Just before we headed north for Xmas, I posted this shot of an odd little stencil I saw in Dublin. It’s a neat stencil, and a technically reasonable photo of it, but it’s hardly amazing. Yet it caught some traction (perhaps in part due to synchronicity with the season) and ended up on Flickr’s “Explore” pages. This has lead to 60 favorites in four days, over 4 times as many favorites as every other photograph I’ve posted with one exception. I’m thrilled by the response (it’s always nice when people see your work), but according to Flickr’s “interesting-ness” algorithm this is currently the 5th most “interesting” of all the photos I’ve posted, a “claim” which clearly doesn’t bear any significant scrutiny.

I realize that any algorithmic determination of “interestingness” is going to have substantial oddities and be subject to gaming in various ways. And I suspect that the “rich get richer” part of this is a common experience for anyone who posts stuff on-line or, more generally, puts any of their work out in the public. Still, it’s weird when it happens.

OK, I’m done navel gazing – you can go back to your holiday revelry.

My 15 minutes would appear to be scattered like little breadcrumbs across the trail of my existence, and yesterday I discovered a few more.

It all started when kjell mentioned on Twitter how cool Flickr’s new stats were. I hadn’t heard of them yet, but being a good data head I immediately rushed to sign up and started poking around as soon mine were available.

A little poking turned up some unexpected clicks from ScienceBlogs. Digging some revealed the fact that two of my photos are being used in their channel photos this week!

Way cool.

Oh, and the originals are here and there.

Our recent upgrade of WordPress has brought with it many bits of nifty goodness. The one (and so far only) downside is that scheduled entries are broken. I can schedule them fine, but they never show up. The “count down” just goes right on by and then starts counting back up. Foo.

Some poking around in the forums suggests that the problem isn’t unknown, but is rare, and the little bits of discussion frankly didn’t make much sense. So, for the moment, I ain’t gonna bother.

When I launched Your Daily Awesome 16 months ago, I was between projects and looking for a creative outlet that incorporated the myriad cultural phenomena that constantly inspire me. YDA was the perfect vehicle for this, and to my great surprise and happiness, other people shared my enthusiasms: The earliest days of the blog drew a few dozen visitors daily. November alone has seen more than 90,000 hits, a level of popularity that excites and humbles me.

But all good things must end, and this is the final entry on YDA as we know it. I am a writer first and an artist second (or vice versa, it’s hard to keep track): Blogging is not my main gig, and for the past several months, I’ve been unable to devote myself to my real work so that I can noodle around on the internet every night, hunting for something appropriately awesome to blog. Those (substantial) daily chunks of time need to be applied to other projects that are more significant to me, creatively and professionally.

When I posted the clip from True Stories of David Byrne deadpanning his way through the history of Texas, I didn’t realize that it would be YDA’s last real post. But if pressed to choose a closing statement, I’d be hard-pressed to select something more appropriate to this blog’s sensibilities.

Infinite thank you’s to Your Daily Awesome’s readers, linkers, and the artists who inspired this blog. I promise to spend my time wisely.

This has been a wonderful source of, well, awesomeness, and will be missed. Life is complex, however, and I can certainly understand the problem is competing priorities.

Happily, the blog is still up, so you can go back and sift through the splendiferous back catalog.

Best wishes to Chas.

As part of the upgrade I turned on the Akismet anti-spam plugin that now comes standard with WordPress, and man is it wonderful. In the few days that it’s been working, it’s (correctly) identified roughly 100 spam messages per day, keeping them out of my mail spool and management work flow on the blog.

Unfortunately I only half turned off the old CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin code was all turned off, but the formatting of the comment submission area still had a (now empty) box for the authentication image, and the box for you to type in the code (which you couldn’t see). It turns out that you could post a comment ignoring the code, but that was hardly obvious from a user standpoint, and happily one of our regular readers pointed out the problem.

I believe the problem is now fixed, and I would be grateful if a few folks would post a randomoid comment on this post just to verify that all is now well.

If the Akismet tool continues to do such a good job, I’d like to turn off moderation altogether so that people’s comments will appear immediately. Stay tuned!

Thanks to freezelight for the cool photo.

I just finished a long overdue upgrade of all the UnhinderedByTalent.com WordPress installs, so everyone’s all spiffy and shiny now.

The photo (from the Green Fair where we met the River Nene folks) is just there to fool you into believing this post actually had content :-).

Someone asked over on Flickr if I knew who this was. I didn’t have a clue who he was until the question prompted me to do my homework. You’re looking at Bob Breeks, the guitarist and singer for The Bad Terrorists, a band here in Colchester. They were played with (I’m assuming) reduced amplification at the fair, so you really couldn’t hear the vocals for crap, but the playing was quite fun.

Of Britain’s web population of 26 million [a study] found that 15% kept a blog. Of those running a personal website, almost one in five were blogging at least once a day – the high water mark for an internet phenomenon that is transforming the way people voice their opinions.

But what’s the value of voicing one’s opinion if no one’s actually listening? It would be particularly interesting to study how much of all that text is being read, and by who? (In fairness, of course, there aren’t that many folks reading this, so mea culpa, etc., etc.)

Thanks to John Naughton for the pointer.

TechCrunch reports on a piece on SomethingAwful.com about WikiGroaning. The idea is simple – compare the write-up on Wikipedia of things that are of arguably important in the “big sense” (say, Aristotle) to things that are well known now but arguably ephemeral in the long view (say, Oprah). Gee, now that’s probably not the balance an editorial board would have planned for, eh? This isn’t entirely surprising, but still disappointing. The pieces I’ve linked to have numerous pairs to compare, although the fact that they’ve brought those pairs to the attention of a wider audience may lead to at least some of the imbalances being addressed. Many of the pairs show a definite “nerd bias” (e.g., Lizard vs. Dragon), but others (like the aforementioned Aristotle vs. Oprah) are arguably a more general “current events and pop culture bias”.

And because none of us have any real work to do, some silly people created WikiGroaning.com, where one can type in pairs of words or phrases and they’ll compute the “nerd points” for each based on the contents and edit history of the appropriate entries on Wikipedia. I did a comparison of Jon Stewart and Edward Murrow and, big surprise, Stewart racks up way more nerd points than Murrow (113,720 vs. 14,380). Ditto when comparing Stewart to Walter Cronkite (14,462), and Stephen Colbert has even more nerd points than Stewart (141,964).

As is pointed out multiple times in the discussion of the TechCrunch piece, Wikipedia is still largely driven by the early adopters, and those are (not surprisingly) still nerds to a large degree. The real question will be whether the demographics of Wikipedia contributors will become more “mainstream” over time. If it does, some of the bias goes away of its own accord. If the bias, however, works to prevent that mainstreaming we could get a feedback loop that traps Wikipedia in this nerdly space. I don’t honestly consider that terribly likely ’cause the kids are growing up with it, but we’ll have to wait and see. The pop culture bias is perhaps more chronic, as most people in most times tend to dwell inordinately on the people and events of their day. At some level, though, I don’t really mind Jon Stewart having some huge entry as long as Edward R. Murrow has gotten his due.

The other (and arguably more important in the long run) issue is raised by John Naughton, who reports on serious gaps in the Wikipedia entry on “Spreadsheet”. Naughton is picking up on a post by Dan Bricklin (a key developer of VisiCalc – the first spreadsheet I had any contact with), who discusses his concerns at some length and raises important questions about how a community project builds “neutral” content in a way that incorporates the experience of heavily invested experts like Bricklin in the process. Important stuff and worth the read.

It’s a nice, elegant site featuring photographs of her art. She used Shutterbug to build the site. I had no prior acquaintance with Shutterbug before this, but it seems like a quite straightforward tool. It seems especially well suited to the design of largely static image oriented sites (like Jess’s). No replacement for the mighty WordPress for managing dynamic content, but quite good for what it does.

I really like Jess’s work (and I’m only slightly biased), so go check it out! I’ll leave you with the following detail I took of one of her girdles during a special show of her girdles at the PRCA last year.