It seems like only yesterday that Frankly Curious published its 2,000th article. (It wasn’t; it was almost two years ago.) We are now well over 5,000 articles. What’s more, the articles are much longer now. In the early days, articles were often very short. And then there is this thing since I moved over to Word Press. It tells me how many words I’ve written, and that tends to make me shoot for 500 words — the Frankly Curious standard. But I often find myself well over double that. What am I gonna do? I have a lot to say.

This comes up because I was thinking of writing an article about the ridiculousness of the libertarian argument against labor unions. I will probably get to that soon, but I was thinking, “Didn’t I write about that before?” Well, the truth is, I can’t find that I have written about it, which is odd given that it is something that really bugged me even when I was a libertarian. (As a libertarian, I was a huge supporter of labor unions — strong labor unions were the only way libertarianism could ever work.) But what if I had? It isn’t like it would be just a rehash of the older article. And it isn’t like I had anywhere near as many readers before as I have now.

But what is the purpose of this blog? I know I write these articles from time to time. But I really am trying to figure it out. As you should have noticed, there is now a “Morning Music” post. It took me exactly three days for it to get totally out of hand. The idea was just that I was going post some video that I thought was interesting. But it couldn’t stay at that — no. Now I have to go on and on about what I think is interesting. For example, I have one coming up about Michael Penn’s minor hit, “No Myth.” And I swear, I get 500 words out of talking about Wuthering Heights.

So I seem to have set up another trap for myself. Now, instead of five posts per day, it is six. And there are three set ones: the birthday post, the quotation, and the music post. But here is the interesting thing: they are actually the easiest ones to write. I know I have to create them, so there is no question of whether I should or shouldn’t write them. The hardest part about writing any article is starting it. Actually, of the three, the quotations are the hardest, because I have to find something that is interesting without my commenting on it.

This means that I have three articles per day that I consider “real.” And by “real,” I mean hard. They are article that generally require that I read a lot about what’s going on and look for something that I think is worth writing about. And then that leads to reading what other people are writing about. And this usually results in what I think is my best work here. Most especially, I think my best work is about economics, because that’s an area where I think I have the perfect level of knowledge (low but not zero) to get across complicated issues. But in general, no one is interested in these articles. Which is fine.

The question remains: do people like this? That’s a rhetorical question — don’t feel the need to chime in. But if you think it sucks, please let me know. It isn’t likely to change anything. The addition of “Morning Music” is part of my broader attempt to make Frankly Curious a destination site. This isn’t as loony a thought as it might sound. The number of people who come directly to the home page is way up over the last year. I want this to be a place where people can come every day and know that there will probably be something that they’ll find vaguely interesting. And it provides my life with structure that I badly need.

Afterword

Speaking of structure, this is currently the publishing schedule of Frankly Curious:

12:05 am - Birthday Post
06:05 am - Morning Music
08:05 am - General Post (usually politics)
11:05 am - General Post (usually politics)
02:05 pm - Quotation
05:05 pm - General Post (hopefully not politics)

I’m thinking of moving the birthday post to 5:05 am. There’s a technical reason for that. I rather like it going up after midnight.

Matt Yglesias no doubt thought he was being very clever when he published, 13 Ways of Looking at a Clickbait. Of course, he makes some good points. One is that people have taken to claiming that any article they don’t like is “clickbait.” That certainly is not true. But I think that Yglesias is wrong to try to turn “clickbait” into an all purpose word meaning “effective headline writing.” The word is a pejorative and it should remain one.

To me, clickbait is a form of false advertising. And it usually consists of opinion. “The 30 Best Game of Thones Characters.” People only click on such articles to make sure that Tyrion Lannister in listed at number one. But the worst — and most effective regarding myself — are lists of things I supposedly do not know. “17 Hollywood Stars You Didn’t Know Were Gay.” There ought to be a law against such headlines. They abuse the disabled. My disability is that I know everything that is worth knowing. And while it is true that I won’t even know who 14 of those “stars” are, I will most certainly know the ones I recognize are gay.

But the whole thing did get me thinking about headlines here at Frankly Curious. I hate writing headlines. But Yglesias is right: it is a new world and websites are like magazines. The purpose of headlines are not to summarize the article but rather to entice the viewer to read the article. For a long time, I’ve been under the spell of Jakob Nielsen — the usability guru. His point has always been that people come to a website to get information. But that isn’t so much true of Frankly Curious. But to be honest, I’m not sure why people come to the website.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that the articles that get a lot of attention do so because the content is good, original, provocative. Ultimately, I think that is what most matters on any website. But it probably is true that this site doesn’t get as much traffic as it would if the headlines were better. There is a problem here though.

Frankly Curious does not publish articles about the ten best ways to fight belly fat or the eight greatest generals of the Civil War. Most articles here are broadly essays. They are not about stuff — they are about my reactions to stuff. And what is the best way to entreat a potential reader to follow along? I really don’t know.

Then again, I don’t have a clue what people want to read about. So I simply write — generally at a furious pace. And I figure that some people will be interested in some of what I have to say. And given that I don’t know what people are going to want to read about, I don’t see how I can be expected to write headlines that will encourage them to even try. It would probably take me as long to write a good headline as it does to write an article.

But there is a difference. If you go over to Vox or Crooks & Liars, you will see that all you are offered are headlines. This is a big trend on the internet to make websites more like magazines. But Frankly Curious not only has the actual articles on the front page, it rarely puts any of the articles “below the fold.” So people can just scroll down the page and see if anything looks worth reading. So maybe headlines don’t matter so very much — at least not here.

Is blogging dead? Many people are greeting the blogging retirement of Andrew Sullivan as a sign that it is. This is preposterous. I can’t really speak about what he does, because I actively avoid him. But what most people think of as blogging is someone famous for something else who also has a blog. That’s not what it is. I enjoy reading Jonathan Chait, for example, but his “blog” is just a side thing he does because “everyone has to have a blog.” But there is nothing about his “blog” that speaks about him. It’s just brief articles that are written by him — every couple of days.

I know what people mean when they talk about blogs. They look back at 2003 when blogs were just finding their way. There was still a lot of interaction: blog to blog communication. Clearly, that is a thing of the past. But as far as I can tell, that was mostly useless. And I still see vestiges of it in modern blogs. People will post a brief introduction and then just quote someone — often unedited. I don’t like that. It strikes me as lazy. (Of course, I have something similar with my quotations.) But this seems to be what people think of as the glory days of blogging.

But I think if people were to go back to early days of blogging, what they would find is that the blogosphere looks very much like it does today. I think it is just that because it was new, it seemed a lot more exciting. The idea that nobodies could contradict establishment media figures seemed revolutionary. And it was revolutionary and now we find ourselves in a different media world. But that revolution had nothing to do with Andrew Sullivan. He became editor of New Republic in 1991 — almost a decade before he started blogging. I’m sure Sullivan could have gotten a good circulation if he had started a newsletter. So who cares?

The truth is that the blog is what replaced the mimeographed zines of the 1980s. If the blog is dead, it is just one idea of the blog: the blog as a marketing tool. Jonathan Chait’s “blog” isn’t a reaction to not having another platform for his ideas. He blogs to market New York Magazine. Even Paul Krugman uses his blog simply to work out ideas for his twice weekly columns for The New York Times. For the 14 “Daily Reads” I list on the right, only six are what I think of as blogs: Beat the Press, Booman Tribune, Economist’s View, The Equitablog, Hullabaloo, and Incident Economist. And even among these sites, I’m mostly pushing the definition. Incident Economist, for example, is largely a repository for The Upshot cross posts and Aaron Carroll’s Healthcare Triage videos. And it doesn’t accept comments.

I think that much of the commentariat want it both ways. They want blogs to be freewheeling, exciting, personal. But they also want them to get huge amounts of traffic and be impactful. And this is why the “blogs” that major outlets put up are blogs only in that they use blogging software. They reflect the organization first and the writer second. If I were to sum up Frankly Curious in three ideas, it would be: Don Quixote, puppets, and left wing politics. It is not a recipe for huge amounts of traffic, but it does reflect who I am better than any other work that I’ve ever done.

There once was a blogosphere that was exciting and idiosyncratic. Then all the media outlets came in and added to that blogosphere. But as they were corporations, they soon found a way to make their blogs as careful and inoffensive as their regular output. And then everyone bemoaned the end of the blogosphere. But the blogosphere hadn’t gone anywhere. It was just that many in the media lost site of what blogging was. They mistook a faster publishing schedule for blogging. But I don’t think that was ever blogging. It was just a reaction to blogging. That’s what media outlets do. It wasn’t as egregious as taking Fats Domino and creating Pat Boone. But it’s no more authentic.

It’s a curious thing. I’ve been away for a couple of days working very hard on a project of theoretical remunerative value to my life. But before I left, I wrote some fourteen articles and scheduled them. And it is strange to see the site work on autopilot in that way. It seems less authentic, somehow. But I figure that must just be from my perspective. It ought to look more or less the same from the outside. The only thing I can think is that I probably pick less interesting subjects when I am doing the writing in clumps. But maybe not.

The reason there were only four posts yesterday is because I had planned to be home by around 5:00 last night. Instead, it was closer to 11:00. And I was far too tired to write anything, having been lost in the world of Android development and the OEM Preinstallation Kit — trust me, you really don’t want to know, although I am planning on writing something about it tomorrow over at the Dirt Cheap Computers blog. It just goes to show, you should always over-cram when going away, because you never know.

There is another reason, however. The truth is that it is kind of upsetting to the blogging rhythm to not do it for a couple of days. When I got home, I immediately broke into panic mode: what am I going to write?! In many ways, doing the computer work was kind of a vacation. It’s like housecleaning: so concrete. You know when you’re done. With blogging, you are never done; you are only temporarily caught up. I could be a year ahead and I’d still worry. And I can’t even image what it would be like to come back to that. It would probably make me just stop. (Feel free to make a comment, but take note of who’s reading whom.)

So I’m not clear whether the writing from the last couple of days isn’t better than the writing of today. For example, the article about the maps on The Nightly Show seemed a little thin to me. Usually, I manage to have a bit more to say about a single idea. Republicans Are Not for Smaller Government seems like an argument I’ve made many times before. And of course, this exhausted article is just a bit of a ramble, interesting only to people who care about my life (now numbering zero if you include me) and maybe some people who are interested in the mechanics of running a blog with a semi-rigid publication schedule when you have absolutely no help.

People tell me that I have OCD. And there is no doubt that I do have some symptoms. My favorite is that I can’t stop thinking about jamming my fingers in the cuisinart or having my fingers slammed in a door. But I think we over-analyze ourselves and I would certainly come down on the light side of OCD (although admittedly, right now I cannot stop picturing my fingers slammed in a door jam). Still, it could be that the publication schedule here is a sign of whatever OCD I have. In my defense, if I had it bad, I would have posted something last night to make the five article quota. But the whole thing does seem more compulsion than commitment.

At this late hour, I do feel like I’m back in the swing of things. The problem is that it looks like I will have to go away tomorrow for a couple more days. So normally, you’d be reading about some film (I have a couple of those in the works), but I’ll schedule them for while I’m away. But I probably won’t have time to cram very much, so I will either have to carve out some time for posts, or just fall down on my commitment. We shall see.

Afterword

You can usually tell what I write in real time: it will have only a one in sixty chance of being posted at five past the hour. If it is schedule, it will have a one in one chance of being posted at five past the hour. Why five past the hour? I don’t know. But until there is a good reason to change it (And why would there be?) it will remain that way.

I’ve been in the uncomfortable position of having to actually make money recently. I’ll admit, I’m kind of a brat about it. I expect so little from life — really. I’m pretty sure that I’m above water in the whole “what I give” versus “what I get.” But the universe is not just, so I work. A little anyway. As much as I can, actually. But my business partner, Will, doesn’t think I dress well enough. But that’s a matter for another time. For now, let me just say that it is yet more evidence of an unjust universe and the fact that in modern America, the quality of your work doesn’t matter nearly as much as the suit you wear. Don’t blame me when the empire sinks into the sea of irrelevance.

But since I am doing “work” work, I’ve finally gotten around to doing a tiny bit of work on the Dirt Cheap Computers website. I’ll be adding more over the coming days and weeks, but as for now, I’ve added a blog. I’m going to try to post something every day or so. It’s all computer and technology related. For example, yesterday, I wrote, Don’t Let Myth Drive Your Choices. It follows on the news that Aaron Sorkin is making a new Steve Jobs biopic. And today, I wrote, Hackers Could Crash Your Car — But Don’t Worry.

At least for now, the style is very much the same as it is for Frankly Curious — if somewhat more circumspect. But we will have to see how Will reacts it. He may want something a bit more “professional” — you know, the computer equivalent of a jacket and tie. But that hasn’t generally been our way in the past. And I think he’s more interested in getting things like project management and support tickets working. So he’ll probably let me slide on this stuff.

The only reason I’m bringing it up here is because I think the articles are worth reading. So you might click over there from time to time. I’m going to try to stay up on technology news — something I generally don’t do. This century may be lacking in theology and geometry but there is sadly nothing that I can do about it. And my wisdom about Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais may be profound, but it is not in demand in this debased culture. Anyway, maybe I’m wrong to be unimpressed with, Done Deal: AT&T Closes $2.5 Billion Purchase of Mexico’s Iusacell.

But don’t get the wrong idea: I’m not getting paid for that blogging. However, I suspect it will be helpful in getting more clients. And those clients will, in theory, pay me. Will and I often joke that we have a non-profit business — in practice anyway. My hope is that if the business really takes off so that we can’t even keep up and have to hire other people, then it won’t matter what I dress like. I will be able to just send out some squeaky clean novice. Then when the client complains, I can feign surprise, “Oh! I thought you just wanted someone with a good hair cut!”

Sadly, that kind of biting sarcasm will not be on display at the Dirt Cheap Computers blog. But it should still be interesting.

Afterword

If you know anyone who is in the Bay Area who needs computer services. That’s especially true of business clients, because those are the only ones that I really do work for given that I’m mostly a network and database and programming kind of guy.

Some time ago, I was watching Kristen Schaal doing some stand-up comedy and she mentioned YouPorn. You never know with her. It would be entirely in keeping with her style to make up such a thing. On the other hand, of course the porn industry would create an “adult” site with that name. Although now that I think about it, YouTube sounds kind of obscene too. The truth is, just about everything sounds obscene in the right context. Anyway, I had to know, so I opened a new tab in Chrome and typed “youporn.com.” And sure enough: there is such a site and it is exactly what you would think it would be.

YouTube was created in February 2005. YouPorn was created in December 2005. And if you look on Alexa, you will see that YouTube is the third most popular website in the world while YouPorn is number 127. So clearly, the pornographers are clever people — they knew what they were doing. And I, as usual, am pretty clueless — not realizing that of course there would be a YouPorn.

Before I go on, I should explain Alexa traffic ratings. The lower the number the better. But 127 is still remarkably low. There are over a billion active websites on the internet. Frankly Curious usually has a ranking of a bit less than two million. That represents about 500 visitors per day. And it isn’t linear. A website with a ranking of 20 million (generally Alexa doesn’t rank sites with that little traffic) would not have 50 visitors per day but more like 5. So you can imagine the number of people who are visiting YouPorn — millions per day.

But YouPorn isn’t even at the top of the heap in terms of porn websites. Black Hat World provided a very helpful article about a year ago, List of Over 300 Porn Sites in Order by Their Traffic Ranking. YouPorn, with its nifty name only ranks number six behind such sites as XVideos, PornHub, and the similarly titled RedTube (created right after YouPorn). And YouPorn is only a little more popular than the charmingly titled YouJizz. Shockingly, Porn.com — created a full decade before YouPorn — isn’t even close. I guess like in anything, management matters.

Perhaps I would be better informed about all this if I were a big consumer of video porn. But I’m more of a literary guy myself. Video has many problems — most specifically it doesn’t really have motivation. People have sex. There really isn’t much motivation there. Although I will admit that I came upon a Russian how-to video that was excellent. It was aimed at young men and was more about seduction than mechanics. It really was charming, because it involved a young couple and it would show the guy screwing up and then rerun the whole thing with him behaving more appropriately. I really wish that I had had such a video when I was young. But regardless, such things are the exception and video porn is generally more like a filmed gynecological exam than anything sexy. Give me Anaïs Nin’s careful prose any day!

So there I was, encouraged by Kristen Schaal to see if YouPorn is a real thing and finding that, yes, it is a real thing. But then, the next time I needed to go to YouTube, I entered, “you…” That was always enough. Chrome filled in the rest and took me to YouTube. But not after the YouPorn incident! At that point, “you” took me to YouPorn. I’d been going to YouTube for many years and YouPorn once. But Chrome suddenly decided that “you” meant I wanted to go to the Sexy Site of Sexy Sex. I remained calm. I figured it was just using the last thing I entered. So I carefully entered YouTube each time. But after “You” it always offered up “YouPorn?”

It isn’t just that it was vaguely embarrassing. I do, after all, have Kristen Schaal to blame for it. But it interfered with my work. I am highly dependent upon habits. So I was forced to change my habits, which sucked. Well finally, Chrome now offers “YouTube?” when I type in “you.” But this took over two months to happen. Entering “YouPorn” once make the stupid browser think that I wanted nothing so much as the sixth most popular porn site on the internet. If Google didn’t own YouTube, I would suspect some kind of payola scam going on. As it is, I figure it is just bad programming.

This is the hardest part of the year to write. Very little is going on in the news and the people I commonly read are not writing very much. What’s more, not that many people are reading. I suppose that they have more important things to do than read my increasingly strained missives. Yet I still try to grind out five articles per day. This is not out of any commitment to you my loyal readers. It is more out of a commitment to myself. I am a man of habits and I have this feeling that if I don’t write five articles today, I may never write another ever again.

There is another aspect of of this. In order to write well, it is important simply to write. When I go back and read things I’ve written in the past, I’m constantly amazed that the best work is often the stuff that I just dashed off. And stuff I thought was very good — things I worked very hard on — leave me flat. So if I want to write a hundred articles each year that are worth while, I probably do need to grind out a couple thousand. Because when you are in the thick of it, you really don’t know what is good and what is dreck.

Another problem is that I’ve now written well over 8,000 articles on this blog. With every day that goes by, it seems that I’ve already said what I have to say on the subject. Indeed, there will be times when I’ve written half an article, only to realize that I must have written the same thing before. And a quick search shows that indeed, I have. And often, the process of my thinking is dead on. I am nothing if not consistent. Even when I was a libertarian, my writing on the subject of politics was not so very different than my more clear thinking today. This was one of the reasons that I wasn’t allowed to play in any libertarian games.

Tomorrow, I’m sure I will have much to say about the ending of the year. As for now, I have little to write about other than the fact that I have little to write about. Of course, there are things to write about. For one thing, I have a very interesting grammar article to write about. But it will take a little work and I don’t feel up to it right now. But you would think that at this point with five years and 8,000 articles under my belt, I’d be able to look back to the previous years for what I did. This is not all that useful. For example, last year at this time, I just didn’t write that many articles. And the year before, I wrote really short articles.

So I’m stuck tonight just slogging out an article about how I’m reduced to slugging out an article. It really doesn’t speak well of me. If I weren’t so obsessive, I’d just recycle old article. I know that even my most devoted readers don’t manage to see everything that I’ve written. What’s more, I often completely forget things that I wrote. I’ll sometimes notice that there is a flurry of visits to a particular article and I have no idea what the it is about. So maybe I’ll start doing a little about that. But there is so much else to be done moving into the future.

There is something that I might consider. Posting five articles of an average length of 700 words each day is an arbitrary work load. I have friends (Although they might might not describe me that way!) who have active blogs who produce far less. Infidel753 posts only every other day on average. Bark Bark Woof Woof posts only a couple of things per day and they tend to be light on content. Beggars Can Be Choosers posts every couple of weeks. Human Voices posts every week or so. The Good Typist publishes once a week (but she’s also polishing her novel). Ramona’s Voices is much the same. On the other hand, Job’s Anger publishes at the same pace that I do. And so does P M Carpenter’s Commentary. But most of all, I try to be like Digby — both in terms of amount of content and quality. I’m pretty sure I’ve got her beat in terms of amount. It is still the quality that I’m working on. And I’m afraid having lots of content is necessary to have a high level of content.