How to Become an Important Blogger (my plan)

Being heard and having your ideas count for something seems to be a game of influence. To this end, my goal is to increase readership of my blog and encourage people to follow me on twitter. To increase readership of my blog, I need to post more regularly, and more often. To increase my twitter following, I can piggyback on my blog as well as reposting trending topics. I need to earn my readers respect by entertaining them with solid information they can trust and/or starting some legal controversy with a big company as seems to be a very effective method for gaining followers. I must also concentrate on writing well, with as few grammatical errors as possible, solid logic, and topics that appeal to a large audience. The next few paragraphs contain a few examples of what I intend to write about, as well as the logical and psychological mechanisms behind my method that should make it work.

 First of all , this blog is about challenging the status quo, the way people think, and their most dearly held beliefs. My favorite topics are Psychology, Religion, Misconceptions about Science, Really Cool Science, and the Political Misuse of Science. I am a student of Psychology with a Minor in Philosophy, a fan of physics, and a computer science hobbyist. I have a terrible urge to write but not always a clear topic to write about. During my explorations of the mentioned topics above, I will also engage in some introspection and meta-thinking (thinking about my thoughts) to determine the origins and other reason behind them. For example, I'm writing this blog post as a way to motivate myself to write more blog posts by creating a reader expectation of more blog posts as well as to outline for myself what topics I will write about when I don't have one particular thing bugging me. I'll be clear, this is a purely selfish endeavor which I intend to use for gaining more influence in the world around me, as well as more control over myself.

 Regular posts are one of the most important things to having a successful blog. They don't have to adhere to a strict schedule as long as they occur often enough for readers to expect to find something when they check back on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The data I use for this, while not scientific in nature, seems solid enough to support the hypothesis. Every blog I've ever read that has more than a few readers and tons of comments always has new material every time I look as well as a reasonable expectation for there to be more material. At the base of this I can identify an operant conditioning cycle that reinforces both the behaviours of the blogger and the behaviours of the reader. A blogger is reinforced by the blog's statistics to post blogs. The more often and more regularly the blogger posts, the more readers the blog will have. On the other side of it, the readers are interested in reading the blogger's writing, so they return to the site to see if anything new has been posted. If there is new content, the reader is more likely to return to the blog in roughly the same amount of time, favoring faster and faster return rates until the reader is roughly in sync with the blogger's posting pattern.

  Piggybacking on trending topics will help both my blog readership and my twitter following. By checking the trending topics, I can post a tweet with the trending hash-tag and expect to see a rise in viewership of that tweet. If that tweet contains a link to my blog, my blog readership will also increase. The rate at which my blog increases is proportional to the number of people who read my tweet. If the content of the blog is relevant and interesting, I can reasonably expect to see an increase in return readers to my blog, who may become followers of my blog if I continue to hold their attention with my blog content in subsequent posts. Tweeting trending hash-tags also increases my twitter following by increasing the exposure of my tweets. If I increase my twitter following I can reasonably expect a larger audience to be exposed to links to my blog, increasing blog readership and eventually blog following. At the bottom of all this, my posts must still be relevant and interesting or my blog will gain a reputation for being useless reading. I can also reasonably expect that this particular blog post will do nothing to capture new readers. However, I hope that it can serve as a promise to current readers that the blog will improve.

  Creating controversy seems to be highly effective at gaining new readers as exemplified by two recent incidents involving two high school students and the Governor Brownback and Dr. Burzynsky. The first high school student, Emma Sullivan, wrote a tweet about Governor Brownback saying that she said mean things to him in person. It had the hash-tag #heblowsalot attached to it. The governor's office responded inapropriately by contacting her school where the principal proceeded to rip her a new one over the issue, ordering her to write an appology. She refused to write the apology because she was acting within her First Amendment Rights. The second student, Ryhs Morgan, wrote a "scathing post" about Dr. Burzynsky's quack treatment for cancer citing data from actual doctors as well as a few skeptical watchdog sites. His office sent Morgan several e-mails citing Libel laws and threatening to sue. Morgan responded by researching the legality of the claims and finding the legal precedent for actions required for the suit to come before a court. Dr. Burznsky's office met none of the legal requirements and the post is available here. Both of these bloggers now enjoy much increased readership. I may be able to stumble into some controversy of my own just with the political and misconception based posts.

  The plan is laid out, the stage is set, all I need to do now is perform. I look forward to writing about the research ideas I have, ranting about potentially damaging laws, geeking out over new gadgetry, exposing faulty science and con artists, discussing religious brainwashing, and having conversations with my audience. I hope I find lots of readers interested in reading about all those things and participating in constructive ways.

Stop Internet Censorship, This is America, Not Soviet Russia

Imagine if the US Gov't tried to shut me up. Or you. Or any blogger.

The "Stop Online Piracy Act" also known as SOPA is basically a rewrite of the Protect-IP Act. The embedded video gives a pretty good description of what it will do.

If you're at all like me, you have probably read at least a little about Google's struggles with China. You may even be familiar with the "Great Firewall of China". I'm seeing far too many parallels between this law and the very thing that the president himself is fighting against in his recent speech about the US military presence in Australia. We are trying to protect commercial interests here, which is a fine pursuit. The problem is that I fail to see just what makes it ok to tear down China's Firewall and replace it with our own, more comprehensive firewall that gives American corporations the power to shut down an American business on grounds of "inadequate copyright protection". Yes, China is making it difficult for it's citizens to access American websites, but it's not really able to stop them. There are always ways around that haven't been plugged up yet. The Chinese firewall is doing quite well as a training device for hackers and for (presumably) slowing internet service. We've already got plenty of hackers doing very simple work-arounds to get their hands on a few hours of media for free. What will happen if it becomes more difficult? It's not going to stop.

This is a very interesting situation. If we focus on the run of the mill consumer who may have a few bootlegs and other illegal downloads, I can set up an example that shows just how bad this can get. Currently, the set-up is simple. Very little work is required for a good payoff. Just download a p2p file sharing service and start searching for host sites with links to the content you want. It's not even as complicated as that description sounds. Just type in the name of whatever it is you're searching for (whether it's a song title, a band name, an entire genre, a movie, and actor, anything) and add the word "torrent" to the end of your search. The reason it's so easy is that some programmers decided that the method should be available, so they put it together. It worked, so other programmers improved it until it was readily available to anyone that looked for it. Under SOPA, the same thing happens. For a while, Joe Blow the regular guy might be forced to pay for his music. Chances are, he really doesn't want to and resents the new law that is taking down his favorite websites and services. It's not just the p2p programs and host sites that are in danger, it's YouTube, it's Facebook, it's Google as a whole that may be in danger. So after Joe Blow loses his file sharing capabilities, the hackers that started the whole thing to begin with, and all the others that improved or used the system go back to work. Making something illegal makes it a more appealing challenge than before. Pretty soon, a new system is in place. Joe Blow hears about it through a friend of a friend and he's happily downloading his music for free again, only this time he's getting it straight from the record companies that have hacked databases. Patches are automatically downloaded into his fancy new program every time the company closes a hole and the hackers find a new one. The whole process is more exciting, harder to track, and vastly more complex.

Better yet, if SOPA passes, this blog will be shut down. This blog will be shut down for my description of the p2p process, for hinting that hackers might be able to circumvent the law, and for encouraging civil disobedience. It will be shut down because these paragraphs are a threat to copyright holders of America. I will be forced to stop writing, maybe even arrested because I told you how to beat the man. I may go to JAIL because I told you that the man can't win this one, even if the law passes. I, and hundreds of other bloggers, thousands of websites, millions of people are in danger of losing our First Amendment Rights over a little money that we probably wouldn't spend anyway.

Censorship is un-fucking-american. Stop this bill NOW. If you didn't sign the petition that popped up when you loaded this page, please refresh the page and sign it now. There are also numerous other petitions going around the web which I may post here if it seems the bill is in danger of passing.

Well, this is a little disappointing...

I haven't posted very recently. I'm lazy. I'm pretty ok with that most of the time. like right now. Because I'm winning the blog contest. That's right. winning. I don't even have to try. It's sad really, because I've had some great ideas for blog posts that I've just forgotten about because I've lost my motivation to post. My competitor hasn't even written one post, hasn't set up his blog or anything. Granted, he's got a good reason for it... he's actually working ten hours a day. when we started this contest, it was based on the fact that both of us had lots of free time to think about things and write out our thoughts. Now that's not the case. He's got a project to work on, and so do I. Both are projects other than blogging, so blog posts will occur less frequently I'm not even going to promote this post because really, it's almost entirely irrelevant to the rest of the blog. Also, since someone had decided it was a good idea to troll this blog (srsly, even with as few readers as I have, somebody wanted to troll), I have changed the comment section to disallow anonymous comments. While that does make it more difficult for my one legitimate anonymous commenter (pretty sure there's just one), it also saves me from having to delete the troll's comments. I'll have some more actual content ready for publication in a week or so. I'm in no hurry. After all, I'm winning this pitiful blog contest.