Election Fun #2

The News Journal held an on-line straw poll today in preparation for the Iowa Caucuses.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama edged-out Delaware's own Joe Biden by two votes. They were followed closely by Ms. Clinton and more distantly by John Edwards and a few other fellows.

On the Republican side, Ron Paul scored what looks like a decisive victory over Rudy Guiliani, followed by John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Mitt Romney was in fifth place. The Ron Paul win may be tainted by (very slight) hints of astro-turfing; someone posted the poll to Digg with the following note:

The Wilmington News Journal is sponsoring a virtual caucus for the state of Delaware. Ron Paul is trailing Rudy... let's make it happen!!

In the comments that followed, several supporters posted information on Delaware ZIP codes, which might have been useful in fooling the News Journal's polling system. Of course, this may only have been an attempt to get Delaware e-voters involved, and there's nothing to say that other candidates' supporters did or didn't try the same thing. But it looks a bit funny.

And let's not forget that there were only 4,696 votes cast. We probably shouldn't take this very seriously.

Election Fun #1

I was (only a little) surprised to find out today that there is a link to this blog from an unofficial "Mike Huckabee President 2008" blog. The Feedjit traffic feed widget I installed recently showed a click-through today from a post on that blog listing Other Bloggers on Mike Huckabee. That post is from last February. I had included some praise for Huckabee back then in a brief collection of some things I liked about some politicians.

I wonder if readers who've come here from there have had a look around the rest of the site and been horrified to find that I am, indeed, a left-wing, progressive liberal? I am, you know.

I did like what little I had heard from Huckabee at that point; he sounded like a reasonable fellow. There was never more than the slimmest possibility that I would have voted for him, though. And as the race among the Republicans has heated up, his rhetoric and positions have become more traditionally right-wing and evangelical. So...

But I do like him on a personal level.

2007 on Mike's Musings

2007 was the first full year for which I tracked traffic on this blog using Google Analytics. Well, most of the year. There were two brief periods, totaling about a week, when I had made template changes and forgot to re-install the Analytics code. But I think I have enough data to take a look at activity for the year.

There were 8,103 unique visitors, who stopped by 14,773 times and viewed 29,576 different pages. My busiest day for the year was September 14, with September 13 a close second. Based partly on data about individual page-views and Google search terms, I think that those dates were busiest because of several posts in the first part of September:

• Fifty Years Ago Today, in which I looked back at desegregation;
• Looks Like I'll Have to Make Friends With a Lawyer/Author from California, one of several posts this past year about lighthouses being sold;
• At The 29th Annual Bethany Beach Boardwalk Arts Festival, which featured the works of at least one popular artisan and touched on the contentious Delaware off-shore wind-farm proposal; and,
• We Have Met the Enemy and He is Those People, in which I took my own neighbors to task for their desire to wall-off our subdivision from a new one next door.

There was a lot going on just then.

Over the full year, a large majority of readers simply came to the blog's front page and read what-ever was newest. But there were a number of pages, some from several years ago, that continued to attract readers. Here are the top five:

• Pimping My Prius, from September of 2005, is about installing a Sirius Satellite Radio receiver in the Prius. This page was viewed 918 times in 2007. It has long been the most-viewed archive page.
• A Restaurant Recommendation Chain-Post, from May of 2007, is one of the few "memes" I have ever taken part in. By design, this meme carries links back to all participants and that chain of posts garnered 166 page-views in 2007.
• Hey! A Gravity-Monument Photo!, from May of 2005, also had 166 page-views in 2007. Anyone who has ever run across one of these puzzlers is bound to do a bit of Googling and that can lead to this page. There's also a link to it from TutorGig.Com's page on the Gravity Research Foundation.
• An Albino Deer? Or An Echo From the Distant Past?, from January of 2007, is about a white deer I spotted at Cape Henlopen State Park but also mentions a legend about a white deer from the Lenape people who once lived in this area. I've noticed lots of "white deer" searches over the years. This page had 147 page-views in 2007.
• Now, Here's a Surprise, from August of 2005, concerns my experience with a blood clot hat summer. This one gets many visits from folks searching for information on blood clots. I hope it helps people who stop by; it had 144 visits in 2007.
  

Search engines generated many visitors to Mike's Musings in 2007, but not the majority. Almost 53% percent of visits came through links from other sites, including Delaware On-line, Blogger (likely the risky "next-blog" link), several other Delaware bloggers (Delaware Liberal, TommyWonk, WGMD, and Down With Absolutes top that list), and (interestingly) via the link in my e-mail signature line.

A bit more than 32% of traffic to the site this past year came through search engines. Many were searching for "Mike Mahaffie" or for "Mike's Musings." Other popular searches were for combinations of sirius and prius and satellite, "how to get rid of a blood clot," and the Woods of Mahaffie.

About 15% of visitors were from "direct traffic," meaning people have bookmarked me (how nice) and checked back in (even nicer).

Most of my readers are from the United States though there were a good number of visitors from Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia and many non-English-speaking countries. Within the US, most visitors checked in from within Delaware and surrounding states. But I am pleased to see that I had visitors from every state, though only 3 from North Dakota.

I'll have to work up some North Dakota-specific content and try to target a Roughrider audience in 2007.

More Delaware Blogs

Today was gray and rainy and, aside from a run to the bank and the library and the normal kid-carting, perfect for some on-line loitering. I spent some time, therefore, poking around the web in search of more Delaware blogs to add to my ever-expanding list.

I use del.icio.us to track, categorize, and blog-roll a variety of blog-links over on the left side there. I keep a list of Delaware blogs in general, a list of (mostly Delaware) political blogs, and a list of other blogs I enjoy.

Sometimes I wonder why I've let myself get sucked into so obsessively tracking the blogs here in Delaware. The web is meant to be a global community, and much of what I do on-line aligns with my communities of interest -- geospatial data, music, the Dead, blogging itself. Yet I still like to track those blogs that focus here on the 2,000 square miles of the First State. It is where I live, I suppose, and these are the people I see most often.

So here are some Delaware blogs I found today (and a few days ago too). In no particular order. A few are just-started; an early New Year's resolution or a Christmas present to the self. Others are a months or more old and have been hiding in plain sight.

• Bring Me Up -- A series of music reviews.
• Frank's Ramblings!! -- Frank posts things he finds on his daily travels.
• Creative Rants from Nerissa -- She says it is "her page; her rants." But there's more than ranting here.
  
• Blog Avenue -- "Jen's City Blog." About life in Wilmington, I think.
  
• Clockwork Jalopy -- "...where I park my many ideas and weird views." We all need that.
  
• Bienvenue Chez Seals -- A transplanted Frenchwoman in upstate Delaware.
• Just Purge -- "Clear your mind. Cleanse your soul."
• On Transmigration -- "Gay, Happy, not quite Ecstatic, and moving on to a new life and responding well to therapy."
• Jenny Q -- A mom From Newark, Delaware. With a teen. Bless her.
• katielynn -- Newlywed woman in Delaware.
  
• Everyday Hustle and The Fine Print -- These appear to be two young friends upstate. They each have their own blog, but there are cross-references.
• Useless Entertainment -- Music reviews, from Milton, Delaware.
• Another Gun Blog -- "...a 22 year old law clerk / college student and a gun nut."
• Blue Hen Hash House Harriers -- "...announcements and write ups for the Blue Hen Hash House Harriers, a Delaware drinking club with a running (stumbling) problem."
• Object of Complacency -- A young man. I think a Delaware high school student.
• Shoreman -- Keeping an eye on the shore from the Delaware side of Delmar.
• It's All Greek To Me! -- A teacher at a (Delaware?) Greek charter school.
• along the way -- She is "a writer, a minister, a friend, a sister, a daughter, and a wanderer" who also "manage[s] a church camp and conference grounds" in Bethany Beach, Delaware.
• VibrantPolitics -- A young man in Newark closely following the Democratic primaries.
• Average Girl In Average World -- An average person. Who blogs.
• Delaware Venable -- Fairly tightly focused on religion. Right-leaning Christian variety. A retired state trooper.
  

You may notice that most of these are Blogger blogs. My cheat for today was to surf the "Delaware" tag in Blogger's profiles. I like to do that every once in a while. This time of year is usually a good time to find new blogs.

I will, of course, continue my practice of checking all of the blogs I link to each month to see if they are still active. Those with a month or more without new posts are moved out of the blog-roll and onto the inactives list. I do track their RSS feeds to try to catch them and re-add them when they come back to regular posting.

There are a small number of Delaware-based blogs that I find that I choose not to link to. These tend towards the virulently racist and anti-semetic. As a general rule, I don't link to blogs that feature collections of fascist iconography. Call me intolerant. It's my blog-roll.

Getting Ready for a New Year

There's a "2008" sign posted on Legislative Mall, in Dover. It is next to a white-painted telephone pole topped by a chicken-wire and Christmas-light ball that will drop on New Year's Eve.

Things have been somewhat quiet around state government this week. Some of us took Wednesday off to return from holiday travel. Others took the week itself; for travel or extended family time.

The time between Christmas and New Years is a great opportunity to get concentrated work done. There are fewer calls and fewer meetings.

I've used my few days this week mostly to review draft data as part of the statewide aerial photography project we've undertaken. I'll continue that work on Monday.

Then we return to a new 2008 on Wednesday.

A Merry Christmas to All

Let It Snow (Repeat)

Yesterday was unseasonably warm (despite the wind and the rain) and I found myself wishing for a white-Christmas snowfall here in the Mid-Atlantic region.

It doesn't seem likely, though, so I went back to my "making snowflakes" posts of December 2004 to find a link to Lookandfeel New Media's Make-A-Flake site. This is an on-line site for e-cutting e-paper into e-flakes. And I e-did.

I'm not sure whether or not this site has been maintained in the intervening years. The download your flake and e-mail your flake applications don't seem to be working (or maybe not with FireFox).

So I had to grab screenshots. which led me to notice a grammatical error that I'd missed in my younger days (of three years ago).

The site numbers the flakes that are made. According to the dialog-box that popped up when I was done, my flake was number 16409992. Or perhaps I myself am flake number 16409992. The box does say "You're flake #..."

And while I was taking a closer look at this site, I read the "be nice" small print to find:

Please help us keep the snowflakes clean. Report offensive snowflakes when you click the snowflake.

I suppose it must be possible to cut a paper snowflake to resemble a naked person or something otherwise untoward. But I myself lack that creative talent.

I can cut spiny, sparkly snowflakes though. And all I need is to create about 3,485,824 more!

In Troubled Times, Where Shall a Bruised Nation Turn for Soothing Ironic Distance?

I found myself drawn to this recent headline from The Onion: Nation's Crumbling Infrastructure Probably Some Sort Of Metaphor.

The satirical "newspaper" recounts recent infrastructure failures and notes that these failures are "forcing many to question whether the nation's rapidly deteriorating roads, contaminated drinking water and groundwater, and run-down schools could perhaps be a metaphor for something."

"Everywhere you turn you see improperly maintained railways, structurally deficient bridges—not to mention billions of gallons of untreated sewage flowing directly into our groundwater," said Adam Perry, a representative for the ASCE. "Is there an underlying message here? There are so many layers, and each one is so subtle and nuanced, that I'm hesitant to make any kind of blanket statement about what this means 'for America.'"

"I think our overstretched and increasingly obsolete infrastructure might symbolize something important," Perry added. "But what?"

I find myself missing that sort of irony-heavy satirical commentary now that the TV-writers' strike has darkened the nation's airwaves. I wonder where to turn for the acerbic commentary I once depended on The Daily Show to provide.

As it happens, commercial television is not the only place to find such content. As we turn away from reality-TV, we are rediscovering thoughtful, written cynicism in all manner of formats, from traditional printed books and magazines to on-line blogs and, for the more adventurous, personal conversation.

Aside from The Onion, there are other goofy-news sites such as ScrappleFace, McSweeney's and the (somewhat NSFW) Daily Mash over in the United Kingdom. There are sites featuring humorous writing in general, such as Francesco Explains It All. And the TV writers are creating new on-line video content in their own cause at Speechless.

So, as the writers' strike drags into a new year, and we resign ourselves to television without great wit, people around the nation are re-discovering the joys of literature, learning about alternate media, and indulging in conversation.

And some -- a brave few -- are starting to express their own, very personal, satire.

Delaware Photo Blogs

I've been thinking about posting an item about Kevin Fleming's Wild Delaware blog ever since I ran across it back in September. I did add it to my blogroll, but I am lazy and easily distracted and eventually other Delaware bloggers made note of Kevin's blog and started spreading the word.

Kevin is Delaware's premier photographer. His are the coffee-table books we give when we want to give the gift of Delaware-ness. I had the privilege of meeting and being photographed by Kevin back in the spring of 2006; I'm a fan.

But Kevin is not the only one taking cool photos in our state. I've collected links to at least eight other Delaware photography blogs and even more Delaware photography web sites. So I thought I'd present a selection of those sites too. In absolutely no discernible order.

Tony Pratt also photographs nature in this area. Tony is an old friend I worked with at DNREC many years ago. He works in beach preservation and spends much of his time on the shoreline, in the dunes, and working with property owners. He is also a former Lewes leader; he helped write the City's first comprehensive plan, which I have now been part of updating.

Remind me to tell you the story sometime about working down the Delaware Coast with Tony and Mike Powell early one morning in January, 1992, during a major Nor'Easter. We were taking pictures (pre-digital cameras, unfortunately) of storm damage. It was an adventure.

I ran into Tony at the Dover Safeway one day recently. There's a decent salad bar in there and I often see colleagues wandering through at lunch time. Tony told me he'd started his own photo blog. He has been joining Kevin for early morning photography visits to area marshes. I think he's had pretty stunning results.

There are several other professional photographers with blogs. Laura Novak and Lance Lanagan both have studios and specialize in portraiture and weddings and such. There's also a blog for, by and about the Delaware Professional Photographers group.

And there are semi-pros.

Photodee blogs about her "adventures in knitting & photography." I don't know anything about knitting, but her photography is pretty cool.

Dave Wolanski has both a personal photoblog, Things I See, and a new Dave's Photo Tips blog where he offers advice and guidance on shooting with digital cameras.

And So That Happened... was a photo-a-day blog that was active from late 2004 through this past spring.

There are also bloggers who, like me, making photography a part of what they post, if not the main focus. These include, and I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out, Delmar Dustpan, Elbert (with an "E"), and The Happy Hippie.

And finally, many of us also post Delaware photography to one of several flickr groups focused on the first state or to the Delaware.gov collection of photo collections.

Delaware State News: Off-Line

Independent Newspapers, Inc., wants me to pay $145 a year to view the contents of the Delaware State News on-line. Up until today, INI had offered a limited selection of local news stories in an ad-heavy, if not terribly exciting, web 1.0 format.

No longer.

This morning, their old "news" link led to a statement that one can now read the ENTIRE newspaper on-line. If one subscribes. And that some local news will still be included in their Newszap forums.

I didn't see any news in the forums, so I sent an e-mail to the auto-contact link they have. Here's what I got back (in part):

Thanks for your email. To be honest with you, we reached the conclusion that we could no longer give away our newspaper content for free. We are proud of the work our staff members are doing and believe we’re making a difference for thousands of people every day.

We hope you will consider purchasing an e-Subscription, which will give you every page of every edition of the newspaper in an easy-to-read format and with full search capabilities. To make this option more attractive, we have an introductory offer of 2 years for the price of 1, which we think is a great deal!

I think it's a form e-mail. I sent my question in to two separate contact links and got the same e-mail back each time. I followed the link they sent and, after a bit of searching, and working my way through a name and address data collection page (Harrington J. Millworthy, IV, at your service), but eventually I found the Subscription Rates page (above left).

I guess that 2-fer offer means I could get two years of the e-paper for $145. That's very generous, but still probably not of interest to me.

As part of my job, I scan a variety of news sources for items related to land-use planning and to geospatial data uses. Until now, the State News has been one of those sources. But given the low volume of news I usually found, I don't know that it is worth it to subscribe to an online version of the printed paper. Someone who gets that paper the old fashioned way is likely to let us know if there is ever anything worth looking at.

I don't think this change will do the State news much good. The News Journal offers a relatively complete edition on-line each day. I think they have too many ads, but understand they have to pay the bills. The Cape Gazette also offers a paid "full content" version but does post the main news of each week for free.

The New York Times tried a pay-only premium portion of their site for a while, but scrapped that plan this fall (remember Times Select?). In part, I think, they ended Times Select because people simply ignored the content that they would have had to pay to see. As a result, no one referred to it. No one linked to it. It ceased to be a main part of the discussion.

So, for now at least, I say so-long to on-line content from the Delaware State News.