Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Tuesday Open Trackbacks

It's a party! A trackback party that is...

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned a new rating system for blogs? I've been thinking about that a bit. I saw a couple of blogs this week that have a content rating mechanism built into them.

You know the kind I mean I think. Somewhere associated with the post there's a little block where there is a row of stars. You click somewhere in the block to rank the post. This is sort of what I have in mind for the ranking system, but I've got some additional thoughts about it.

First of all, ranking the post is only the beginning. I think the post should have a few rankings. One for how satisfying a read it was. Another for how well it fit in with what the reader was looking for. Another for how well documented the post was, and so on. I also think that a count of readers for a particular post, and a count of votes should be a part of the ranking. Finally, a composite ranking merging all of the previous ones together.

This would rank posts on an individual blog. But just ranking posts on a blog doesn't go quite far enough. It might help a blogger to decide what topics to spend their effort on, or it might not. I guess it would depend on the blogger.

It would become more useful if it could be used to compare blogs for usefulness to readers. That's the general idea behind it, but after watching blogrolling.com's performance today I just don't know if it's worth the trouble. I know that I don't have the available bandwidth to cover providing that sort of service.

I think there are a few more things that would need to go into the ranking system. Full text indexing of posts would be another useful item, together with a keyword frequency table for searches. Maybe if people could do a search for content, and the search engine rankings were based on the user ratings instead of the number of links we would see more meaningful rankings.

What do you think? Post comments if you have suggestions. I'm interested in doing what I can to go past link counts or traffic counts to rank blogs. If the service could be kept lightweight and include the search box on every participating blog -- Who knows? It could change the way we use the web.

Or maybe I'm just suffering from delusions of adequacy.

This open trackbacks post is for April 10 , 2007.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

Blogrolling.com is hosed again...

Blog rolls from blogrolling.com aren't loading again.

This is really a bad thing. I was planning on moving the blog rolls from the side bar to their own page to improve page loading times. That's looking more and more like a good idea.

I've cached them, but even with caching, if the blog rolls aren't available it takes too long to load pages with lots of their blog rolls on them.

I'm more than a bit put out with them over this. I guess there's not too much I can complain about though since the service is completely free. Especially when you consider the number of blogrolls they have to support and the bandwidth they have to manage.

For now, I'm pulling them off the side-bar. I'll check blogrolling.com periodically, and I'll put them back on again when they've got their act together.

Thank God for "Emancipation Day"

 This year we get a two day reprieve on the filing deadline for our taxes. This little bit of news comes courtesy of the I.R.S.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today issued a reminder that 2006 federal tax returns must be filed, and any taxes owed must be paid, by no later than April 17, 2007.

Traditionally, the deadline for filing and paying is April 15. This year, however, taxpayers nationwide will have extra time to file and pay because April 15 falls on a Sunday and the following day, Monday, April 16, is Emancipation Day, a legal holiday in the District of Columbia.

Previously, the April 17 deadline applied just to individuals in the District of Columbia and six eastern states who are served by an IRS processing facility in Massachusetts, where the Massachusetts state holiday Patriots Day will be observed on April 16.

Under a federal statute enacted decades ago, holidays observed in the District of Columbia have impact nationwide on tax issues, not just in D.C. Under recently-enacted city legislation, April 16 is a holiday in the District of Columbia. Officials recently became aware of the intersection of the national filing day and the local observance of the new Emancipation Day holiday after most forms and publications for the current tax filing season went to print.

I hate tax time. Even when I'm receiving a refund I generally put this onerous task off until the last minute. Seeing the total tax bill I pay every year is depressing.

It doesn't even matter that it's taken out of my paycheck. It still hurts to see just how much of my hard earned money is being used to pay for boondoggles in other states.