Where are they now?
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a little obsessed with Alexa rankings and their relevance (or lack of it) for measuring a website’s success. Taking a look at their pages for wolfshowl.com this evening, I discovered that I am not the first to own this domain name; according to Alexa’s WayBack Machine, from March 2002 to the end of 2005 wolfshowl.com was a purveyor of “a wide selection of Homemade oils,Lotions,bath salts and Egyptian Perfume Bottles. As well as Bondage apparel, Erotic clothing for men and women. Jewelry of all kinds, and everything you can think of for your New age Supplies. We now sell Adult Pleasure Toys.”
Sounds like it was a much more interesting site back then, doesn’t it?
But I wonder what happened to the previous owners? Did the bottom fall out of the erotic clothing and adult pleasure toy market (surely not), or did they just decide to move on to pastures new? How do you even get into selling that sort of stuff online anyway? (No, really, I’d like to know ‘cos I’m sure there must be some money in it; answers on a postcard to Wolfie Needs More Money, England).
If anyone out there was involved with wolfshowl.com before I took it over in December 2007, drop a comment and let me know what happened.
[Apparently, wolfshowl.com now attracts 0.0003% of global internet users and has an Alexa rank of 275,702. Facebook, which is currently at 5, gets about 8.5% of global internet users stopping by. Even Google (at 2) only gets around 30%. At least according to Alexa and, as I've said before, who knows how relevant their figures are?]
Brief notes
Just a quick round up of things that have caught my attention over the last few days:
1. There’s a new diet drug that’s been approved for use in the UK, despite fears that it can cause depression and an increased risk of suicide - especially for anyone already taking anti-depressants. So, when you feel down about being overweight, take Rimonabant and feel really bad about how fat you are! But provided that a drug is approved by NICE it doesn’t matter how bad the side effects are - or how many other drugs you have to take to cure the side-effects! We all know that there is no miracle cure for obesity; if you want to lose weight, you’ve got to change your lifestyle and diet permanently.
2. Apparently, the US have said that they won’t recognise Zimbabwe’s elections this week, and Mugabe’s knighthood has been stripped. Even worse, England have cancelled the 2009 cricket tour of the country. Is it just me that thinks that none of this is going to make any difference? Let’s face it, Mugabe is prepared to kill the opposition to make sure that he stays in office. Why does he care if a cricket tour doesn’t go ahead?
I seem to remember a few years ago that the US and the UK decided that they needed to intervene in Iraq because of the human rights record of the country’s leader, Saddam Hussain. Mugabe’s human rights record is worse than Hitler’s, yet all we’re now doing is taking away an honorary knighthood? Could it be that Zimbabwe doesn’t have anything the West wants, so we just leave them to get on with it?
3. As well as being in trouble with race stewards for his mistakes over the last couple of Grand Prix, it seems that Lewis Hamilton is now wanted for burglary.
4. File this story under “There’s no smoke without fire”: Once again, John Leslie (former Blue Peter TV presenter) has been caught up in allegations of rape, dating back to an incident in 1995. He hasn’t got The Titmuss to stand by him this time, so how will he cope?
5. When I first read this story, it went into a bit more detail and I promise you that the driver was a woman, who’d put the automatic transmission into drive when she meant to put it into reverse. The current version of the story leaves out those details, but I think the pictures say it all. And I love the fact that the driver of the Toyota wasn’t in the mood to give interviews!
Photography challenge
Over at Cornell Finch, Collin is writing a series of articles aimed at the beginner photographer. It’s an interesting series so far, as he tries to remove some of mystery surrounding this fascinating subject. I’ve had a camera for years and never really used it for more than point and shoot type stuff, so I’m looking forward to learning how to actually make the most out of this piece of equipment.
Collin’s also planning to set a series of photography challenges, so that readers can put the skills they’re learning to use. To start with, he’s challenged us to take a picture of a car from an unusual angle. I finally got round to doing this first challenge today and here’s my picture:
It’s taken with a Canon Powershot A70, on the automatic setting with a shutter speed of 1/15 and an aperture of f2.8. Focal length is 5.41mm and the macro setting is on. Well, it had to be as this is just a toy Porsche.
What I like about the picture is that the macro setting really beings forward the obvious neglect that this car has suffered over the years, as its languished in a dusty cupboard.
Taking this picture also lead me to experiment with the camera a little to see the differences that changing the aperture or the shutter speed make; the differences in clarity, brightness, etc. Then the battery light blinked at me and I had to stop.
Let me know what you think and bring on the next challenge, Collin.
Closing down? Maybe…
No longer the Mecca that it once was, the New Wolfs Howl Forum is becoming painfully neglected; moss is growing in the cracks between the paving stones, the paintwork on the windows is cracked and peeling, the shingles on the roof are loose and several are missing. The once busy house is empty and quiet, a patina of dust lies on everything and if you listen closely you can hear something scurrying in the crawlspace. Rats? Maybe. Ghosts?
But the place had a heyday, when it was the place to be. The social venue of choice for the great and the good, where intelligent conversations took place between intelligent people and everyone got along. The heady days before familiarity set in, before the next big thing came around the corner, before everyone became too busy to stop by anymore.
So now the New Wolfs Howl Forum is dying. Like a leaf at the end of summer it’s drying up and turning brown; losing it’s vitality and returning to the earth from which it sprung. But it is not too late. This particular leaf can be saved if we all believe in it enough, if we wish and wish and wish…
… and if we visit a bit more often and actually start some conversations. Left in its current sorry state and given no life-saving sustenance, I fear the New Wolfs Howl Forum will be gone forever very soon.
Trade Association for bloggers
I’ve been browsing discussions over at BlogCatalog.com (if you haven’t already, you should check it out - puts you in touch with lots of new bloggers, and can be really good for promotion) and came across this post about a Professional Blog Owners Association.
The guy that started the discussion is involved somewhere along the line (open and frank he has not necessarily been) and he was looking for people to sign up. He was probably expecting an overwhelmingly positive response; if so, then he must be mightily disappointed. Whilst some have said they would be interested, more voices have been raised in opposition, for various reasons. Some have taken him to task for his lack of openness about the whole project, others have argued that they can’t see the relevance or point of such an organisation.
I chimed in with my own two cents, which - as it had grown to blog post length - I’m republishing here.
According to Wordpress.com’s homepage just now, there are 3,160,529 blogs hosted with their service. Even if only 10% are active, that’s still in excess of 316,000 - on one blogging service. Think of all the blogging services there are, and all the self-hosted blogs there are and you come up with a huge number - and you’re starting with 25. Hardly representative and not a very good indication of whether the software will scale properly.
For a ‘Trade’ or ‘Professional’ association to be successful and representative of its industry (as opposed to a bunch of people trying to make themselves sound important) it needs to have a large proportion of the industry as active, supportive members. It doesn’t seem like you’re going to achieve that.
Also, an industry association should work for its members. I don’t mean perks like free hosting, I mean proper work, supporting the members, and the needs of the members. If a member blog gets sued for copyright infringement when in fact they’ve done nothing wrong, will the association be there to fight the bloggers corner with legal advice and representation? That’s the sort of thing I’d expect from an association and what you’re suggesting sounds more like a club.
And what about those members? If you’re only going for the ‘big’ bloggers (which is why you’re only starting with 25 - because there aren’t so many blogging stars to choose from) like Arrington, Scoble, Calacanis and such then I think you’re going to be out of luck, as they won’t want to know; why do they need an association to tell them how to blog? They’re the ones that continually tell us how we should be doing it.
So, perhaps you’re going for the ‘intermediate’ level - those bloggers that run a bit of advertising, do sponsored posts for PPP/Izea/SocialSpark, PayU2Blog, ReviewMe, etc and have a bit of traffic. But they’re not going to want to join either because those services already restrict what they can and can’t do to earn money off their blogs.
Which leaves you with the Wordpress.com, Typepad, Blogger multitudes. Who aren’t going to care because they just blog in their spare time about what interests them, and by calling it a ‘Trade’ or ‘Professional’ association they’ll think it isn’t aimed at them anyway.
I hate to pour water over your idea, as you’ve obviously put work into it and feel it’s worthwhile but I think you’re missing the boat both with the type of organisation you’re putting together and the type of membership that you can expect. Sorry.
But who’s right? Would you - as a blogger of whatever level - want to join such an organisation? Do you think the world of blogging needs it? I’d be intersted in your views, or you can head over to BlogCatalog and leave them there.
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