House of Eratosthenes

Webloggin Welcomes Morgan Freeberg, New Author of Blogging Excellence!
By the Webloggin Editor
October 20, 2006 at 1:33 pm in Feature Article

We are very proud to announce that Morgan Freeberg from �House of Eratosthenes� has joined the Webloggin Community of Blogging Excellence!!!!

Morgan calls his blog �the blog that nobody reads� but in reality he has developed a following of regular readers.

So why is it called the blog that nobody reads? Morgan explains this best.

So the question has naturally arisen from that readership, why does it persist in calling itself �the blog that nobody reads�? Yeah, subtitles can be cool. Superman is the �Man of Steel,� and Hooters is �Delightfully Tacky, Yet Unrefined.� But what�s up with a subtitle that is starkly at odds with the truth?

And what�s going on with that name? House of Erato- What? Who?

Here it is, the long-awaited FAQ that explains all. However, it�s a Bill Clinton flavor of �all� � it depends on the meaning of the word �all.� Unlike our 42nd President, however, I�m not going to deliberately lie to you and then send my cronies out to appear on Sunday morning talk shows, intoning that the lie was okay because it was never your business to begin with. I�m taking the initiative in telling you, so it�s automatically your business, and it�s true.

So there you have it. Well actually there is quite a bit more. My favorite is �This blog is meant to be a monologue, but a dialogue is always better.� You can read Morgan�s FAQ here.

While you are at it please stop by his blog and check out everything he has to say!

Webloggin’ editor is way too kind. Three exclamation marks? Well, I’ll take ’em.

So is it really The Blog That Nobody Reads? Well…kinda, yeah. But as I’ve noted, the subtitle has a lot more to do with intent than with achievement. We don’t say outlandish things around here to generate more hits, like…foolish nonsense insinuating our elected officials are starting wars to get revenge for attempted hits on their daddies, or for oil profiteering, or crap like that.

No sir…when we spout craptacular nonsense of that sort of magnitude, it’s because we believe it to be true.

When you go the other way, allowing what’s “true” to be affected by your desire for more traffic, you replicate a problem that currently infects, not only the “blogosphere,” but the mainstream media as well. You begin to say things to get people to look at you, and lose your dexterity in dividing what’s proven from what is not — and what’s unproven one way or t’other, from what’s blatantly false.

And so we have global warming. This blog, which nobody reads anyway, keeps in mind that “global warming” is proven or is pretty much proven…but at the same time, the idea that technology is contributing meaningfully to it, is in serious doubt. There is a significant likelihood that the importance of the human technology, may one day be proven as well — and that, even then, the prognostication that our actions may have a deleterious effect on our continuing survival, is mythical. The supposition about looming extinction at our own collective hand, is complete balderdash. There’s never been a serious reason to believe it, ever. To the contrary, gloomy omens of our self-destruction are every bit as old as written communication itself, perhaps older — they have never faded away into dormancy. Ever. Not for long.

But The Blog That Nobody Reads is always open to new information.

Point is, that is just not the kind of idea that’s going to get you a lot of traffic. So we’re way down the list of the blogosphere ecosystem, #8244 right now, on a list which places DailyKOS at #3.

That’s the way thinking is. You may reach a conclusion based on what you heard that will get you a lot of attention, which is the way other editorials and blogs do it. Or, you may reach a conclusion upon which you, personally, would be willing to bet something important. Like a body part or the life of a loved one. That’s what we do here at The Blog That Nobody Reads. We think — sensibly. You will see, here, repeated references to “on your left nut thinking,” or the prospect of taking your left testicle and putting it under a sledgehammer while swearing…to the opinion you reached. Being more willing to bet the family jewels on the idea you have reached, than to bet ’em on the opposite. It’s a way of thinking most people don’t do nowadays.

And yet, everything we use to communicate our ideas to each other, every device, every protocol, every little thing that powers those other things — without exception — was invented and put in production by men who thought that way. Would I bet my personal fortune that I can use this generator to light a city without any gas? That I can use a packet header to tell the network what peer should receive the payload? That this page will display properly in a browser lots of other people have? People who think that way, build things…and then we use those things they built, to communicate stupid, silly, crazy ideas that don’t make a lick of sense.

And…pictures of girls in skimpy clothes. Well, the Blog That Nobody Reads doesn’t fault men for being men. We cast our jaundiced eyeball, instead, on the silly stupid ideas. Or to be more precise about it, upon the people who genuinely believe them, simply because someone’s taken the trouble to communicate them. It reflects poorly on our generation. Our children will look back on us and regard that as the hobgoblin of our times. We place credibility on the idea most likely to get attention, ignoring the ideas least likely to do this — we’d be a lot better off doing the opposite.

So that’s why this is The Blog That Nobody Reads (although you need to read the FAQ to get a detailed explanation). As for traffic, since labor day we’ve declined from a lethargic, sleepy state into a catatonic one. We’re showing a few signs of heading back up upward into “sleepy,” a trend which will be almost certainly be reversed as we head into the holidays. On average, we’re more-or-less hovering around the century mark, a hundred hits a day or just shy of that. It’s not a very “happenin'” blog at all.

But our “following,” what there is of it, is very loyal. We’re pretty pleased about that. And the “linkage” throughout the blogosphere is on the upswing, partly because of networks like Webloggin’. It would appear based on the timeframe involved, that because of the listing on Webloggin’ Friday afternoon, the Blog That Nobody Reads was promoted from a “Flippery Fish” to a “Crawly Amphibian“. We used to be number nine-thousand-something…now we’re number eight-thousand-something.

If that does turn out to be part of a long-term trend, I believe it would say a lot more about people-on-average than it does about this blog. I think people are tired of all the bullshit. I think they’re ready to go back to thinking the way television-inventors thought, rather than the way television-watchers think. Several times a day, we are asked to believe that an invasion of Iraq is still up to some meaningful referendum. Deep down, we all know it isn’t. Deep down, I think everybody understands this was a decision made by the White House in the spring of 2003 — after that, it was a done deal. No point debating it, unless you want to discuss what we are to do “next time.” Well, if it’s all about what to do next time we have a lunatic like Saddam Hussein — and you’ll notice, this isn’t something that ever involves a lot of waiting — I think most people understand that whole business of “Doing Nothing” isn’t a really swell idea.

These are just sensible conclusions. They’re opinions you end up forming when you think as if your left testicle depended on the tethering of your thinking to the plane of reality…not when you say crazy crap to get attention.

As for whether people are titillated by it, my only hope is that when they spend the time reading it, they get something back that’s worth their investment. I’m not out to sell advertising and I’m not out to sell newspapers. You will read things here, though, that you won’t read in any newspaper. The two sentences immediately preceding, have a connection with each other…which is a sad, sad thing. But I think it’s changing.

In order to drive up your numbers, I intend to check in several times a day. I will do this only so long as you really appreciate my efforts by continuing to write as well as you have been in the past.

Thanks for your work,

orwoody
- orwoody | 10/22/2006 @ 09:55
[…] – We become an official member of Webloggin, a community of bloggers scattered across the country, promoting blogging excellence. At about that […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/13/2009 @ 00:03

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