King  Gary 

Something Awful wrote an article talking about Wikipedia, discussing that if you take two articles that are similar (the example they give is Knight and Jedi Knight), then you would see that the article that is more related to nerds, which is the latter in this case, is longer and more comprehensive than the former.

TechCrunch also picked up on this, and Michael agreed with Something Awful and the claims that it makes. He says that “People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.”

I digress.

The examples that are given include the following:

• Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
• Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
• Girlfriend v. Video Games
• Half Life v. Half Life 2
• Love v. Masturbation
• Bathing v. Acne

I will analyze the first two examples, below.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

In a similar nature as my previous post regarding cleaning up my list of feeds, I’ve begun to clean up my Facebook friends list.

How do I determine if I should remove someone from my Facebook profile? Well, Facebook nicely reminds me whenever a friend’s birthday is coming up within the next few days. If I would find it awkward if I posted a simple ‘Happy birthday’ message onto a friend’s Facebook profile ‘wall’, then they probably shouldn’t be connected to me on Facebook.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Six Apart has announced that they will be releasing their Movable Type blogging platform as open source later on this year. This is a major move by the company which made a poor decision in the past when they heavily enforced their MT 3.0 license and which gave rise to WordPress to become a major player in the blogging platform arena, and arguably, the CMS world.

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has posted his thoughts on how he thinks the battle between WordPress and Movable Type will play out, now that both will soon be open sourced. WordPress has really taken a strong foothold and has now become the blogging platform of choice among millions of users worldwide.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

Yesterday, Ask.com made a major relaunch of its search engine. The primary theme among its changes seems to be that its aiming for a more simpler, sleeker look overall so that there’s not as many things fighting for your attention.

Let’s face it. Here we have a company which rode atop a gimmick that was birthed during the dot-com bubble heyday; I’m talking about Ask Jeeves. Other search engines that also had a mascot include sites such as Mamma (one of the few that I can recall), and most of those have died off enough so that they hold a negligible share of web search. Ask is still around because they’ve managed to reinvent themselves as a search engine with a pretty good domain name, and I would say that that’s what’s kept them in the game thus far. If they were named something more web 2.0-ish, like Mahalo, then they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

There’s some chatter going on with regards to Guy Kawasaki’s latest web venture, Truemors, a “rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.” (from from TechCrunch) and how Guy mentions that it (only) costs him $12,000 for the entire website to go from an idea to reality.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

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Popularity: 12% [?]

My latest post over at Blog Herald is entitled Quick tip: How to make the ‘Categories’ box bigger when writing WordPress posts.

Excerpt:

I’ve written at a couple blogs, including my own and Blog Herald (here), and quite often, I see that there are quite a number of post categories to choose from in order to tag my posts appropriately.

Below, you can see a typical listing of available post categories that you can use on a WordPress blog. As you can see, though, there are so many categories that the box requires a scroll bar.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Engadget is widely known as the ‘most popular‘ blog, according to Technorati.

If you click through to the blog’s profile, though, then you’ll see that it’s actually ranked FIFTH out of the top 100 blogs.

So, my question to you is, which four blogs have more Technorati Authority than Engadget?

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Popularity: 8% [?]

“Hi, my name is Gary, and I’m an addict.”

To drugs? No, silly! To feeds! When I counted, yesterday, I had no less than 200 feed subscriptions in Google Reader; according to some people, this is a tiny number and I should continue subscribing to feeds. To me, though, I eventually found it a bit excessive.

The important thing to consider is if you are getting a lot of duplicate content in the feeds, and if you are, then you should start purging feeds that simply echo content that you find in your other feeds. This was the case for me.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

That’s right; a blog called iLEMONed has apparently become the 12th most popular blog, (seemingly) overnight, according to Technorati’s ‘most popular’ blogs ranking.

I checked the blog’s FeedBurner stats, and it only has 681 subscribers. This alerted my sensors immediately, and so I look around for a minute and found out that the blog released its theme for public consumption a few weeks ago. Since they included a link leading back to their own site, they garnered thousands of links in only a few weeks. You can see those links here.

Their Technorati Authority is currently 9,247; they trail the much more popular celebrity news website, TMZ.com, by a mere 400 in Authority.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I’ve made yet another post over at Blog Herald entitled How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog. Go check it out!

Here’s an excerpt:

In continuation of my last post, Enabling sidebar widgets for your WordPress theme, I am now going to show you how you can use these newfound widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog.

Most blogs have only one sidebar, but some, such as Blog Herald, have two (or more!) After reading my last post, you learned how you can use widgets on your blog’s theme, so now, I will show you how you can use widgets on two or more sidebars. This post assumes that you’ve either read my last post, or you already know how to widgetize a theme but would like to know how to widgetize more than one sidebar.

I’m also going to show you how you can customize your sidebars by choosing how you want each widget to be formatted on a per-sidebar basis, and I’ll also show you how you can name your sidebars to more easily identify each one.

This tutorial will focus on using widgets on two sidebars, but the steps can be easily reproduced to adapt to more than two sidebars.

Popularity: 9% [?]