Small fry in an even smaller pond

One of the joys of being a small, insignificant blob, er, blog, is that it’s easy to spot when sites link to you.

It’s all relative really, as even at IOL, it was easy to notice when a story had been picked up on Slashdot, Fark, Google News, Drudge Report or something similar. The stories read by loyal local readers, the Shaik Trial etc, would be happily picking up their few thousand reads. Suddenly the story about a man growing breasts would leap to top of the day in a matter of minutes, and you’d know it’d been picked up. It made the figures rather meaningless actually. I seem to remember the most read story of all time being Cannibal caught in the act by KZN police.

I’m sure even the top sites have their stats skewed by being picked up by other top sites.

But back to the latest ripples in the usual calm pond of my statistics. DBDebunk, one of my favourite sites, has linked to a post I made last year called Arrogance, slashing Slashdot (and MySQL) and the end of America. It’s not near the top f the charts yet (a trackback from an ancient thread on Jeremy Zawodny’s site takes the credit there), but it provided a good excuse to revisit their site. It’s run by Fabian Pascal and C.J. Date, two well-respected relational database experts, but what’s even more enjoyable than their excellent technical writings are their social critiques. It can make for depressing reading after a while, but Pascal in particular never fails to get a dig at deteriorating educational standards, and how that impacts other areas as well. Read, for example On Intellectual Diversity and Relational Theory, which contains a humourous rebuttal of a US Republican scare story about academic discrimination (briefly, only 13% of Stanford academics are Republican, while 51% of the public is. Even worse, only half a percent of academics believe people are sometime possessed by the devil, while 36% of the population do.) Perhaps not the best example, as the initial rebutal gives credit to academics, but it’s in a similar style to other postings.