Walt at Random

Not a great title for this musing, but I’m not feeling creative enough for a better one.

What I’m getting at is this:

One downside of increased transparency of many people’s lives, especially noteworthy people, is that it’s harder to divorce the person from their creations.

For example?

I read many of Robert Heinlein’s books when I was much younger (maybe even young). I enjoyed most of them, not as great literary works but as enjoyable science fiction.

At the time, I knew nothing about Heinlein’s own worldview beyond what was in the books, and that wasn’t always obviously Heinlein speaking. (It’s definitely not the case that everything said by Isaac Asimov’s characters represented Asimov’s own thinking; why should it be true for Heinlein?)

Later, as I learned more about Heinlein, the man, it was too late for it to affect my enjoyment of his books–I’d already read them.

But I didn’t read Orson Scott Card when I was younger, and still haven’t. And, frankly, I suspect I never will, given what I know of Card’s activism and, um, sentiments, and given that I’m never possibly going to read all the books that are out there that I might enjoy. I figure I read about 12 science fiction books and another 26 booklength-equivalents (in science fiction magazines) a year, and that includes fantasy as well; there’s no conceivable way that I begin to run out of reading.

A tougher case…

There’s a country singer I’ve enjoyed quite a bit over the years. The name’s not important. His songs aren’t stridently political, and while he certainly indulges in gospel and religion sometimes, well, he’s a country artist. (Heck, I was an absolute J.S. Bach devotee when I was young, and Bach didn’t exactly ignore religion…)

Lately, though, I’ve heard that this person is becoming a known and significant contributor to a brand of politics that really doesn’t do much for me.

Does that make his music less appealing? Maybe, a little bit, yes.

The difference between this person and Card are, apart from pure intensity, this person doesn’t inject his politics into his songs to the extent that Card apparently (apparently–I haven’t read him, remember) injects his worldviews into his fiction.

And in general…

Once you’ve heard and confirmed someone’s stances and the vigor with which they pursue those stances, you can’t unhear them–and I don’t see how that can fail to affect how you read their writing, view their art, listen to their songs, watch their plays.

[Just as a socially onservative religious person who wants to know more about the St. Andrew's Cross and doesn't have filtering turned on will probably never fully unsee the results...]

That’s life. It’s always been true to some extent. I think it’s more true these days, and it’s harder to ignore the person behind the writing, the music, the art.

And sometimes, that feels a little unfortunate.

Not unfortunate enough to send me to the “Card” section of my library’s SF/F shelves, to be sure…

A two-part post of no enormous import…

Texas

Just finished checking Zelienople Public Library, the alphabetically last library in Pennsylvania, for presence on Facebook and Twitter. That process began with A Hufnagel Glen Rock Library on November 17. Given the bad cold I’m finally getting over and other stuff like turning around the micropublishing book and helping (a little) get ready for Thanksgiving, I guess I shouldn’t be too unhappy with that progress. That’s 453 libraries in roughly four weekdays and one weekend; a little below my 100-per-weekday, 100 over the weekend goal, but not badly so.

Now on to Texas’ 561 [565: Seeing that the table I had was only showing city names, I found another table, showing 565 main libraries with population figures, and it has full library names] libraries, aiming for 50-75 today, the rest starting Friday. (For those who follow my activities closely, if there are any of them, the reason I’m posting this on a Wednesday morning instead of being out hiking is because I *am* about 95% over the cold and decided to take it easy–and because it’s threatening rain out there any minute.) I might miss the aim: As always, I’ll help with anything Thanksgiving-related my wife asks me to do, but I’ve found in past years that I’m usually most helpful by staying out of the way.

The Texas process will be a lot slower because November 25 is also precisely four months past the point at which I began the original 25-state/2406-library scan, and thus marks the start of the four-month rescan. So I’ll be happy with 25 or more new (Texas) libraries per day…

And somewhere in there I may put out a truncated little C&I issue…

Thanksgiving

I won’t scan any libraries tomorrow. We’ll be hosting a small dinner (brother & sister-in-law, sister & brother-in-law; none of the nieces and nephew and grand-nieces are here this year), with my wife doing, oh, 95% of the work. That may be a conservative estimate. It’s her choice, although it’s my immediate family. I doubt that I’ll even be on the computer tomorrow–and if I am, it won’t be until late afternoon at the earliest.

I could provide a gratetude (Jon Carroll’s marvelous term) of things I’m thankful for (John Scalzi’s been doing a wonderful “Thanksgiving Advent Calendar” series of daily gratetudes at his Whatever blog), but I’m not much of one for lists. At a start, there’s my wonderful wife (we met not much more than 34 years ago, and we’ll celebrate our 34th anniversary on New Year’s Day). Then, there’s good health (this cold being a rare exception–I’m 66 years old, not taking any prescription medicines and not having any real complaints, so I’m extremely thankful to my father and other ancestors for great genes!). And, to be sure, being in a country, state, and community that I love, despite all their failings; having not only a roof over my head but the nicest house we’ve ever owned; good food (much of it local, most of the produce from farmers’ markets) and having not gained the habit of eating too much of it; good wine (some of it very local, nearly all of it from within 200 miles); good music; good friends locally and the many good virtual friends of LSW (and others); good books and a great local public library to borrow them from…

And more, but I think that’s enough. On to Abernathy, Abilene, Alamo…

Alexandria Library has both a Facebook page and a Twitter account–although the Twitter account doesn’t show up on the library’s homepage and seems somewhat neglected. York County Public Library appears to have neither (although, as with so many others, there’s a Facebook page that the library probably had nothing to do with).

And that’s Virginia from start to finish, with lots of interesting stuff in between.

Now, on to Vermont. Meanwhile…

Too Many Words on a Favored Break Pastime

When I’m in the middle of writing a chapter, I alternate between working on the chapter and checking groups of libraries/visiting FriendFeed and gmail, usually aiming for 25 libraries at a time. (I’m current at 1,975, planning to get to at least 2,050 by the end of the day. Technically, of course, all those counts are one too high, since there’s a label row.)

But when I’m not writing a chapter–either because I’ve done enough for the day or because I’m done with this week’s installment–I do something else for a break. (Not the long breaks, where taking walks and reading are involved, but the short breaks sitting at the computer.) For quite a while, that break was frequently an ongoing game of five-card draw video poker, jacks or better, using a years-old Masque program that could be set to suggest which cards I should hold (and has a printable table of the too-many combinations to think about). I still have the program, but am unlikely to use it much in the future. For that, you can thank New Orleans and a website I discovered after ALA Annual.

New Orleans?

Yep. I think I mentioned in another post that, along with going to various programs and spending a lot of time in the exhibits, I spent a few hours at Harrah’s in New Orleans, always playing video poker (the only slot machines that involve some degree of thinking and skill). Planned to spend $50 to $70 max. Ended up walking out with $250 of the casino’s money. And found that I was almost always playing either three-hand poker or some subset of a ten-hand game, and that I enjoyed that a lot more than single-hand poker.

For those who’ve never encountered it, multihand poker (it can be anywhere from three to 100 hands, usually either three, five, ten or 100–and with three, five or ten, you can usually choose how many hands you want to play) works like this:

• You place your bet–with coins (or, rather, numbers based on the bills or slip you deposited) going to each successive hand first, then adding to them. If you want to get the best payback, you bet five coins for each hand (massively increasing royal flush payoff–this is true for virtually all video poker, and makes up about 1.5% of the extremely high payback of such machines); I almost never do that.
• When you click on Deal, the bottom hand is dealt.
• When you hold cards in that hand, they pop up on all of the hands you’ve bet on.
• When you click on Draw, the non-held cards are replaced in each hand–but each hand is a separate deal. Thus, if you’re playing five hands, you see five different results of drawing from the same held cards. You win on each hand if it’s a winning combo.

The virtues: More action and it’s interesting to see how things can play out. The vice: More action–if you’re playing a quarter five-hand machine and want that big royal-flush payout, you’re wagering $6.25 on each deal. That’s way too rich for my blood. I was typically starting with $0.50 (one each on two hands) and increasing hands & bets as I was winning–or, playing a dime machine, starting with $0.30 (one each on three hands) and doing the same. I’m guessing 100-hand games are typically penny games, but that still means you’re wagering $5 each time (5 coins each on 100 hands).

Coming home

We used to go to Reno two to four times a year, mostly visiting surrounding attractions in the mornings and playing slot poker in the afternoons. We don’t do that any more because the second-hand smoke is too much for my wife’s asthma and also irritating for me. There’s an Indian casino about two hours from us that had a substantial true nonsmoking room, but it also has lousy odds and the town doesn’t have a good hotel (the casino’s building one now). We went there a few times (my wife’s sister lives in town, and her niece is a financial person at the casino), but not recently…

I was missing casinos–not to gamble, which would imply the possibility of winning, but to game as cheap entertainment. And I realized that the Masque video poker wasn’t doing it: I wanted multihand, and it wasn’t enough like the real thing. (I was also finding double-bonus poker, where you trade less of a payoff for two pairs for more payoff for many other hands, including *much* more payoff for some 4 of a kind hands, to my liking, and the advice on holding is necessarily different for that version.)

A little investigation…

I wasn’t about to sign up for an offshore gambling website, any more than I’m ever likely to visit either of Livermore’s two “casinos” (that is, poker parlors–legal in many California cities since poker is a game of skill): Too rich for my blood, and I’d be a terrible live-poker player.

But then I found a website that’s explicitly not a gambling site (there’s no cash wagering of any sort) and offered video poker looking and sounding almost exactly like the real thing: Videopoker.com. There’s a reason the poker games look and sound realistic: Videopoker.com is operated by Action Gaming, a division of IGT–and Action Gaming makes those multihand video poker slot machines.

The win-win situation…

You can play video poker, in an absurdly large number of variations, absolutely for free–if you don’t mind flashing and changing ads around the edges of the virtual machine. After a while, I found that annoying enough to sign up for the “silver” level: $25 a year, and the third-party ads go away. (There are still a few videopoker.com ads, but they’re static and out of the way.) There’s a much more expensive level, something like $8/month, that allows you to chat with other players and keep track of your scores, but I’m not interested in that.

There’s also something else. On each of the first 20 days of each month, there’s a daily contest, using some “machine” from the large collection. (A machine might be Game King or Three-Hand Poker or Hundred-Hand or one of the many extra-action variations; within a machine, there are still quite a few choices–e.g., jacks or better, double bonus, deuces wild, and anywhere from three to a dozen others.) Unlike the regular games, where you start with 10,000 credits, bet what you want (all of it non-$) and go up or down until you stop playing, these ones are fixed: You always bet the max, you start with 0 credits, and that number goes up as you win. You play 100 deals (which may be anywhere from 100 to 10,000 actual hands), at which point your score is recorded. You can play up to five rounds per day–or, if you played five the previous day, up to eight.

And the high score for the day gets a $50 Visa gift card, plus a month of free Gold membership.

(The last third of each month is a single contest for the whole period, with a few prizes running to a little more money, and as many entries as you like.)

I started doing this, keeping track of how I was winning or losing on various game variations. Seeing that the leaders for each day were almost always dealt at least one royal flush, I figured I’d never win, but that was OK: It wasn’t costing me anything.

Until, somewhat less than a month ago, playing hundred-hand and actually winning (that is, I was well on my way to having more than 50,000 credits after 100 hundred-hand deals), I was…dealt a royal flush. Which, of course, you hold all of (actually, that’s the single hand that you don’t get choices on), turning it into 100 royal flushes.

Yes, they do send you the $50 Visa card. I know it was somewhat less than a month ago because my player status hasn’t yet reverted to silver. It will soon.

I see this site as a win-win-win situation. Players win because they can play for free and maybe learn to be better players. (There’s now a $20 software option, which plays full-screen and offline, and it *does* offer the option of advising on what’s best to hold.) Action Gaming wins because players are far more likely to seek out Action Gaming machines when they do go to casinos.

Casinos win because multihand poker, especially with some of the options, gets past the problem casinos might have with full-odds video poker: The payback is *so* high–around 99% for jacks or better, actually slightly over 100% for deuces wild and some other options *if* you always hold correctly–that players really don’t burn through very much money. But if you’re always playing maximum coins and you’re playing three or five or ten hands at a time, you’ll be spending a little more. (If you’re an addict, you’re probably not playing $0.10/$0.25 video poker anyway–you’re probably playing something that doesn’t require thinking and offers more bells and whistles.)

On the other hand…

The effect on me is a little different. The play is realistic enough that I have very little interest in going back to casinos. Oh, if we went to Vegas to see the architecture, I’d play; if Reno ever gets rid of smoking in casinos, we like the town enough that I’d play some–but otherwise, well, there’s absolutely no second-hand smoke at home, there’s no loud music, there are no drunks or over-perfumed women sitting down next to me, and if I really want a glass of wine, it will be a whole bunch better than what I’d get at most casinos.

And, to be sure, I can play for 15 minutes when I choose to.

Well, there’s one other negative: I’ve played enough of the extra-action games (which require more than five coins per hand to offer a number of higher payouts, usually involving more luck and less skill) to know that I would probably never play them if and when we do go back to casinos (or I play aboard ship on a cruise).

Anyway, that’s my story. Oh: While hundred-hand poker is just too rich for real-world playing, it’s a great way to check what makes sense to hold and draw, as you’re seeing 100 sets of results for each attempt. I’ve been refining my own playing based on hundred-hand results. When I do eventually show up at real machines, I’ll be a better player…although, y’know, I’m probably enjoying it more at home. Even if that 453,000 point total wasn’t worth the $4,530 it would have been on a penny machine. My regrets for that not being real money are nonexistent: I simply would not play at $5/hand, even if we won the lottery. Not before I saw it was possible to win so much; not after.

Comment situation

I’m not allowing comments on this post for two reasons:

1. I neither need nor want lectures on The Evils of Gambling (even when no money is involved.)

2. I know Spam Karma well enough to know that your chances of having any comment accepted that includes words like poker or gambling are nearly zero. That’s even true for my own comments.

Here’s a first-world “problem” for you.

On Sunday, our bidirectional PG&E electricity meter read 2 (preceded by a bunch of zeros).

But that was before doing a bunch of laundry and cooking.

Today, it turned dreary (not “bad” weather by any means, just dreary): Overcast and rainy. Which means very little generation from our photovoltaic system (5.42 kWh, which is better than I expected but one-third of a really good day)–and also using a little more power for lights. Right now, the PG&E meter is at 16.

Trivial numbers, but a target

My wife really wants to hit zero–to see the PG&E reading be all zeros. That would mean we’d essentially used the grid as a giant battery all year–sending surplus electricity out on sunny days, getting it back on overcast days and at night.

Technically, zero wouldn’t do it: We were at -22 at last year’s “truing up,” the annual point at which PG&E will actually charge us for the electricity we’ve used, if any. (Or, starting this year, theoretically pay us a little if we’re net negative.)

If we’d forgone baking & laundry on Sunday, we would have been there–but that’s silly.

Not done yet

The truing-up reading will be taken somewhere between October 15 and October 18. Right now, the ten-day forecast (ha!) says rain today through Wednesday, but clear from then through October 11. (The three-day forecast is probably right. The seven -day Weather Underground forecast is plausible. AccuWeather’s 10-day forecast? Really? 10 days ahead in the weather biz is a very long time.)

Chances are, if it’s clear almost every day from Thursday through October 15, we’ll wind up at zero at some point. Maybe.

Silly in a way

This has very little to do with money–after all, we’ll wind up paying for, say, 10 to 50 kWh for the year, at the lowest rate, which means a bill of around $5 (for 50 kWh). For the year. (Well, plus the $4.50/month metering/grid connection charge we’ve been paying along with our gas bills.)

It’s just a number, but it’s an interesting one.

I should note that our next-door neighbor is having a photovoltaic system installed. Little by little, these rooftop installations do make a difference.

That’s an odd topic: Turns out UC Berkeley is working with SolarCity, our vendor, on a study of the actual impact of household solar on electricity loads–which involves changing the frequency with which our system’s output is reported to SolarCity via wifi from once every 15 minutes to once every minute. The study’s just getting going…it will be interesting to find out the results.

My weekend list of must, should and could goals includes “one good post,” by which I mean one post in this blog that actually says something. It’s also a standing item on my weekly to-do list (the weekend list is handwritten, and when I run out of slowly-yellowing 4×6 index cards, I might stop doing it; the weekly list is a Word file and kept to one printed page. In both cases, I just love crossing things out as completed–and in certain cases, putting an item on the weekly list and, after two or three weeks, bolding it, will keep reminding me to do something I’d just as soon postponed).

As I was saying…I aim to do one good post a week at a minimum. Lately I’m missing that aim. That may continue. You can partly blame FriendFeed. You can partly blame my being old and lazy.

You can mostly, at this point, blame a confluence of events:

• I thought I’d finished the first-phase research for the social networks book and was just about ready to start actually writing the draft in the middle of this week. Well, I did start writing the draft…and found after two pages that I wanted to think about it a little more.
• In timing that couldn’t be better, the managing editor at ITI sent me the PDF of my micropublishing books with loads of copyediting suggestions just at the point where I had to admit I was procrastinating, and that took priority. I’ve now gone through all the suggestions, sent back a couple of small questions and one larger question, and am just about halfway through revising the draft. (I love good editing: while ITI is clear about editorial suggestions being suggestions, not mandates, I’m likely to accept somewhere between 95% and 99% of the suggestions, maybe a little higher than 99%.)
• You don’t do this two-screen revision (the book in Word on the larger left screen, the PDF on the smaller notebook screen over to the right) all at once. Or at least I don’t–it leads to new mistakes and irritability. I’m doing one chapter at a time, with substantial breaks in between. I could be using those breaks to start the other book–but I don’t really want to do that. Fortunately, it turns out there was one more metric that I needed, one that requires a few hours (literally “a few”–no internet searching involved) scanning. So I’m interleaving that scanning (and occasional pure fun stuff) with the revisions.
• The scanning has to do with “currency” of the most recent post or tweet on a library’s account, as of the date I did the checking. For some reason, while I saved recent tweets and posts, I didn’t actually record currency (although I planned to do so on the second pass in late fall). I’ve come up with a sortable single-character code that gives me a useful hierarchy of currency without much effort.
• One reason to check currency has to do with the many library Facebook accounts (and some Twitter accounts) that don’t show up as links on the library’s home page. While I went into this project believing that no model of social network use would suit all libraries equally well, I had sort-of assumed that direct links on the home page would be one typical sign of active library use. Until, just for fun, I checked out the library website where one of the field’s better-known and more thoughtful advocates of library social networking works (it’s in one of the 25 states I didn’t survey)…and found that there were no obvious links. But, searching for and checking the Twitter and Facebook accounts, there was also no question that these were active, well-read, viable accounts. So I sent an email inquiry to the person involved–and received a response that convinced me that my assumption was wrong: That even “put links on the home page” isn’t necessarily an obvious choice for every library. That, in turn, is leading me to rethink my definition of “active” accounts, or at least to add a new category.
• In other words, lots’o'activity, and I don’t really feel like doing long, thoughtful, coherent blog posts at the end of the day. Some day…
• Oh, as for early work on the November Cites & Insights… Well, it’s possible there will be a November/December C&I, which could come out any time up to, say, December 10. We shall see. (The current issue is #144. That’s one of the magic numbers for calling it a day…I’ve done a gross of issues, just as Buffy did a gross of episodes. I don’t believe the October 2011 issue is the final C&I…)

Hmm. I guess this will do as “one odd post” until a good one comes along. Oh, and given recent comments about blind sources: The person involved is David Lee King, and I found his thoughtful response to my clumsily-worded question convincing and, well, thoughtful. Thanks, David.

Just a quick multifunction post for no particular reason:

• I reached a milestone yesterday, completing Phase 1 of my 2012 book project–that is, checking public libraries/library agencies in half of the U.S. states for presence on Twitter or Facebook. More than 2,500 libraries checked in all, starting near the end of July. (There will be a followup, intended to be precisely three months after the initial scans.)
• I have not yet started on any of the data analysis or real work on the project, and probably won’t even add the key columns to the spreadsheet(s) until I’ve taken a day or two away from the project. Conclusions will, of course, be part of the book. On the other hand…
• The process involved looking at more library websites than I’d ever expected to, and that did generate some thoughts that have very little to do with the book. I may turn those thoughts into a casual essay (or part of an essay) for Cites & Insights. (No, I’m not planning any grand set of guidelines or critiques–others who are closer to the issues have done those or will do them. These will be casual thoughts.)
• Also completed the first half of a closer milestone: Making changes in my current book project (The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing) based on the editorial pass. Starting, oh, as soon as I finish this post, I’ll be doing the second half of that milestone: Detailed copyfitting to deal with awkward line-break hyphens and the like. (For very good reasons, I’m doing the actual layout on this book.)
• Once that’s well under way, I’ll do some C&I writing…and maybe get back to watching old movies.
• I am firmly resolved not to deal with a silly list issued by some college that gets lots of attention for the list. I looked at part of it, broke down laughing, and decided that it wasn’t worth the time or attention. Silliness is always with us; the Onion and Cronk do it better.
• Speaking of old movies, which I wasn’t, our Saturday movie last weekend was a reminder of why I don’t plan to give up on physical discs any time soon–the Blu-ray version of Forbidden Planet, magnificently restored–and with loads of extras, running to more than four hours altogether, I think (including some we won’t bother with, such as the full-length 1957 film that also “starred” Robby, the Robot). Yes, we’ve seen the classic movie (perhaps the first A-level SF movie?) before; no, we’ve never seen it like this–and even if we had high-speed broadband, you can’t get this level of picture quality via streaming.
• And to close this randomness: Perhaps worth noting that, of all the Blu-ray discs we’ve watched from Netflix–probably 80% of the discs over the last couple years, certainly more than 100 discs–only one has had any problems. (That one looked as though someone had deliberately tried to damage it, and succeeded.) That tough coating on Blu-rays apparently works: Most of them look as though they’d never been played.

Just a quick note: If you encounter me on any of the services that include an icon or picture, or go to my personal website, you’ll now encounter some variant on this picture.

The picture(s) I’d been using were either three years or eight years old (depending), taken in Alaska during cruises. In both pictures, I had a mustache–one I had for more than 30 years.

I shaved off the mustache a little over a year ago. It’s not coming back. While it was essentially invisible in icon-size versions of the picture (white hair blends pretty well with pale skin), it was still there.

The picture above was taken July 6, 2011, during a hike in Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, near here. (I go for hikes–nothing too strenuous–every Wednesday with some varying number of other folks.) Those are hiking poles in my hand, and a truly elegant hat (OK, a cheap gardening hat, but it does the job and fits my fat head) on my head.

Before you ask: No, the photo hasn’t been Photoshopped–neither my wife nor I owns Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

It has, to be sure, been altered–not to make me less aged, but to move me from kneeling as part of a group shot to me kneeling in the open area to the left of the group. My wife did the editing, using Corel Paint Shop Pro. Only the background was changed (and it’s background that is actually in the original picture)-she didn’t attempt to touch up my numerous wrinkles or other facts of being just under 66.

I’ve completed the first pass for use of Facebook and Twitter by public libraries in six states–which was, originally, all I planned to do (as part of a book project that’s not primarily about numbers as such).

Those six states make up roughly one-fifth of U.S. population (they include a very large state, a large state, a medium-sized state, a medium-small state, a small state and a very small state in terms of population). They include a total of 802 public library agencies (libraries and library systems).

Based on just those states, I can offer two “contradictory” comments, both true:

• Most libraries in the six states studied don’t use either social network: Roughly two-thirds don’t use either one.
• Most people in the six states are served by libraries that do use at least one of the two social networks (although “most” in this case is around 54%).

Think about it. There’s no contradiction between the two numbers. And that’s all the numbers I’ll note at the moment.

I will say this: I’m doing more than 6 states. I’ll almost certainly do another ten (two large, two fairly large, two medium, two fairly small, two small) states…and I might even do another eight beyond that. (The set of ten states includes a total of just over 800 libraries/library agencies. The set of eight includes just over 640. We’ll see how it goes.)

…then nobody else does, or nobody else should, or nobody should pay extra for the difference. Or any of a number of similar arguments, expressed with comments like “why bother?” or “scientific” claims (such as results of surveys where a few hundred folks can’t reliably tell which of two wines, tasted blind, is more expensive).

Sometimes it’s a little stronger. Blake Carver, who in many ways I like and admire (otherwise, C&I wouldn’t be hosted at LISHost), gave this as his reason for posting a link that, at third hand, discussed such a survey—that is, 587 participants were only 50% successful in deciding which of two wines was more expensive—“oenophiles are all full of shit and it’s all just subjective and people waste a stupid amount of time and money on spoiled grape juice.”

OK, that’s hyperbole on Blake’s part—or at least I think it is.

For the rest of the story (and five other snarky little essays)… or read My Back Pages as part of Cites & Insights 11:6.

Yes, this My Back Pages is now in HTML, using the new template.

10. Putting things together into a list seems to connect them. Surely you’ve seen lists where some elements don’t quite seem to fit—or where the organizing principle seems forced. Not a problem. It’s a list. The title connects individual elements, even if that connection is artificial. You can be philosophical about this: Bogus lists encourage people to think about possible connections. Or you can be realistic: A lazy writer spots 10, 15, 25 or 42 items that can fit under a title, no matter how ill the fit.

9. Lists are quotable, searchable, Tweetable. Honorable bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers, and FriendFeeders will link back—but they’ll probably use one item at a time. Great! Just make sure topic phrases are less than 140 characters long and paragraphs run less than 140 words. You’re on your way to big-link love. A good 20-item 1,600-word list probably results in 10 times the links of a single discursive 1,600-word post or article and probably takes less than half as long to write.

For the rest of the story... or read disContent as part of Cites & Insights 11:6