Waffle

An interesting way of doing business: Cartoonist Ampersand has sold his domain to a Search Engine Optimiser who lets him continue to run his (excellent) blog and cartoonist pages in exchange for a link on the blog's front page and the ability to put whatever he wants (presumably link farms, but I haven't been able to find out yet) on new pages on the website.

I suppose it's as legit as any other form of sponsorship, and it sure beats having SEOs spamming their links on other people's blogs against their will. But one wonders if it wouldn't have been more effective for the SEO to buy a traditional sponsorship. What's one link to a blog about, in this case, handbags, on Amptoon's blog page worth in comparison to a well-placed ad, possibly drawn by Ampersand himself and integrated into the website, pointing directly to the product? Presumably the other stuff the SEO adds is worth more.

There is a risk involved that could cause Amp trouble for a long time to come. The reason I'm interested in this story at all is that the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Search Engine Optimization is spam. Comment spam and forum spams, the two blights on the Web that have caused me to spend many unpaid hours to clean up Waffle, Talk About Comics and, before Mithandir installed his latest honeypot-based comment spam blocker, the comments to Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I know that's not entirely fair; there are forms of Search Engine Optimization that don't involve spam, and what Amp's buyer is doing could be one of them. But if the buyer is putting link farms on new pages within the amptoons.com domain, then these will themselves only become valuable if they're widely linked to, and that means there's a strong incentive for the new domain owner to spam. Actually, that applies to anything else he might put there - it can only be valuable for SEO purposes if it's widely linked to.
You don't want to be associated with a domain that's spammed in blog comments or forums. Or associated with spam in any form at all. It got the makers of the blogging software WordPress in quite a bit of trouble and could end up doing the same to Ampersand.

I am feeling the pull of the political blogs again, for the first time since the US Presidential elections of 2004. I've been reading them a lot, and have added Red State Son, The Whiskey Bar and Wisse Words to my blogroll. The former two are essayistic blogs rather than quote-and-link blogs. The latter does a bit of both, and has been a consistently reliable source of stuff for me to quote-and-link. I ought to apologise to Martin for taking so long to add it.
I fear this renewed interest in political subjects will turn out to be a precursor to me writing about politics again myself. I'm not happy with the idea, not yet anyway. I don't think of my own opinions as being particularly trenchant, interesting or well-informed. But as a writer and artist I also know that sometimes when you get an itch you must scratch it. At least, I hope that the next time around I won't be pulling my punches or putting up any pretence of being balanced or reasonable. Seeing both (or all) sides of an issue is something my readers are smart enough to do themselves, in their own time, and if they can't, then they're pretty much part of the problem and not worth talking to.

On Lebanon: I think Juan Cole continues to be the most readable pundit. His enemies on the American right have called him anything from a Chicken Little to an Anti-Semite; the one label they haven't been able to pin on him is "wrong". As a result, I'm very alarmed by the same things that alarm Professor Cole Justified defensive war, my foot.

On the crossroads of politics, blogs and comics, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money, John Holbo at Crooked Timber and countless others have commented on recent Day By Day comics making very uninformed references to German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. I have nothing to add except that if I ever hear "Why is the NY Times so anti-American?" as a conversation starter, I'm going to assume I've got heat stroke again and am hallucinating.

More on right-wing comics in a separate post.

Sometimes I feel like I should just use my RSS scraper to stick a copy of Andrew Rilstone's blog in mine (to do so without his permission, though, would arguably be a form of plagiarism). He doesn't write much but he's always a great read. Today, he reads the Daily Express so you don't have to. Or rather, he read it for a week last month, but has now recovered enough to post an analysis. Drop what you're doing and read it. The blog post, I mean, not the Daily Express.

That introductory bit in the front of a book that an author or publisher typically invites someone else to write is called a "foreword" not a "forward". If you get a book in the mail and then send the package on to someone else, that's a forward, from the verb "to forward". A foreword, by contrast, is a word, or rather a lot of words, that comes/come before the main bit. It's not that difficult.

Yes, I'm cranky today. If you had spent the day fighting Paint Shop Pro, you'd be cranky too.

(Triggered by Comixpedia where I do actually have an account, possibly two, that I could use to comment, but I haven't been able to log in there in months.)

The adjective form of "camp" is "camp", not "campy". It is not derived from the noun "camp" or at least not in the usual way. In fact, there isn't really a noun form of the word unless you mean a bunch of tents. "Nounized" forms of the word occur only very rarely, usually to allow speakers more readily to define or comment on the phenomenon. As "camp" is undefinable, this is a pointless activity that should be discouraged. Use the correct adjective and forget you've ever heard the noun used.

(Triggered by use of the wrong adjective form on the blog under Dominic Deegan, but could have been triggered by a million other occurrences.)

Fafblog on the Mohammed cartoons:

"What if it's not really a picture of Mohammed," says me, "just a picture of a picture of Mohammed?"
"Metablasphemy!" says Giblets. "It is sacrilegious and pretentious!"

Don't read the rest, the above was the best bit.

My arse. Political bloggers are the new hippies. They think they're going to change everything, stick it to the man, put the world right. In twenty years, they'll be playing golf and boasting about all the dope they smoked even though they'll know by then that it was all oregano anyway.

*spits*

Geir mentions in the forums that the Norwegian tabloid VG has quoted my Post on Rowling denialism in its weekend edition, as part of an article on conspiracy theories and the "Paul is dead/J. K. Rowling doesn't exist"-syndrome.
If you live in Norway, you can still pick it up on Sunday as it's in the weekend edition. The article is by Anders Giæver. No web version of the article exists, but Geir's report has the quote in Norwegian.

Via Crooked Timber, I hear that Shot By Both Sides is calling it a day (I would have found out anyway – SBBS is only a dozen places down on my blogroll). John B explains:

For those of you who lied, twisted, cheated and bullied until the least worst choice available to me was to close the site, congratulations. You've won. I hope it was worth it. It would be ungracious of me to hope that bad things happen to you in return, so I'll merely take solace in my knowledge that you have to go through life having a personality like that... Good work, fellas.

And not on my blogroll, but visited occasionally in the past few months, objectivist libertarian blogger Arthur Silber is giving up, citing health problems, poverty and public indifference to his writing as reasons. His story seems familiar somehow.

Some of my critics tell me (to quote one of them) that I should "grow the fuck up." What they mean by that is that, instead of offering what I'm able to do–my writing–in exchange for voluntary donations, I should turn myself over to the state. In that manner, all of you will have to support me indirectly whether you want to or not, and I won't have to do anything at all in return. Of course, the state may not treat me very well but, after all, beggars can't be choosers. Today, that's what it means to "grow up."

But since this hasn't worked out and since there is no market for what I do, except one that is so negligible that it doesn't matter, I will now follow their advice. Next week, I'll turn myself over to the State of California. I'll let them figure out what's wrong with me physically, and decide whether and how they will deign to treat it. I'll let them decide where and how I should live, and how much money I should get, if any.

From what I've read of his writings, I'd say he deserves better.

This text ad inside Opera 8.01 probably says something about the blogosphere, or blogging in general, or maybe the system was confusing this blog with Little Brown Shirts (placed below the cut because it was messing up page display in some places):

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