Because of this, I was leaning toward removing comments altogether. I instead chose to replace it with Facebook Comments, to establish that the commenting system itself has little effect on the quantity or quality of comments.

I was certain that the content itself determined whether or not people would comment. I was wrong.

On October 12, 2011, I posted the first test comment to the system. That was 150 days ago. During those 150 days, there have been 292 comments posted. For comparison, the equivalent time period a year earlier had just 41 comments posted to the old system.

Switching to Facebook commenting increased the quantity of comments by 612%.

So, not only did I get moderation tools, swear word filtering, and grammar correction for free, the system itself made it so much easier for people to comment that it dramatically increased participation. Comments also end up being posted in many cases to Facebook users walls, so there is a built-in opportunity to increase awareness of our site and what we offer.

Because of the open graph API, it's trivial to still include a static version of comments for non-javascript browsers to read (including search engines).

I've replaced WordPress comments on this blog to see the effects here and will be running similar tests across other sites.

What's your experience been with Facebook comments?

The claim? Well, rich people are actually a single category of wage earner and "rich" starts at (according to Jonathan Chait) $200K. So any chart that breaks down income in increments larger than $200K is faulty.

If it makes sense to lump all "rich" people into one category, it hardly seems fair to break down all other income levels. So let's see how income is truly distributed if all income earners at $100K and below are lumped together:

Sweet, turns out the "poor" have more money than the "rich" after all.

Maybe we should stick to data in the first place?

After checking off events that occured during the last 12 months, you would be able to gauge how the stress in your life was affecting your susceptiblity to illness. Presumably, striving to avoid stressors was the key to a long and healthy life.

I found one of these stress tests online and took it today, but I only included things that have occured in the last TWO months. The results?

Your total stress score is 426

If your score totals 150 or more: You have a 50-50 chance of developing an illness.

If your score totals 300 or more: You have a 90 percent chance of developing an illness.

In the last couple years, I have specifically tried to seek additional stress in my life. I've taken on more volunteer work, become more active in local interest groups, and tried to fill my schedule however I can. To me, if I'm not doing those things, I'm not actually living. And, while I may suffer from a few additional colds each year, I can't imagine giving it up.

66.135.33.106 gizmodo.com
66.135.33.106 experts-exchange.com
66.135.33.106 techcrunch.com

I already avoid reading these sites since I dislike their business practices. But search engines I use and people I know keep linking to these sites despite my opinions. ;)

When I click those links without realizing the destination, I twinge imagining that I've contributed even 1¢ to any of these sites by loading a CPM ad.

Never again.

• Thank-You card and i3 Detroit sticker
• Handmade postcard
• Exclusive Akimenko Meats Cookbook

Between this and my Kiva loans, I think I'll always be able to put my disposable income to good use. :)

We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

Merlin Mann tries to respond to it, but instead responds to everyone else's arguments about why full feeds are better. But, I guess if you call something a straw man, the only way you "win" is by attacking some other position. What gets me though is this curiously stalker-ish final paragraph:

(I’d also mention, just in passing, Marco, that your two primary businesses I’m aware of rely very heavily on all that expensive content being freely available and munge-able. A magazine article that can’t be reblogged will never make it onto Tumblr, and a more (theoretically) monetizable world of teaser-only websites and feeds turns Instapaper into a beautifully-implemented PR aggregator)

Ad hominem, Merlin.

Answer highlighting in search results

Consider the example, [empire state height]. With today's improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This might be cool for Wikipedia, but it totally screws every other website owner.

If you have a website that deals with anything Google's algorithm has decided is a "fact" then watch out, your traffic is about to drop. Google's destroyed a lot of niche online markets but this is a broad attack against all sites.

The future of this feature is that you never have to leave Google at all.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

It's about time.

Nosirova Uguljon's Daughter

Entrepreneurs like Nosirova are the key to building the economy in poverty stricken areas like Tajikistan. Plus, her daughter represents a better future for their family and community. Although the total loan amount was $1,200, it only took $25 of my money to help support this business. I was able to join with 37 other lenders to support Nosirova's business through the microfinance site, Kiva.

Alice Indangasi Shabola

She's already paid back her loan and I've turned around the $25 and loaned it to Alice Indangasi Shabola for her clothing business in Kenya. That $25 now represents $50 of economic impact to businesses in developing countries. When Alice pays back her loan, I'll loan that money out again to yet another business. You can see what kind of long-term effect just $25 can have on Kiva.

Of course, once you've made one loan, you want to make more. :) Here's my lending page on Kiva showing all the loans I've made.

I hope you'll find $25 to loan through Kiva and have a real impact decreasing poverty around the world.

Today, after receiving a report that the service was unavailable last night, I took another look at it. Still not sure why it went down, but while I was working on it I've added some basic logging (for troubleshooting purposes) and looked around the internet to see if people are using the service.

Since logging was never included in the first place, the only way to surface a reasonable count of URLs was to count the cache files. Since cache files are programatically deleted, I was pretty shocked to find over 11,000 files in that directory. Now that I have actually logging in place, the site displays a counter. Today's count? 11,411 URLs expanded!

Of course, people only know about the service because of the folks who have helped spread the word about it! Thank you to all these folks for mentioning expandUrl:

• Blog Brasil Academico "If you prefer a cleaner and more free advertising try expandurl.com."
• Troy Sabin "The Yang to the URL shortener Yin - URL expanders"
• Free Nuts #2 in their top ten URL expanders list!
• Borrowed Code Mentioned as part of a blog entry about fighting Twitter spam.
• Benny Chen "After failing to find a good solution, a short address before the humble beginning to run out to restore the service; Can only say that a group of prescient people, ah!"
• Kate Morris "There is another useful tool available - http://www.expandurl.com - it shows you not only where it goes, but how many times it is redirected and how. :) Not my tool, but a friend built it."

Finally, I discovered a Google Code project that integrates the expandurl API into Google Chrome. This is very cool to me, as it means the service will be used by lots of folks (even if they don't know they're using it!). :)

Not too shabby for 221 days in. ;)