PSoTD

Weird. Why am I getting spam today about home mortgages with the subject line of ""leaning in favor" of voting to confirm Alito. Conrad also is not part of the Gang of 14"?

Are we at risk of becoming over-RSSed?

Anyone know how to do this easily? I wanted to convert the html used for the links for Koufax candidates for Blogs Most Deserving of Wider Recognition into OPML, and then load them into my bloglines account, but I just spent an hour working on it and am not getting good results when uploading. I'm sure it is my cobbled together OPML file with hamhanded copy and replace efforts. I figured the OPML could also be made available for anyone else who wants to import these blogs into their RSS reader. Any help out there? I'm looking for something easy on my fingers...

Most internet users outside of bloggers have no clue about the future of use with RSS. So we still need more mainstream articles on the topic...

See... Bush shouldn't be setting deadlines for anything after all...

In March 2004, the president set a goal of broadband access for all Americans within three years.

"We ought to have universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier," Bush said at the time.

When Bush set the 2007 goal, America ranked 13th in broadband penetration rates. According to the latest numbers from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.S. has fallen to 16th.

The ITU analysts attribute America's falling numbers to a lack of cohesive government policy while others attribute it the vast and diverse U.S. geography.

Of course, it would help if we had a President who "gets it" about the Internet in general, and the vast changes still in store for us as it evolves. This isn't very impressive, however.

The president called broadband expansion a "brilliant" idea.

No, it isn't a brilliant idea. It's a market demand.

If you haven't put yourself on the PSoTD blog map, here's your chance...

Like everybody else's web site....

The ones that may have to provide traffic information to potential advertisers... because the information advertisers get vary from web site to web site.

From CNet:

Web publishers may soon have to change the way they count visitor traffic, whether they like it or not.

An Internet standards body is hammering out new rules for tallying traffic numbers on Web sites and their content partners, in an initiative called the Nomenclature Project. Under changes proposed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its members, publishers will have to work under more stringent rules about what can and can't be counted as part of their site.

Is it just me, or does every technorati search retrieve results that are now completely dominated by livejournal entries? Weird.

Past Peak has a piece about a true leader in the world: Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, who has founded a non-political committee with the intent of making Sweden fossil fuel-independent by 2020.

RIP: Political Site of the Day

Almost nine years ago, we bought a fledgling little political web site - Political Site of the Day - from an outfit known as Internet Publishing of Texas for the whopping total of $150. I don't know what happened to the guy who was Internet Publishing of Texas, but we bought the site and put it on our servers and redesigned it and kept up with the initial concept - highlighting a political web site each day - since then. A few years ago, we realized that traffic was dipping considerably - the age of the "hot site" (anyone else remember Cool Site of the Day?) was well past, and particularly weekends were slow, so we limited selections to weekdays.

Still, in the Internet era before blogs, traffic could be good. 1000 views in a day was a big day but was a day we saw occassionally. Our biggest traffic day was the day that Ken Starr's impeachment report was placed on the Internet, for whatever reason a lot of searchers assumed that Political Site of the Day would have it. We didn't, of course, but we did put a link to it that afternoon.

Once blogs came out, the demise of Political Site of the Day was apparent. I kept it going even though traffic and my interest in a single political web site selection - and a vanilla take on that selection - was waning. But I persevered... sorta. I even began PSoTD as a blog to report the changes in archived picks from the Political Site of the Day. Eventually I decided I wanted to use the blog for something more than that, and it shed the original skin. A few months ago, I did a reality check on the two sites: Which site did I want to continue? (This blog) Which site was I sick of? (Political Site of the Day)

And the plug began to squeeze itself out of the socket.

Back in the good old days - pre-Bush - the best thing about Political Site of the Day were the submissions. People really wanted to have their sites listed, and lots of very cool sites were submitted and eventually became a daily pick. But submissions have dropped considerably, and the big submission spikes we did get were for campaign sites for candidates, which we almost would never pick. I can't remember the last time we had a cutting-edge political web site submitted to us, but then again, cutting-edge political sites are few and far between. Most of us fall well away from the edge.

Anyway... it is time to say goodbye to the work of maintaining Political Site of the Day. It gave birth to this blog, which I still find very enjoyable, and I have learned a lot of the political web resources over the past nine years. A LOT. But... it is time for aboutpolitics.com to stand as a historical reference only and not pretend to have value in the present. And so... rest in peace, old site. You've earned it.