New Aggregator at KnoxNews

This is cool, and needed. The News Sentinel continues to be way ahead of the curve as far as newspapers go when it comes to embracing its local blogging community. Not at all a bad business decision either, since they will be hosting blogs (and advertising) for others there. The site itself has a lot of features, but I doubt I’ll be using many of those. The aggregator is nice though.

I’m a big fan of aggregators for two reasons. First, they bring readers to your site that you may have a hard time reaching otherwise. Secondly, they are a great way to find new blogs and get a good sampling.

Luckily, I have the perfect spot for it in my theme. As soon as the bugs are worked out, I’ll be including it.

Posted on

Electoral College Class of ’96

Justin Gardner at Donklephant asks if we should Get Rid of the Electoral College.

On Aug. 25, Democratic California senator Dianne Feinstein called for the abolition of the Electoral College, saying, “The current system enables a handful of states to become battleground states, and disenfranchises tens of millions of American voters in the most important election in the nation.

Yeah, but…
Wouldn’t eliminating the electoral college basically cause candidates to pander to campaign in areas that are densely populated and forget about people in less populated areas?

I think the real problem is that we’ve become a culture that, dangerously and wrongly, looks to The President as the person who is responsible for all of the woes and triumphs of our daily lives. The Presidency was meant to be of the States, not of the people, hence the electoral college. The President’s job was to be the executive officer of the group of States, while the States themselves were to be responsible for governing the people. That way people in California would be free to institue whatever wacky policies and programs they choose to implement locally while not affecting the people of New Hampshire, who would be free to choose a more conservative set of policies to govern their state.

The powers of the President and federal government are pretty clearly laid out in the Constitution and should be correctly limited. If they were, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Posted on

Blog Numbers and the General Public

The Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik has another great column today, this time about the numbers of Americans who are blog-aware. According to a survey (conducted online),

…80% of Americans know what a blog is, nearly half have visited one and 8% maintain their own blog.

I think these numbers may be off by quite a bit. I would guess that far fewer than 80% of Americans know what a blog is (the study didn’t give parameters, just asked a yes or no question). Seriously, how many times have you answered “yes” when someone asked you if you knew what something was, just because you didn’t want to admit to them that you didn’t know.

Also, I’d bet that more than half of internet users have visited a blog, but they may not know that they were visiting a blog. I have a few other blogs that I run, and based on the search engine terms that lead people there and their click behavior after they arrive, most of them aren’t very web savvy. Of course, that is all demographic dependent. Most visitors to this blog are pretty savvy.

So what are the real numbers? My initial guess is that these numbers are reversed. I would guess that around 50% know what a blog is, and 80% (or more) have visited one. 8%of Americans maintaining thier own? That one I have a tough time believing. Holding a wet finger in the air, I’d say that could be off by as much as a factor of ten.

Posted on

Damn You Scrubs

I tried it once, just a taste, a few years ago. I got just enough of it to know that it was something I should stay away from. I could feel those inner voids that had been present in the years since Seinfeld went off the air being filled just a little, and I knew I’d be in real trouble if I allowed myself to partake. There was no way I’d let myself get tangled up in its evil web.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave in to my weakness. Gave in may not be the right phrase. It’s more like I got overconfident in my ability to fight off my demons. It had been years since I’d bothered watching a sitcom. They all suck, right? And I’ve outgrown them. I’m mature. I can handle my TV now. It wouldn’t do any harm to watch just one episode. Besides, it would be a nice thing to do for the missus. She seems to enjoy it, and she’s confined to that big comfy chair made for two feeding the baby. It’s family time.

It’s just one episode, right?

Wrong. I hadn’t counted on the fact that she was mixing up a dangerous concoction of Scrubs with Tivo. Cooked up with 2.5 hours of syndication every weekday, they form the speedball of television sitcoms. It didn’t take long for my tolerance to build up. Within a few days I was there with her watching 2 episodes a night. We should have known things were getting out of hand when we accidently missed The Soup that first Friday night.

I know. It’s pathetic. We weren’t trying to be neglectful, Joel McHale. Honest. It just sort of happened. We’ll never let it happen again. One more promise we can’t keep.

Now, a few weeks later, here we are at rock bottom. I’ve even caught myself calling my male coworkers “Bambi” and thinking up places to hide saltines even though I have no competitors. At home, we’re making excuses to watch more and more, and our justifications are just lame:

“We can’t watch just one episode…they air in pairs.”
“It’s Tivo’d, so it actually takes us three episodes to watch an hour of TV.”
“We have to watch some of these or we’ll run out of recording space.”
“We should watch all of these now. We’re going to be gone for a couple of days and will be way behind.”

It’s easy to rationalize it, but deep down I know it’s wrong. The worst part is that she can’t help me. Her problem is just as bad as mine, and I’m not sure if she sees it herself. Maybe if I get it out of my system I can help her get straight too.

Maybe I can get in touch with the producers of Intervention on A&E. We used to watch that show too before all of this started. Maybe they could help us.

But it wouldn’t hurt to hear just one more snide comment from Dr. Cox would it? They come in really handy at work.

Want to watch some with me? Come one…just some clips, not a whole episode or anyhing like that. A little bit won’t hurt you.

[youtube SPGWRS9B5_0]

Posted on

It’s That Time of Year Again

Local people will hate me for writing this, and most non-locals won’t get why it’s a big deal.

It is really sad funny, but I didn’t know that football season started today until about 30 minutes before the UT game. This is what is considered the real football season around here by the way, not the NFL. I’m risking my status as a Knoxville resident by admitting that I wasn’t really aware and don’t care that much about UT football.

Now for the fun part. The start of football season means that it’s time to start listening to sports talk radio again. See, I’m not really a football fan, but I’m a huge “Members of the Knoxville Chapter of Mensa talking about football on the radio” fan. It’s hard to believe the entertainment they provide is actually free.

I just checked the scores and saw that the Vols lost, so it should be good this week of radio. The chicken littles will be out en masse, not realizing that win or lose, they still have to go to work on Monday. I’ve never understood how people can get so emotionally invested in something over which they have no control. Maybe that’s it? The fact that they don’t have control is what makes them freak out over it? Dunno.

Anyway, here’s a quick stab in the dark of some things we may here this week:
“Phil Fulmer should be fired”
“I don’t understand why they ran _____ on that 2nd and 4 during the 3rd quarter”
“How many games does Phil have to win this year to keep his job?”
“Let’s just hope Cal wins out.”
“If Fulmer gets fired or resigns, who should we go after as a coach?”
“I just want to say GO VOLS! I’ll hang up and listen to your comments.”
“If the NFL comes after Phil, what are the chances of him leaving?”

See a common theme here? Tennessee fans do love them a good coach firing!!!

***UPDATE***
As sure as the sun rises. The first comment on the article in the KNS I linked to:
“it just goes to show that we pay top dollar to overrated coaches (phill fulmer mostly)”

I love this time of year! It’s better than Christmas and Arbor Day combined!!!