Airborne Combat Engineer

Sheepdog gets off to a fast start

A-C-E has linked to Sheepdog several times during his first month of blogging, not to help him get started (A-C-E, cruising along at around 7K hits/wk after peaking at 14K back durng the Battle of Falluja, doesn't have that kind of power), but rather because he posted things I felt would be informative and interesting to A-C-E visitors, and he has a sense of values which would make sense to those who keep reading A-C-E (except the contrarians and leftist moles).

I'm pleased to see he's getting off to such a strong start. I'll predict he'll skyrocket this quarter.

Recommend you bookmark the Sheepdog blog, or just click on it under FEATURED BLOGS in the left sidebar (where I leave links to interesting blogs for a while, before I move them to the appropriate link category).

Are you a wolf, a sheep, or a sheepdog?

If you're wondering where that came from, read this Blackfive post.

No new posts until 2300Z Monday

If anyone looks for new ACE posts, this will save you a trip or two. Check back 2300Z (2000 EDT) Monday.

Have a great weekend.

"Election Projection" editor loses parents

Thu 18 Mar 04. Election Projection.

Scott Elliott, who has done such a great job updating his "Election Projection" site (which I checked regularly for updates -- things had been going downhill of late), has lost both his parents, who were missionaries [in Iraq, I believe].

We recently lost a blogger, Bob Zangas, a Marine reservist who went back to Iraq to work with the CPA -- just trying to help the Iraqi people have an open society. Then five American aid workers. And now this. The World is just not fair. Thank God they are now in a better place.

The loved ones of these people, and all who were dedicated to making the World a better place, have our heartfelt condolences.

****

If it's not disrepectful to add a footnote on how the polls are going in the first turn of the horse race, the NY Times had this down in the 9th paragraph of an article:

"The candidacy of Ralph Nader looms as a potentially lethal threat to Democratic hopes of regaining the White House: With Mr. Nader in the race, Mr. Bush leads Mr. Kerry by 46 percent to 38 percent, with Mr. Nader drawing 7 percent of the votes. In a sign of the polarized electorate Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry are facing, three-quarters of supporters of each candidate asserted they would not change their mind before the election."

It also says:

"Already, most voters think Mr. Kerry is a politician who says what people want to hear, the poll found, rather than what he believes."

Besides, how many times does the horse leading at the first turn fade well before the third? Neal Boortz predicts JfK peaked way too soon, and will fade.

Blogshares: A (fictional) blog market

Have you seen this? Seyed Razavi has developed an innovative "fictional money" market for blogs at www.blogshares.com. Players start with a "fictional $500" and blogs are valued by incoming links. Stocks are tracked and ranked by major indices. And, the top players are ranked.

Buying "stock" in a blog is yet another way to show your appreciation.

Here's his description:

BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies. Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by their incoming links from other known blogs. In effect, links become the business deals in the simulation and players speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares. A whole host of options exist for advanced play including gifting shares, leveraged buy-outs, stock splits, additional share issues, market and player bonds. For full details see the Help Center.

Anyone can play BlogShares for free, and ownership of a blog is not a requirement to participate. You need simply to register to receive a virtual $500 to start investing. Blog owners also receive 1000 shares of stock in their blog. Each individual uses the simulation for different purposes: you can use BlogShares to find new blogs to read, to show your appreciation by buying or gifting shares and, of course, to accrue as much capital as possible. Advanced options such as bonds allow you to take the game in a number of different directions.

With over 5,000 active players at the end of the Beta phase and more than 40,000 known blogs, BlogShares provides a rich, complex environment for (virtual) profit and fun. BlogShares continues to expand as more members, more blogs and more features are added to this quickly growing online community.

The response time is slow (probably due to its growing popularity), so be patient.

To grow your wealth rapidly, "invest" in recently started blogs which are growing rapidly in popularity. (Well, Duh.) Then link to them to help increase their value. (I'm going to be investing in and linking to blogs with which I generally agree, even though that's not the optimum strategy.)

Trading Hint: ACE has increased in value 73% since entering the market in December. It is currently undervalued and rated BUY. But, two words of caution: The vast majority of links to ACE are from searches AND I'm looking around for a different format which fits the kind of posts I do better than the blog model. (If you buy ACE stock, I'll give you a heads-up before I switch formats, if that's not too Martha Stewardish.

Wish somebody would do this using REAL money, with the bloggers getting the capitalization money, less a small fee to the market. It could augment the "tip jars."

Check out BlogPulse

As more and more jump on the blog bandwagon (there are over 80K blogs now, and the number is growing rapidly), the signal-to-noise ratio continues to deteriorate.

As I've said before, blogs may soon go the way of the CB radio. Truckers, who originally used CB radio, still use it, but most car drivers haven't had a CB radio since back in the 70s, if they ever had one. After the fad wears off, blogs will probably only be maintained long-term by those who make a living (or, aspire to) composing sentences.

Sure, there will still be millions of blogs - like this one - springing up like mushrooms and then dying off after a brief existence, since the software is so easy to use. And blogs will mushroom to deal with short-lived specific topics, such as Carol Moseley Braun for President. I'd love to see a bell curve on the lifespan of blogs.

Who is NOW endorsing now?

The blog reader needs sophisticated tools to find the VALUABLE posts regarding the subjects of interest to him/her. This is a golden opportunity for innovative software developers. But, it can't be done with bots alone. There must also be some subjective judgment as to what is accurate as well as significant.

BlogPulse is a useful tool to help sift through all the blogs and at least find out what the majority of bloggers are talking about. I'm linking it in the growing left sidebar. I'm only beginning to learn all the functionality it offers.

Are war bloggers just "swivel-chair commandos?"

James Lileks on the Joan Rivers show (the topic was baldness)

Dennis Perin takes on James Lileks [father, husband, homeowner, dog owner, photography enthusiast, journalist, author, columnist for the Star Tribune, and writer of The Bleat (www.lileks.com/bleats, a very professionally done blog], and, by extension, all war bloggers not currently in a combat zone, in this article.

It's something to think about, especially for those of us who aspire to be war bloggers (or warbloggers if you prefer merged words).

Personally, I find warblogs useful for the information they provide via links, and the perspective the various warbloggers provide. Some is based on considerable experience in the military and life. I find blogs (and the articles and forums they link) especially useful in exploring the more technical aspects of warfare and home/personal security and defense, which the media doesn't deem entertaining enough to keep the average American from clicking to another channel. I don't pay much attention to the "gloat and strut" stuff in the blogs of others, and hope anyone reading the ACE will ignore anything of that sort they see in my comments. To worry about that is to miss the message as you critique the style of the messenger.

Those who find war blogs too belligerent should be reading the comments of people like actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who said (according to Fox News) she'd raise her baby in London, since America is "just not safe" and "no place to raise a baby" and there's that "wierd, overpatriotic atmosphere." That's fine by me. Guys like Osama who are out to destroy our way of life scare me a lot more than the resulting American attitudes, GP.

It's hard to concentrate on what she's saying when she dresses like this.

I'm of the opinion blogs are the CB radio of the 00s. As the number of blogs grows into the tens of thousands (since it's so easy and cheap to blog), we'll need increasingly sophisticated ways to sort out those worth reading. Eventually, the entire blog medium may collapse of its own weight, taking down the good ones along with the bad.

Visit my old blog if you like

This blog moved from another blogging service on Saturday, 11/22/03.

It was at:

http://www.307th.blogspot.com/

Go there if you have time to read a couple of weeks of archived posts.

There will be no new posts after 11/21/03 there.

The www.airborne-combat-engineer.com URL has been redirected to this blog.