GPR6: A little egoboo at just the right time

I was looking at a liblog I hadn’t heard of before, and happened to glance up at the GPR flag (it’s on my Firefox navigation bar, useful for certain things)… which is irrelevant except for the side-effect:

For the first time in a few months, I went to this blog as a regular reader (that is, not through my administrator’s door) and, after that, to Cites & Insights.

And found that both of them have Google Page Rank 6.

Which ain’t no big deal, actually–of the 521 liblogs in But Still They Blog, when I checked GPRs in August 2009, 90 (17%) had GPR 6 and 19 (3.6%) had even higher Google Page Ranks (18 had GPR 7; one had GPR 8)–but, well, it was nice to see a rise in visibility (I find “importance” too silly to use for GPR).

If you’re wondering, here’s the breakdown of GPRs for liblogs in August 2009–noting that I used GPR 4 in either late 2008 or mid-2009 as a criterion for newer liblogs for inclusion in the book:

  • Google Page Rank 3 or lower: 47
  • Google Page Rank 4: 196
  • Google Page Rank 5: 169
  • Google Page Rank 6: 90
  • Google Page Rank 7: 18
  • Google Page Rank 8: One–and it’s probably not the one you think it is.

As for Cites & Insights, that had risen (slowly) to a Google Page Rank of 6 (and maybe 7 at one point, although I could be wrong about that) while it was at its earlier site. Moving to its own domain, while absolutely necessary and a Very Good Thing in the long run, automatically broke a bunch of links and caused the GPR to plummet–that’s a given.

Last time I checked on either–it’s not something I look at very often (my ego does know some bounds)–both were at GPR 5.

The timing is nice because, well, I’ve been ruminating about the “semi-” part of being “semi-retired” and how hard I should try to keep that “semi-” part. And whether full retirement might mean retiring some of my writing activity.

I’ll keep ruminating, doing some of it in public, no doubt, but this slight rise in visibility is nice, particularly coming at this point. My mantra used to be “I’ll keep writing this stuff as long as people want to keep reading it.” It’s not that simple at this point, but apparent interested, voluntary readership is certainly part of what makes doing this stuff worthwhile.

For those who feel posts need to be substantive and significant: This one isn’t. Not sorry about that. And I may have a new clarification on comment moderation policies coming up soon…one that makes an exception to the usual “your email address will never be revealed” rule. However, that policy change–if and when it happens–will only be prospective: I will not reveal any email addresses for comments received up to that change.


Quick update on the “collection of OA stuff from C&I” project: I’d been holding off on actual publication of that collection, including free PDF (and maybe free ePub) and minimally-priced paperback version (probably Lulu’s cost plus $1, or rounded to the nearest $5 interval), because of two factors:

  1. Someone had expressed an interest in building an index for the collection, which would have made the book more useful (effort I frankly was not ready to add)
  2. I’ve had other things to think about, and the level of interest in the collection was, while non-zero, not huge either.

#1 didn’t come through. #2 is still a factor, as is the lack of an easy epub conversion that I’m particularly happy about.

Within the next two weeks, I think, I will do the minimum necessary–slap together a simple cover, put up the free PDF and minimally-priced paperback, and maybe put together a (free or minimally-priced) epub version that’s at least plausible. [The best way to do that, at this point, seems to be to take the Word version, make a copy, turn off hyphenation and justification, remove page headers and footers, and turn that into an epub version either directly or via a PDF intermediary. That’s less than half an hour’s work; I’ll spend that much time.]

And, of course, I’ll announce it when it is available.

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