A Very Weak Pulse

Dear BlogPulse,

A couple of days ago, you had a page found here on meyerweb titled “How Not To Get a Job” ranked as the top blog post in the blogosphere (blogscape, blogsea, blogsoup, take your pick).  You even made reference to it in your own blog post on April 17th.

Okay, first of all, it’s not a blog post.  It’s a standalone static HTML page that’s just a marked-up version of an email that made the rounds of the Internet in the mid-1990s.  (It might have been a combination of a couple of emails; I don’t clearly remember any longer.)  I have a bunch of those in my “funny bits” section, if you’d like to waste a few hours.

Second, the strength of that ranking has propelled meyerweb to #6 on your Top Blogs list for April 16th, which puts it just below Michelle Malkin and above Engadget, Gizmodo, and—no kidding—Scobelizer.  Thirty-two places above Scoble, which is too many kinds of wrong to easily quantify.  Previous to this, I don’t think meyerweb even registered on your list (except on April 14th, when it was at #16), as it really should be.  I’m fairly well known in my field, but outside it?  Not so much. 

Before I wander too much further into the weeds, let me get to my point: have you looked at the trend chart for that page?  How about its citations?  These results are due to blog spamming, people.  I don’t know why some Blogspot spamachine included a meyerweb URL in its output stream, but it did.  I had nothing to do with it, and frankly, I’m severely annoyed that it happened.  I know there isn’t anything I can or should do about it, but I’m still cheesed that I’ve been tainted by involuntary association.  Your blithely going along for the ride, posting commentary about it without even the barest smidgen of checking into the history of this sudden star on the blog cosmos’ event horizon, just ticks me off all the more.

So please, if you could, pull that URL out of your results, recompute the rankings, and pay more attention to your own data analysis in the future.  At the least, could you manage that last part?  I’ve paid you scant attention in the past, I admit, but this doesn’t exactly leave a positive impression.

Thanks, and sorry if I came off a bit testy.

Addendum: oh, cripes, now it’s been blogged as real over at CBS News.  Thankfully, the reporter, Melissa McNamara, is now aware of the situation and has promised to post a correction.  So it looks like I’ll have a better media outcome than Tim Bray did with the Washington Post.

• A Very Weak Pulse was published on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been three replies.