On Thursday afternoon, I recorded my latest guest spot on Bloggingheads with Bill Scher. I pretty strenuously object to the argument he puts forth — that America necessarily voted for a progressive approach to government last Tuesday — I certainly didn’t persuade him, but will I persuade you? I guess you’ll just have to watch and see:
Archive for November, 2008
Well folks, this is it. After two years of the longest presidential campaign ever — and one hopes it can’t get any longer — the polls are open and people are standing in line all across America. Or, given the early hour, all across the Eastern time zone. And this time around people are doing something they couldn’t the last: posting their thoughts to Twitter via mobile device.
Why do I bring all this up? Because New Media Strategies (where I work and whence I type) has teamed up with Tropicana (the orange juice makers, not the casino resort) to create a Twitter-focused data visualization tool that we’re calling Fresh Squeezed Election Tweets, and just went live a few moments ago at www.anorangeamerica.com:
The site is continuously collecting tweets using the words “Obama” and “McCain”, counting up which other words appear with them — Vote, Election, Country — and other words that appear frequently — Bush, War, Lie (no one said Twitter was fair and balanced) — and representing this frequency by the size of the associated blue-red bubble. The bluer it is, the closer-aligned the keyword is with Obama; the more red, the more it’s McCain. And see the black lines connecting? Those show you which words are used together most: if you mouseover the keywords, you’ll get actual percentages. Did I mention it’s embeddable? I don’t think I did. Here, let me: It’s embeddable.
Is that cool, or what? Feel free to use it in your own posts and check back throughout the day, as the data set changes and perhaps reveals some insight into the day’s events. We might already have a pretty good idea who will be president-elect by day’s end, but Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets may help give a better idea why.
The Most Comment-Spammed Blog in America
All irritation at being notified of new comment spam is equal, but the amusements to be found in some spams are more equal than others:
The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?
My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.
Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.
And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:
Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.
I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:
In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.
P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.
Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.
N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.