Mondays suck, in blogging as well as in life. Today was even worse, as I had to drive on the World's Worst Road, Route 206 in New Jersey. But thanks to a fellow blogger, I gained some insight which compensated for the pain.

To give a little background, I had to wait to use a stupid shopping center bathroom today; one of those men's rooms that could have had a bank of six urinals installed but instead had one urinal -- with half the room dedicated to one single stall big enough to accomodate the President of the United States, three Secret Service agents, two members of the press corps, and the guy who carries the "football." (And somehow, I don't think the President is "going" there anytime soon.)

I deserve to be inconvenienced, of course, so I should be a man and suck it up. (?) After all, why shouldn't men have to be made to suffer the same way women have to suffer?

Well, don't fret, because thanks to the power of the blogosphere, hope is on the way! Women who hate standing in line at the bathroom can now pee standing up! (Via (From Snooze Button Dreams via Anger Management.)

And, in case the toilet conspiracy didn't wet your whistle, Don Watkins also shed light on something even more sinister than women's room tactics: the phenomenon of politically motivated linking by hack ideologues to each other. This Truth Laid Bear post (via Harvey) explains how it works:

The League's tactics also, not surprisingly, seem to match their politics rather appropriately. It is not clear to me how the roundup-posts of links to League posters are created, but there seems to be only two possibilities: either they represent an unfiltered list of every League member who posted, or they are being selected by the League's leadership in some manner. (It is of course possible that there is some system of voting for posts hidden outside the view of non-members, but that seems unlikely).

So take the possibilities in turn. If the roundup posts are unfiltered, then the deal seems simple: sign up for the League, and you get extra links, regardless of the merit of your work. Make a brilliant post, make a crummy one, it doesn't matter: you'll get the link that is rightfully yours. I don't think it is a stretch to call this the Blogosphere equivalent of welfare (minus the means testing --- the "rich" bloggers who already have lots of links get just as much as the "poor" ones who have none)

I am not entirely sure that this is being done just so that poor liberal beginners can help each other get a leg up in the blogosphere. Remember that the blogosphere is growing, and there have been innumerable media complaints that bloggers are too "right wing." (Hint: that usually means "libertarian.")

It gave me a real shudder to see Arthur Silber being slammed as a right winger by commenters at Atrios, when he's anything but. (Go read them if you don't believe me.)

The paranoid right wing fix on all of this, I guess, might be to fume that if enough leftist professors and political activists start urging everyone to start their own blogs, and all of them start linking to each other regardless of merit, why, the whole system will change, the blogosphere will become a left wing domain, and the "right wing nuts" will then be told to shut up and go home.

Just like talk radio?

Um, I don't think so. First of all, the much-vaunted left wing "takeover" of talk radio has not yet happened, and there are some serious problems with the idea, because the liberal shows have a poor history of delivering on ratings.

Blogging is a meritocracy, and a purer one than talk radio, for little or no money is involved. While it might be possible for like-minded blogs to "sex up" each other's blogs by mutual linking, if they are not interesting, no one will read them. Also, blogs not only have to be to be interesting, but they must constantly be maintained and fed, and these "welfare" type blogs, while they might get a head start by automatic links, will eventually wither and die on the vine if they don't keep posting interesting material -- and maintain their blogs on a more-or-less daily basis.

I could easily see a situation where there might be thousands of blogs, all interlinked to each other -- with no one reading them. Sure, a biased analyst could write an article that the blogosphere is now officially "liberal" but what would that mean if no one is reading the liberal blogs? What is the value to anyone of another pronouncement about the blogosphere? This is not something that anyone can "take over" or control, for God's sake. Unless, of course, the liberal cabal, having first seized power by means of stealth super-linking, then hands over the Blogosphere to the UN! (Let us pledge now that we will fight them on the mouses! We will fight them on the keyboards! We Shall NEVER Surrrender!)

Seriously, though, what difference does it make if Republican Party operatives flood the blogosphere with a cabal of conservative students to counter the "liberal" trend, or the DNC retaliates in like vein? If they aren't any good, they won't be any good. (Unless the UN takes over, of course..... Then blogging will be licensed and policed, and rated by UN officials.)

What I think would be really cool would be a rating system that takes into account the frequency of posts, the number of links per post, the diversity and originality of content, and the length of time the blog has been around. There is wheat and there is chaff, and it is easy to tell the difference. Quantity is never a substitute for quality. Some bloggers have both, and they make me green with envy. The game becomes one of constant improvement, and those whose focus is on getting free links from ideological automatons will never have a clue.

Speaking of constant improvement, I never give anyone advice, but I just learned something which once again reveals my utter ignorance, and it is my hope that by advertising it to the world that I may be able to save some hapless new blogger my fate.

Well, in defense of my ignorance I should point out that I have only been blogging six months....

But anyway, last week I was very fortunate to get an Instalanche -- from the biggest and the best. It was the second time this happened; the first was when I was still on Blogspot. But this time, I was surprised to see that my SiteMeter hits were nowhere near what they had been when I was on Blogspot, so I visited my ISP to compare. I was stunned to see that the daily "AWSTATS" hits were far greater (on one day TEN TIMES greater) than the hits "recorded" by my SiteMeter.

I researched this, and I found another blogger saying exactly the same thing:

SiteMeter says I've had roughly 2000 visits since I got my own domain, Awstats says I've had 6234. That's more than 200% more visits.

Sitemeter is only going to show direct hits to your front page, period. Direct links to any of your articles or archives will never show up, so if people link to something you wrote directly, or find it in a search engine, you would never know.

Only now you do. :-)

I used to only have SiteMeter on my front page (main index template) until I realized that Glenn Reynolds had it on his individual archives and then added it to that template.

That the SiteMeter must be present on whatever page the visitors hit in order for the hit to be counted seems like common sense, now that I have had time to think about it. But until yesterday, I thought the SiteMeter was crazy, or retarded. Or something.

(Please! Let no one breathe a word of this to the blogger cabals you hate, or they'll figure out a way to flood each other with hits, hand the blogosphere over to the UN, and send all nonconforming bloggers to special political reeducation camps.)