Naked women, naked men doing naughty sex things

Naked women, naked men doing naughty sex things....

Just a test. It's a slow visitorship day today. It's difficult to predict these things and I still don't know how to have more readers. I've also kind of quit worrying about it. The average is probably about 200 or so per day. Not bad. And good enough for me, although I wish we would have more comments.

Norwegianity has been very helpful in many ways -- a good guy and a good blog. Selves and Others has reposted many of my longer essays under my real name. And there have been a couple of big days -- the Salon.com Daou Report linked for a week and the readership was in the thousands. Majikthise welcomed Phronesisaical and that brought in several hundred readers. MaxSpeaks (Max Sawicky) did the same and that also brought in several hundred readers. Pharyngula "blog of the week" did the same. So did my odd exchanges with good-guy Neddie Jingo (two odd guys being odd at the same time). Links from several other sites have also brought in readers. Many of you have stuck around. Thanks. Loyalty is a dying virtue. I hope Phronesisaical provides some interesting information and essays, good links, and the occasional laugh. I know the photos are really nice, and I'm continually thankful for the photographers' permission to use them.

But I'm not fond of the methods of blog colonization and imperialism. It was all supposed to be so open and democratic. But blogland is actually dominated by a handful of sites that have hundreds of thousands of readers. Not to mention porn sites on the web -- thus, the test. Check out the Truth Laid Bear "ecosystem" for numbers, rankings, and stuff like that about blogs. Instapundit and Michelle Malkin are usually at the very top, as are Kos and Powerline. I go back and forth on Truth Laid Bear from being categorized as a "flippery fish" to a "slithering reptile" and I think I even once evolved to a "marauding marsupial." Not bad from having started as an "insignificant microbe."

The reality is that blogs get bigger by linking to more and more sites. But I don't like a lot of those sites. I want to link to sites that are interesting and/or genuinely entertaining. Another blogger trick is to keep commenting on the big sites, but I've done that a couple of times -- not to get visitors, but for the hell of it -- and ended up being called "asshole," "troll," "douchebag," etc. from people on sites that are self-proclaimed exchanges of ideas. So, comments are also tricky. Apart from some spam comments on Phronesisaical -- a problem I fixed by requiring the simple word verification system -- the comments have all been helpful, interesting, and sometimes really funny. So far, no name-calling. Except for Neddie calling me a "French gink" on his own site -- I'm still not sure what the gink part means nor how he got from "Helmut" to French, but I like the ring of it. Anyway, thanks.

So, the goal here, as I've mentioned before, is to keep up with the occasional essay, some new ideas, news and other information links that you might have missed, commentary on news of the day (trying to stay away from what we all already know or from platitudes or from punditry truisms), fruit photos, the occasional attempt at humor, and generally a mix of what the subtitle says: politics, philosophy, international affairs, and fruit. I'm also interested in the huge range of issues involved in globalization, so we'll have a lot of that, and any recommendations, comments, new information, new links, etc. are welcome.

I'm finishing off a book on globalization that will appear early to mid- next year, and I'm working on another on torture, which will be published probably in early 2007. There are two more in the earlier stages. But this is to say that globalization and the very difficult question of torture (why torture, especially a policy of torture, when it's beyond the bounds of morality, justification, reason, and even practical benefit?) play a role in this blog too.

Anyway, some meandering thoughts on the blog business.... Let's see what the title of this post brings. Probably the wrong kind of customer, but I'm interested in seeing the numbers. My apologies to those of you in search of a spanking.

UPDATE:

Oh, I forgot to mention a curious item. There are a number of Google searches that bring people to this site. I haven't counted up which are more common than others. But it appears the most common Google search that brings visitors here is "Lleyton Hewitt penis."

UPDATE 2:

Also, here's today's percentage of visitors by country. I enjoy these things as much as Mark at Norwegianity.