Three Minutes to Midnight

And there you have it. The third most-visited conference on The WELL right now is flame.ind -- more visits than conferences on movies, politics, music, web, health, books, and 1000 other subjects. (I wonder why the vue conferences aren't even showing up in the top 30... are they that uninteresting?According to the latest monthly WELL census data -- 1 June to 1 July -- pre.vue is #46; inkwell.vue is #47; and deadsongs.vue is #189. These are conferences readable by the whole world via any web browser.)

Public conference visits
Thu Jul  1 00:00:06 2004 through Wed Jul  7 23:59:57 2004

 1. 5524  news           11. 1770  macintosh      21. 1077  words
 2. 5064  media          12. 1657  sports         22. 1068  krakhaus.ind
 3. 3168  flame.ind      13. 1625  sanfran        23.  963  berkeley
 4. 3146  genx           14. 1617  books          24.  945  decor
 5. 3137  movies         15. 1578  obsess         25.  900  newmusic
 6. 3028  tv             16. 1513  plumage        26.  899  windows
 7. 2862  popcult        17. 1492  music          27.  848  cars
 8. 2105  politics       18. 1244  ny             28.  843  hosts
 9. 2069  chow.ind       19. 1164  web            29.  797  travel
10. 1972  current        20. 1122  health         30.  764  gd

I wonder how proud Salon Media Group is about flame being #3. (I wonder if Salon Media Group knows?)

Addendum:
One of the ugly side-effects of bozo-filtering (configuring The WELL so it automatically skips over postings by users you don't wish to read) is that given the rise of flame.ind, and the corresponding rise in the use of bozofiltering, more and more discussions get sidetracked by the fact that people who are bozofiltering an individual start commenting on the automatic filtering, rather than on the topic at hand.

For instance, right now in the News conference, someone brought up the fact that Tom Ridge has come out with another terror warning and the subsequent talk is all about crying wolf. One regularly-bozofiltered individual (whose three-letter name ends in 'x' and, shall we say, whose name would win lots of points on a triple word score in Scrabble) inserted a comment and since then others have come along not to comment on his comment, to comment on the fact that he's bozofiltered. Such behavior doesn't produce anything useful, doesn't add anything to the discussion, and shows how destructive the whole bozofiltering practice has become.

I wonder what would happen if bozofiltering were to become completely private: no longer could you share the list of names you're ignoring, and no longer would the automated utility that goes around scanning for any changes to bozo lists work. People should have the ability to filter who they choose, but would it be any great loss to the community if the community didn't know on an individual level who was ignoring who?

Posted by brian at July 8, 2004 12:01 AM

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