Strategies to build blog traffic

There are a number of different strategies that have been suggested and used for building blog traffic. One that I had used in the past was to be a commenter on higher traffic blogs that allowed comments. Another was to cross link by various blogs and websites. One thing that really helps with Google is to be posting frequently. Of course, your posts need to be about topics that people want to read. A colleague of mine suggested that I use Google Trends to help find the current hot topics. Google Trends did not initially give the latest information, but the current incarnation is very helpful. You get real-time indications, with a ranking, of hot search terms. Of ocurse, another technique is to have images in your pages, either with img tags or with text links. Google Image Search started rewarding images with traffic in October 2006. A key point is to have relevant text to your images. You don't need alt tags, or to "hot link" in the usual sense, where someone else's images appear "inline" with img tags. Text links are sufficient. I like to add the 'target="_blank"' to the alt tag so that when the link is clicked, it opens a new window.

I like this: Bill Richardson says that it is "God's will" that Iowa's caucus be first

Ed Morrissey, writing at "Heading Right", has a piece about Bill Richardson's speech saying that it was "God's will" that the Iowa caucus be first, before any other caucus or primary election. Bill probably just disqualified himself with much of the Democratic party and their lefty fellow-travellers.

Getting totally blasted periodically is not healthy

If you periodically get totally blasted or dead drunk, you are taking a big risk. Dallas area musician Carter Albrecht is dead as a result. Well, the result of being drunk, out of control, and a home owner who was a bit quick on the trigger. The KRLD radio website has the story.

The resurgence of rule-based systems

Given our experience in the 1980's with rule-based systems, I am having trouble understanding their resurgence since 2000. From what I can tell, the various products are using the old, weak methods from the past. They are easy to understand and can give explanations for what they decide. They continue to be brittle and inadequate. I keep hearing that some product is being used, despite those facts. "Strong methods" are statistical-based or neural-network based. They can produce impressive results, but are difficult to understand and the results can't be explained easily. My efforts right now are limited to applying weak methods to machine translation. My usual application is translating Dutch to English. Web translators, such as Babelfish, are hampered by lack of vocabulary. Leading edge machine translation is using statistical methods. They have the drawback of depending on having corresponding texts the the source and the destination languages.

My wife liked 'Nancy Drew'

My wife and her friend saw the movie 'Nancy Drew' yesterday, and she liked it.

Do you think that Michigan might have been overrated at number 5?

Since Michigan got beat today by a team they should have clobbered, we can imagine that their number 5 rating was undeserved. The Canton Repository has the story.

Paul Graham's new essay on "How Not to Die"

Paul Graham's latest essay is about "How Not to Die", in reference to technically-oriented "startups". Paul says, among other things:

So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don't get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't give up.