Joey Anuff, one of the founders of Suck.com, forbearer of many a blog in both format and snarky tone, explains a realization they had in 1996, as part of a very detailed history of the site:
"We learned very quickly that print mentions of the site did absolutely nothing," says Anuff. "Nothing at all. Print, I don’t care if it was the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek-print mentions of the site did shit for us."
I pored over our traffic records to figure out what went wrong. Our television and radio spots hadn't really helped. All of that mainstream press came as we slid down from the contagious peak of our first few days. Newspaper articles didn't translate into lots of hits; all they did was lead to more print and television coverage. (The link I added to my Slate bio didn't help too much, either—it accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of CwE's visitors.) Most of our traffic came from blog links and Web sites like College Humor and Something Awful.
Almost a decade has passed, and exogenous promotion still fails to affect the web.
I received a Scrolling LED Belt Buckle for my birthday. The instructions are hilariously mistranslated. My favorite sentence attempts to describe the numeric scale which adjusts the luminosity. It reads: "Note: 1 represents the brightness; 9 represents the darkness".
King Mswati III of Swaziland is largely considered to be Africa's last remaining absolute monarch. Back in January, what little opposition exists staged a strike. Here's some general background from the Telegraph's coverage of that incident:
Some 39 per cent of adult Swazis are infected with HIV/ Aids, the highest proportion in the world. King Mswati responded to the crisis in 2001 by banning virgins from having sex for five years. Any man caught deflowering a virgin would be fined one cow.
This law proved too rigorous for the king. Months later, he chose a 17-year old bride and fined himself one cow.
Dear big media: please don’t let critical tragicomic juxtaposition become a casualty as you purge your work of subjectivity and opinion. I need my boy-decrees-nation-wide-abstinence, boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl, boy-proves-he-is-an-autarchic-polygamist-hypocrite, boy-is-hoisted-by-his-own-bovine-petard narrative hairpin turns.
And, while we're on the topic of polygamy, what happens when - just like most of the world - 50% of your town's teenagers are male but due to the mathematics of your bigamy of choice marriages require at least a 3:1 female to male ratio? Expel the young men permanently, dumping them on the side of a road and leaving them to fend for themselves in a hostile, foreign world at the tender age of 16, or sometimes younger. Do it about 400 times, and make sure to throw in a nice parting zinger, too, like "Just to let you know, when the final devastation comes, you will be destroyed."
I forgot it was my birthday until just recently, so I’ve dropped the ball once again and made no advance plans. As a last-ditch effort, it has been decided that there will be a pot-luck dinner at my apartment this Saturday. Bring, in descending order of necessity, one of the following: food, booze, plasticware, dancing shoes, a thirst for knowledge, winning smile, nothing. Let’s say it starts at... oh, 7:30. That way it won’t interfere with post-dinner events anyone might have.
Last year some were not convinced that my blogvitation was sincere - but it was. Don’t be bashful about asking me where I live. I won’t get creeped out.
As you can see from the chart to the left (sum of passengers using the top 30 airports), 2004 saw a marked increase in global air travel after a couple years of decline and stagnation. Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Tokyo (Narita) all saw solid gains after notable declines in 2003, and US feeder airports like San Francisco and LAX followed suit. In fact, US airports did fairly well across the board in 2004, outpacing their European counterparts, whose growth has been less erratic over the past five years.
I’ll let the charts speak for themselves. First up is a raw volume bar chart of passenger traffic from 2000 to 2004 for the top 30 airports, ranked by 2004.
Next is a year by year percentage change graph in the same order, better for examining the trends.
Despite a fear of flying, Greiner frequently visits companies like John Deere, which is teaming up with iRobot to develop a semiautonomous battlefield vehicle
Do the Deere vehicles come equipped with their standard semiautonomous alcoholic pilots?
It’s been a while - almost two years - since I last 
