Monday, September 1, 2008

The Seduction of B. Maelstrom

The splash I've gotten just from posting to a couple of Sarah Palin threads is astounding.

Political blogging must be so tempting. All those hits are just sitting there. You can poach (and people do) by attacking a more popular blogger and getting them to respond. You can post something inflammatory and get flamed, or get accolades from similarly inflamed minds. Get big enough and you can have conventions and internet TV shows, etc., etc., etc.

I mention it in part because Althouse used to do a lot more arty, quirky, apolitical stuff. The Palin storm is like nothing I've seen there: A couple thousand comments over the weekend. And I'm sure it's not over. Compared to a well-mannered thread on "American Idol" or photo blog, the traffic is humongous. (And she's cultivated a polite crowd over there that can mostly handle the bile that some folks seem to carry around in their cheeks all day, looking for a chance to spew.)

But after the election (and the post-election controversies) it'll quiet down again, I think, and the blog will get more interesting again.

2 comments:

  1. Why do you think she's letting the number of comments get so high?

    Is it that a particular post is linked elsewhere (e.g. instapundit), so she wants to focus the flow into that particular post?

    Since I'm asking questions, and I think you write code (not that such is required for my simple question): What is the code to embed a link, such that it is represented by a word or words in a comment?

    Several years ago I took and passed Sun's Java Programmer test for fun--I've never been a programmer by profession--so I'm not totally ignorant regarding programming. But, I've always sucked at HTML, and I'm too lazy to google this again, so I keep pasting addresses as text, instead of active links.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I suspect she's let it go because: a) it's too much work to split them, you end up anchored to the computer all day; b) they started repeating themselves early on and it got boring for her.

    Embedding a link requires using angle brackets: <>

    [a href="http://www.google.com"]Link[/a]

    Only instead of "[" you put "<" and "]", you put ">".

    Like so.

    ReplyDelete

Grab an umbrella. Unleash hell. Your mileage may vary. Results not typical. If swelling continues past four hours, consult a physician.