Frankly, I'm just astounded at some of the bickering and pettiness I see in the forums. There are hundreds of regulars but a few dozen have coalesqed into cliques.

I personally don't get into on-line cliques. But I don't think there's anything inherently bad about them. The Internet should be whatever you make of it. As long as you're not hurting anyone, knock yourself out. Meet friends, talk to them, etc.

I only worry about cliques when they start to resemble gangs. And I see a couple "rival" cliques that seem to be going after one another. I have no idea why and because clique politics holds no interest for me, I have not really paid that much attention. But it's starting to become a moderation issue. Ultimately, for any community to function, its most active participants have to set an example for others.  That's why we have the whole access hierarchy, to let people move up towards eventually being a moderator.

But even there, people who are (obviously) not familiar with how we run sites think we pick moderators based on some sort of partisan basis.  We don't.  We look for people who have all these qualifications: consistently mature, not easily rattled, not prone to trying to inciting angst in others.

It's been a tougher road than we thought because when you're getting into politics, you can get into heated exchanges.  I won't, for example, raise someone's access simply because I agree with many of their views.  There are very vocal conservatives here as well as very vocal liberals who are citizens and likely to remain that way.

So far, the list of people we've promoted has been pretty small.  I think right now there's Bakerstreet, DharmaGirl, Stevenadalous, JillUser, CS Guy, JeremyG, Greywar, Jamie Burnside and a couple others. People from across the political spectrum.  That doesn't mean that those who haven't been promoted aren't great guys. Our decisions are purely for selfish reasons - down the line, we want the community to regulate itself.  That will probably take a very long time though to happen.

I would agree with those who don't like the access group names. That's my fault for not being more involved with that.  We do need better names for them (feel free to suggest them)

I was thinking Citizen, Counselor, Advocate, Senator, Moderator or something like that. Better than words like "elite" (I REALLY hate elitism and the access title "elite" gives the wrong impression).

I think the whole point paranoia is due to the fact that many users think the system is easily manipulated. My other blog, Skinning the Frog, jumped all the way to #2 with ONE article.  THAT is how the point system works.  If you can get enough readers, and you get them the old fashioned way, earning them by writing good stuff people are interested in and hence link to them and tell others about, you'll get the real points.  The only reason comments and insightfuls by regulars make a difference is because right now most of the blogs are still so new that they don't have their own loyal band of readers.  It bears remembering that I've been blogging almost daily for 3 years, so what I write tends to get read because there are people who bookmark my page, pass it on to others, etc. 

My blog has 103,000 points, #2 has 18,000.  Users who keep at it with consistently high quality articles (or at least ones people are interested in reading about) over a period of time who also do some leg work to get others to link to them will be up there as well.  You get a couple points or something like that when someone comments on your article.  My article on PC gaming I wrote last month has 43,000 points all by itself and has 353 referrals.  It has 103 comments which isn't that significant. So of the 43,000 points it has, it has probably a couple hundred points from the comments.  So anyone complaining that the point system is subject to manipulation either doesn't understand how it works or is just crying sour grapes. 

Complaining about the point system is like a guy in Arizona who's sitting on his butt complaining about a guy in California is "Cheating" at a race in which he too is sitting but slowly inching northward due to plate tektonics.

So guys, the site is what you make of it. Worrying about how OTHERS make use of it is a waste of energy.  It's a blog site. Blog about what you're interested in and stop worrying whether User X is doing somethign that annoys you. It's supposed to be FUN. F U N...

I find it amazing that the group of people most identified with worshipping the first amendment seem to be the ones most intolerant of opinions other than their own. For months we've seen left wing groups like MoveOn.org creating anti-Bush commercials that are only vaguely factual.  Celebrities have lent their voices to unseating George W. Bush.  Bruce Springsteen, for example, is currently doing a "Get Bush Out" concert tour (John Mellencamp wrote a song called "Bush is just another thug"). Heck, I can barely watch TV without some half-witted celebrity telling me that Bush needs to go.  This summer, we've had Fahrenheit 9/11 making over a hundred millions dollars and seen Michael Moore's mug on almost every magazine cover at one point or other.  In short, the left has certainly had its opportunity to get its views out.

But when conservatives try to get their message out, the left cries foul. Listening to the left, you'd think that Fox News was GOP TV.  In left-wing land, apparently, if the coverage isn't overtly left-wing it's GOP TV.  Sure, The Daily Show with John Stewart tends to be less sympathetic to conservatives than liberals.  And CNN, ABC, and NBC tend to prefer to cover social issues that are the strong points of the left.  And let's not forget the ridiculous media coverage of the Iraq war that's come from the New York Times and other "mainstream" media outlets.  But oh no! Bill O'Reilly at 8pm hates high taxes and is (gasp) a Catholic. It must be GOP TV! Those damn conservatives are able to get their message out on a cable news channel on top of AM radio! The sky is falling!

Meanwhile, conservatives have, for years, had to deal with the reality that most of the people who cover the news have political philosophies that are much different than their own. And while most of those who cover the news try to be fair, their own viewpoints inevitably creep into the news and especially in editorials. Conservatives have had to develop a sort of "Reality check" sense when listening to the news.  Liberals, by contrast, apparently are so thin skinned that people like Bill O'Reilly send them into fits of insanity. And don't get them started on Sean Hannity who CO-hosts a show with liberal Alan Colmes. Since when are conservatives allowed to speak at all? Isn't George Will's token appearance on "This Week" enough for those right wing nuts? Sure, "This Week" is hosted by Bill Clinton's former press secretary, but that's fine.

And now this week, the left is going berzerk over the Swift Boat veterans. Cries of unfairness ring loud and clear from the left. Well, as someone who's had to listen to Moore-ons all summer ranting their erroneous "facts" across the net and TV all summer. And had to see snippets of MoveOn.org's venom on TV I say, deal with it.  If Kerry hadn't made the cornerstone of his campaign about the 4 months he served in Vietname he wouldn't be vulnerable to the fact that most of the people who served with him don't support him.  Are the charges of the Swift Boat veterans unfair? Possibly. But compare that to the whole Bush went AWOL nonsense. Was that fair? At least this is based on some semblance of reality.

The first amendment means that all sides get to speak out.  Not just those who hold "correct" opinions.  Those people demanding that Bush or conservatives condemn the Swift Boat veterans and what not should be also demanding that Kerry and his supporters condemn Michael Moore and his ilk along with MoveOn.org.  But don't expect that to happen. Kerry, after, all, complemented hollywood stars such as Whoopi Goldberg, who, in his presence, made vulgar sexual references to Bush. 

So if the left things they're getting treated rough now, then they have no idea what rough behavior is. Perhaps they should start looking at the sewage their supporters have been heaping on the American public for the past half year.

IconPackager was first released in 1998.  It wasn't put onto Download.com until much later.  In hindsight, what IconPackager does seems obvious it lets you change all your icons at once by applying packages.

MS Themes could change something like 7 icons on your desktop.  A good IconPackager theme, by contrast, can change over 120 icons giving you a consistent look to it.

While clones of IconPackager have come out over the years, IconPackager has remained the leader through steady improvements, more icon support, and early support for new icons in the OS.

Today is passed the 2 million download mark making it one of the most popular downloadable programs of all time.

JoeUser.com hasn't "officially" launched yet. We're still technically in beta (i.e. we haven't done any promotion).  Our Alexa ranking is around 25,000. Sometimes it shoots up when something written here gets particular attention but generally it hovers around 25,000.  We don't have a good traffic monitoring system on yet.  We do, however, know how many people are on at once and that number typically hovers around 200 to 300 depending on the time of day.

In the link (shown at bottom), John puts forth the simple rule of blog success: You have to keep at it for a long time.  Years.  And like me, he's faced frustration at not getting his articles linked to by the "elite" blogging sites such as Instapundit. Sometimes it does but it's few and far between. A handful of blog sites really have almost all the traffic with the rest scraping for the last bits.

That was what inspired JoeUser in the first place. I got frustrated with writing something that I thought was "good" (Relatively speaking, I'm barely literate <g>) only to have it just die off in the ether.  But if we could build a community of bloggers where we promote each other. Then it works out much better.  I think it's safe to say that the typical blogger here gets vastly (100X) more readers than they would on their own.  And together we are able to skip years of grinding effort to get noticed.  I have Right Wing News's website shown above precisely to make that point: In about a year, we've already passed it in daily traffic. 

While we have the readers, and by we I mean all of us combined, we don't yet have the respect.  We rarely get mentioned in blog round ups still. Hopefully that will change when the site is launched and the marketing people start doing their thing.  But for now, we're on our own to carve our own success  based on the quality of our collective writing abilities.

So keep at it, and you will build your own base of readers for your blog. JoeUser's unique system jump starts that base but it still takes effort and more importantly, persistence over a long period of time.

Here's a good fisking of Fisk.

http://www.nicedoggie.net/archives/004502.html

Meanwhile, another fisking of a leftwing journalist who seems to be obsessed with "world jewry" (I tell ya, there are a lot of leftists who seem paranoid about what Jewish people are doing).

http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/007276.php

Okay, only those two.  I'm just playing around with Blog Nav pro tonight.

It's really odd having a turtle that is older than you.  Cuddles, the family turtle, is around 50 years old now. I got him when I was a teenager and here, now at 33, we still have him.

I've read that box turtles can live a century, so who knows, my kids may one day be fighting over Cuddles.

One of the things that probably annoys some users of JoeUser (bloggers in particular) is the syndication of other articles and forum posts into their blog. 

Why did we do that?

the goal of JoeUser is very egaltarian.

When I'd set up JoeUser as my personal blog I saw the pros and cons of blogging it alone.  As it got more popular, I became aware of a barrier to entry into the wider world. Basically, my blog was at the mercy of an established order of elite blogs. It bugged me that even if I wrote something of high quality (IMO of course) that I was at their mercy as to whether they would choose to link to me or not.

Most bloggers out there have very very few readers. So when I decided to open up Joeuser to the public, we came up with a system: Have new articles show up on all sites so that readers of one would be inclinded to go to others.

This has the negative side effects you described. Our plan though is that users will be able to buy premium accounts this Fall, which amongst other things, will give htem greater control over their blog.

Ultimately though, the concept of Joeuser revolves around the premise that most bloggers get few readers and provides a system to rectify that.

I'm pretty jazzed but I think we're getting close to where you'll be able to start posting articles via blog nav pro.  Which is much fatser than going through the web interface.