Friday, February 03, 2006

Randomalia: Elseblog 

Google says: Did you mean arseblog?


I've been getting 403 errors over at the groupblog, though as a blogadmin I don't see anything obviously wrong. Pity, as things were getting interesting over there. Assuming the link works eventually, feel free to check out my recent paean to driveway ice chipping, blogged to the tune of If I Had A Hammer.


Increasingly proud of my work over at the Teaching with Technology blog I write for my middle school teachers, though last week's entry was made moot by a full-scale Internet outage. This week's topic: Teaching Without a Net, a McLuhanesque, somewhat anti-webquest treatise on remixing materials for the particular needs of your students rather than merely leaning on the vast wide web.


For those who need it: Blogger's helpful advice on What to Do When Your Mom Discovers Your Blog, via search for "blogspot problems." Hi, Mom!


On a more lengthy-yet-topical medialit note: in a matter of months, Blogexplosion's diversified their service far beyond the old traffic exchange model, adding everything from open-voting blogbattles-for-traffic to a multitude of games and lottery-esque point-gathering activities.

The results seem mixed -- for example, while the phenom of renting tiny screenshot-as-link boxes on other blogs seems popular, most net few linkbacks; similarly, replacing the front-page chatbox with a full audio-visual solospace makes for some hilarious late-night sessions watching drunken swedish bloggers sing showtunes, but seems to have reduced active chat participation to a static and miniscule crowd.

But it may be neither the once-removed nature of the newchat, nor the more intimate and in-crowd a/v group therein, to blame. How else to interpret the phrase some members simply hate surfing for credits in the midst of today's email describing two more new products?

Has the day of the traffic exchange passed? Or is this merely another example of deserting a good, basic business model for transparent bells and whistles? Sadly, though causality is not often so obvious, it's beginning to look like the end of blogexplosion either way.

posted by boyhowdy | 8:43 PM |

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