Riddle Me This, Batman...
Posted by Prof. Goose on July 30, 2006 - 12:34am
Savinar (known to you as AMPOD) and I were bantering in a comment thread last week about TOD traffic stats. I brought up the fact that TOD is, according to The Truth Laid Bear, #155 in web traffic (measured in unique visits--for all of the sites TTLB tracks--and if we doubled our traffic we would barely crack the top 100), but #2189 in the number of temporary and permanent links to TOD (again--that TTLB can track) from others in the 'sphere. (noting also that technorati has a higher number of cumulative links).
I think one reason for this is that we haven't been around all that long compared to some of the more ancient sites, and we kind of missed the initial "blogrolling" phenomenon. The other may be that not a lot of the bigger blogs link to "niche" (or "controversial") blogs like this one.
The traffic number is really great, we're up there pretty darned high. But, any thoughts on this? Is this something we should work on?
“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
—James Madison, FEDERALIST #57 (1787)
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This site is destined to become a "superstar" since That Other Site is taking on more of a "nuke their ass, we want their gas" attitude, between all the junk about wanting a girlfriend, whether 9-11 was a hoax, substitutes for The Blue Pill, and other dreck.
Keeping it on the PO topic, keeping it high quality, is the way to go.
I think the point of this thread is, the Original Poster wants to get suggestions for how to get MORE hits even though this site is growing exponentially. Because MORE is GOOD.
which other site? initials at least, please, for us lazy and clueless?
A conceivable reason for the low linkage would be if TOD's readers tend not to be bloggers themselves. Is this true? HIIK.
(new acronym, disguising profanity, so as not to alarm the net nanny SW)
they don't seem to understand that having a arsenal at your disposal just makes you a big target for any government crackdown that will happen as depletion kicks in.
Hummm, this sounds like something I would hear from Walmart?
Seriously, how many and who do you really want coming to this site?
If you had 5 million people coming here every day could we even begin to wade through all the posts and would there be enough of them on "Peak Oil" to justify the time and effort of those of us who come here particularly for the technical information? (And the level of technical information is really great ! Thank you to all those with the capability to provide all the great articles and graphs - which I love even if it does take long down loads on my slow rural dial-up account)
The fact that there are some very valuable bits of information in some of the comments makes it worth it now to wade through the large amount of off topic stuff to find the good technical information. If the level of comment posting goes up significantly I would have to cease to go through the comments just from a time standpoint. And I am afraid the noise ratio of off vs on topic posts would get much greater.
I think the old addage of "Think carefully what you ask for, you just might get it" comes in to play.
Was only going to put my 2 cents worth in and rang up a 15 dollar rant. Sorry.
This site is outstanding, in part because of the collegiality that comes from not being overrun.
What matters is not the numbers of people we get, but the quality. For instance, I'd be willing to bet that the writers of the Chicago Trib piece on Peak Oil lurked on our site, in order to help with their research. There needs to be a place where reasonable people can go to get quality information and reasonable, (mostly) civil discourse.
if I had the communication skills required to be an effective contributer here at tod my post would have sounded alot more like jon kutz's
again sorry for the... you know
There is still a lot of misinformation out there, which we can set straight .. I think DIGG, and others are a good place to raise awareness out there in cyberland, and especially with the younger demographic that tends to be online, who are large consumers, and tend to make better informed decisions (think buying economical cars, voting etc)..
I encourage all TOD'rs to create accounts and get linking !!
TOD ranks well on Google for "peak oil"--#8 in my search, lower part of page 1. Issue: "peak oil" is still a bit of a term for the cognoscenti--the people who know the language can find us easily, and those who don't can't.
We are outside of the top 60 on the other search terms, including the most common, "oil price." (And that is probably the hardest term to rank well on.) Note, on the bottom graph, that there is huge news volume on oil prices, and very little on the depletion issues that are causing the high prices.
My suggestion: let's find a way to tie TOD to oil price references.
8000+ visitors per day is a good number. I imagine you have a very high percentage of return visitors, which is bad for PPC revenue; I hope you make enough to pay for the bandwidth anyway.
The TTLB Top 100 tend to be either highly partisan political blogs or blogs with very high technology/geek/nerd content. #155 for a niche topic like energy policy is excellent. My blog -- which is about bicycles -- has been linked to by a couple of the top 100 only when I deliberately create link bait, and it's always on something technology or blog-geek related. If you get mentioned on Boing Boing, BTW, you'll instantly get linked to from at least a dozen other blogs. But I digress -- TOD will only make BoingBoing if you demonstrate a pie-in-the-sky way to harvest fat from people to make biofuel.
Vulgar language doesn't seem to be a factor in a blog's popularity; and in fact many of the top blogs are very heavy in it. And I'm amused by those who advocate free speech and then immediately pounce on those who object to language.
Back to TOD's number 8 ranking on Google -- something is wrong because in spite of 2500 backlinks to the home page and nearly 200,000 thousands links altogether into TOD, you only have a Google PageRank of 2. I think you can improve your placement on Google with some effort. Yahoo has your old blogspot site on page four of results. On MSN you're at the top of page two. If you want to work on SEO, you'll need to make decisions about what search phrases you want to rank for.
Good suggestions. FYI, we have referred to another site explaining how to harvest fat from people to make biofuel. Nobody cared, probably because it was a thin guy. http://www.earthrace.net/view.asp?webpage=1228
by the way, RR, here's one of my posts on the gas tax:
http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/08/repost-gas-tax-increases-revisited.html
http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/06/picture-of-depletion.html
still applicable, much like many of HO and Stuart's posts. :)
AdWords
Let us have an informal rule against foul language. It adds nothing to the quality of our discussion and it means that hundreds of thousands (a million? How can anybody know?) of potential visitors to the site are blocked by censorship programs at public and school libraries.
Can anything think of a good reason NOT to have an informal ban on profanity, obscenity, and blasphemy?
By golly, no freakin way!
go talk about your dick somewhere else then. I'd appreciate it.
maybe we could get the hardcore doomers to converse in there own thread
"the doombeat"
I can't even recommend this site to close friends cause the doomers drown out the po discussion. that sucks
Tell me why LATOC ranks number one when you type "oil" into Google. Explain that to me.
Explain that to me. Please.
How does that work?
Even Matt can't pull that off, shithead.
I think some of this may come down to keywords, and, are "metatags" still used in web pages? I think it's a very good point that people are most likely to look up things pertaining to current events, who knows, maybe a "Peak Oil And Lebanon" article, feature, something, may boost this site's numbers.
Let's do a trade: here at TOD, please post the stuff you currently put up on your own site. Then, take what you're posting here, and put it over there.
Yup. You can learn an awful lot about people from poultry.
Well, Hallelujia to the Law of Unintended Consequences! I do think there IS an informal ban on profanity, implemented by a great many posters not engaging in it, and reminding each other that it's possible and preferable to do likewise. But when some folks descend into an f-bomb fest, it does have the effect of showing by contrast how sensibly and carefully other people at this site are working to communicate.
I've been drawn into the occasional muck-fest, and immediately regret it, since we are all trying to figure out what kind of people we are dealing with, and generally only have raw-text and a few between-the-lines-intuitions to do it with.
I did like the SouthPark movie's take on how misplaced it is to demonize potty-talk above, say violence, or Canadians, but that doesn't do much to help those who decide to fling it around here as if it's powerful and biting expression from looking like hapless idiots.
"Always tell the truth. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest" Mark Twain
Bob Fiske
I have a computer degree (wich put me right along chikens and some other small animals in the food chain) but I have mastered ways to put forward a website in the first search result in google.
It involve using that kind of code on EVERY pages in any website :
<meta name="keywords" content="ville de Roberval, Roberval, Politique Culturelle, Culture, arts, musique, spectacles, sports">
<meta name="description" content="Ce site contient toute l'information reliée à la ville de Roberval.">
I modify slightly each page to contain the right keyword that fit the page but since it's for Roberval, I always include Roberval. Theses have got me from unkown rank beyond page 20 in google to top result in about 2 month after I made the new website.
Meta tags really do help
That was before the surgery. But (as you know) that got botched REAL BAD and now there's a court case so I can't talk too much about it right now. Once it's resolved I'll fill folks in on the details and post the before and after photos.
At the very least, you can take comfort in knowing that you have sympathy from a number of others.
My theory is the success (as measured by traffic) of any peak oil site is 80% due to world events: Hurricane Katrina, the price of oil, etc.
Sometimes people will email to say "Matt you've done such a good job." I typically reply, "really I just happened to put the site up at the right time just as the war in Iraq was going to shit and the price of oil started climbing aggresively."
Even the best maintained po site in the world would not have gotten 500 visits a day in 1998.
There have been a lot of good conversations here and a ton of good information posted. I think a cherrry picking of the the threads to create a real tomb of the issues would be fantastic.
www.peakoil.com does this to some extent right now with there sticky threads. I think a wiki format would be beast.
Making all the information more accesible will really improve sticky traffic and linking.
This is THE premier peak-oil site. We bow to no one. If you want to understand oil - YOU come here. Understand?
I see this as a good sign, in science, there's never one be-all and end-all. The One True Source Of Knowledge is found in things like religion, and Peak Oil isn't a religion, it's a discovery. Or something.
Nice Try. (although not a very good one). Yaaaaaaawn.
"No I don't. I can look at whatever I want. Fuck You. You're an idiot. Bite me."
See the "Hall of Flames" folder at http://www.peakoil.com forums. There you can interact with like minded people as much as you desire.
This site excels on the geeky, left-brained stuff. But, to be frank, it's a bit "human-impaired." We're a group that's self-selected for interest in ideas and things more than people.
I bet it never even occurred to many of us here that we should thank those who link back to us, and reciprocate. Or even that we should check to see if anyone linked to us.
Your idea is a great one. We should have someone well-versed in blogging etiquette who can "share the link love."
(But don't look at me. There's a reason why I'm an engineer...)
We hit a lot of comment boxes, started discussions, and blogwhored everywhere for the first few months...
There seems to be a shortage of new threads per day, with all comments being dumped into the one thread, making it very long and jumbled. And then you start a new thread each day so nothing gets resolved or argued right through to a conclusion.
I am a Stuart Staniford fan, but after one of his mind-boggling statistical analyses, the thread sometimes goes a hundred comments without talking stats at all. BTW, have you heard about this new car that actually runs on water, really !
If the name of the game is to get lots of hits, then I would suggest that these problems could be easily fixed by encouragement and a strong "Off Topic" rule so that if an editor thinks a comment is off topic, they can force it into a new thread.
Dave
www.peakoil.org.au
10 mins is a long time for a page load and I can imagine that is frustrating. Have you considered using the text-only feature from your browser?
This is a LOT of work and it will not improve anything, try herding cats instead.
I think what matters is to have the "live" threads still reachable from the main page no matter how old.
For this a "most recent comments" list could be made or some suchlike variant of, most recently commented thread or most recently commented "zero level comment" (the ones which are in reply of the thread post not of deeper nested comments).
The main point being to keep this list of "seeds" small enough to appear in the home page in spite of the large number of comments.
Of course, since we have a few suckers here who will immediately try to abuse the system, a worthwhile add on would be some form of blacklist for abusers, their comments not being censored but counting for naught for prioritizing the "live" threads.
I like the lean aspect of the threads and would not have this turned to "commercial looking" stuff as peakoil.com, I find this distracting.
I have recently been put off reading a blog I appreciated when they turned from a clean blog format to a more cluttered one.
As for caring with dialup users it could help a lot to have some automatic breakup of large sub-threads into "artificial root threads" while still keeping a back link to the original thread.
A note for Super G: Is it possible to customize the Scoop software specifically for TOD, if so I could give a hand with this.
As for Google, it appears that the higher ranking sites to the 'Peal Oil' search promote themselves (by title tag, if nothing else) with the 'Peak Oil' moniker. Changing the 'Discussions about Energy and our Future' tagline to include the term 'Peak Oil' might bump the google ranking by a spot or two -- but Google may weigh the url more heavily than the title in search results, so it's hard to say.
I also recall a discussion a while back that sites with large blogrolls would receive less Google Juice - because of the number of abuse 'link only' sites where were created with the purpose of bumping the search results. It's hard to say what Google is doing behind the curtain at any given moment, since they are trying to evolve faster than the hit scamers.
For myself, I come to TOD for the information (Great Graphs, Stewart!) and links. I have noticed that the number of good quality outgoing links in both the stories and comments have grown slowly as the Peak Oil meme soaks into the mainstream, but the number of comments has exploded, making the good links harder to find. I really appreciate when the editors promote interesting comments or links to the top of the articles - thanks for that. -- J
1. Like I said I think 80% of a peak oil site's traffic is due to world events. Hurricane Katrina is a good example. That blasted my traffic through the roof. Here on TOD the coverage was up-to-the minute. So you ask "what is more important: the outside event or the coverage?" I say the outside event because w/o that you have nothing to cover that people want to read.
Example: what's going to get more traffic: coverage of the next massively horrific hurricane or something about the IEA saying there is a 1.5% increase in demand and then a bunch of graphs saying no, no, it's a 1.75% increase and a bunch of response saying no, no it's 1.92% increase? I'm exagertating but you get the point.
- More content does not necessarily equal more visitors. Think of Tainter's "collapse" curve. It's the same with ANY endeavor in life including blogging. You could post 2x as much content and you'd only see a 10-25% increase in traffic if even that. Likewsie, you could post half as much and only see a 20% drop. I'm just making these numbers but I think you get the point. On LATOC I've found 5 updates a week was 2x as much work for me but didn't get much more traffic than 3 updates per week.
- I suspect that 75% (or more) of the people who will EVER be logging onto ANY peak oil site are already doing so. I mean if 9/11, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, $3.00 gallon gas, etc. didn't get you on to the net to find out about oil what the hell will?
Example: I've noticed a huge drop in End of Suburbia sales the last 4 months or so. This has always been the most popular introductory purchase on my site. My theory is that most everyone who would EVER purchase it have already done so. I could lower the price to my cost or lower and I don't think there would be much of an uptick in sales. I think this applies across all peak oil related stuff: sites, books, group meetings, etc.3. The top peak oil site in terms of traffic is FTW. Guessing from their alexa rankings they're getting 12-16,000 visits a day. That tells me that is the "ceiling" for PO sites for now.
Thing is they do stuff you don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole unless you've got balls (or ovaries as the case may be) made out of brass such as the Pat Tillman stuff.
4. Somebody said something about the reciprocal linking: I have to concur. I don't just mean the links on the side I don't think those generate much traffic. I mean links in the stuff you post.
I give out links a lot on my news page and I usually get eamils from people saying, "holy sh-t I just got a ton of traffic!" That's social capital there. And naturally people want to link back to you.
I wish I had one of those sites (like FARK) where you link to somebody and they get so much traffic the server blows out. I sort of laugh to myslef "muahahahahaha" when I give a link knowing it's going to surprise the person with traffic but that would be nothing compared to blowing out the server.
5. Also, think about what does this say about our dopamine receptors and the possibility of powerdown?
PG, you are in charge of site that went from zero (essentially) to 8,000 visits a day inside of 2 years yet you still want MORE.
Powerdown in terms of energy is not unlike asking you (or me or any other blogger) to be happy with LESS traffic.
Happiness likely evolved as a mechanism to keep us moving up the ladder of status and energy availability. (In human societies the two being correlated) So we're not happy unless we're moving UP in life. In terms of a blog that means more traffic. But in terms of energy/money it works the same way.
So the reason I don't think powerdown will happen on a voluntary basis is the same reason PG is not satisfied with 8,000 visits a day!
Also imagine telling somebody only getting 500/day who aspires to get 8,000 a day that "well, sorry we're rationing bandwidth and you got to the party too late!"
TLS, comments?
Matt, well said, and on this we agree. Im partway through a post on "Peak Oil, Dopamine and Amplitude" but working on some others first. In a sense, our novelty and 'hey - brain pay attention to this' meters are all out of whack - in days of old we would get that stimulus from spotting an edible bird on a tree and hunting it down, or, more recently, looking forward to a traveling bard coming through our village next week whilst we pick potatoes- now we have 200 channels of TV, airplanes that take us anyhwere - millions of members of the opposite sex available to us on internet dating sites, thousands of blog sites, online poker 24/7, etc. Once we experience a higher level of novelty (say, a 7 on a scale of 1-10), living life back at a 4 or 5 is so boring it sets up a seeking mechanism in our dopamine receptors to get back to our recent baseline. This is a powerful neurochemical stimulus. Ignorance is bliss. Its all about unexpected vs expected reward. Oil has subsidized huge amplitude in novelty. It will be tough, if not impossible to go backwards (I am personally trying with only moderate success)
The other thing you didnt mention is Tainters thesis of decreasing returns on complexity. If TOD gets 50,000 readers a day (which it would if oil were over $100/bbl) the posting and discussing with the TOD tribe might become untenable - its beyond the ability of the human mind to absorb posts with 1000 replies. There is an optimal size to human social capital, beyond which the quality dissipates. Gresham's Law, the phenomenon of the bad driving also applies to blogging behavior. See above.
Yes, did you get that out of the works of Gregory Berns?
Waning interest for "usual" things has been mentionned by Tainter and is unfortunately a builtin mechanism of the brain.
There is an optimal size to human social capital, beyond which the quality dissipates.
Called the Dunbar Number, about 150 people that you may claim you "know", beyond that it's a waste (or fake).
This is not exactly the trouble with more TOD readership, Gresham's Law is more in point.
If you have 150 friends and make 2 new ones, who really share your worldviews, then I guess someone goes out the other side....?
Isnt Peak Oil partially about choosing ones tribe? For example, I will never part from my family and closest friends, but I now have much more in common with people on this site and other community oriented/energy aware than with people I went to business school with. Of course, most of these new 'friends' are strangers, which isnt a good thing, but you get the point.
Only in 2006 AD, with 57 barrel of oil equivalent energy usage could a human live in a tribe of 150 people where hes never met half of them
Also, I should note that some activities that 'seek more' have very positive externalities, quite possibly increasing TOD readership and awareness of Peak Oil being a good example.
Savinar's site has only one article on peak oil, and he's spent years editing it. I'm not surprised that this makes him #1 on a Google search for "oil."
Perhaps The Oil Drum needs some such component. I read TOD every day, and I recognize all the "stars" by name but have a hard time remembering who is who. A page that puts faces to names and summarizes where they stand in the issue would help. Links from that to their very few best-written articles would help, too?
If theoildrum's problem is a lack of inbound links, it may be that it hosts primarily casual discussions among people with wildly varying opinions. As interesting as such stuff is, it's not the stuff of inbound links.
While the discussions may be too casual, the articles may be too technical to establish a broader audience.
I am a videogame programmer with an intense personal interest in technology, and I can tell you that I couldn't have cared less about how a drill bit works, until months after lifeaftertheoilcrash explained the crux of the oil problem.
Yes, people probably tend to link to sites that obviously agree with their pre-existing beliefs. What are the beliefs of TOD? Well other than that we have problems with the oil supply, something everybody agrees on, it would be hard to summarize in one sentence or better yet three words. Contrast that to something like littlegreenfootballs "rapid neocon koolaid drinkers" or dailykos "the lefties"
I guess you'd have to dumb things down a bit to get a lot more links.
There's not very many big picture thinkers in the world in the first place...and let's be honest, we're an underappreciated lot.
Critical thinking has never been popular and never will be. If the politicians were serious people they would be reading here and asking for advice. An additional factor is the magnitude of the problems we discuss. It takes some courage to look at them squarely. So denial is also a problem when it comes to vistors and links to TOD.
I guess a better question is this: how do we get more of the elites out in the 'sphere to engage in this conversation?
It is just that simple.
Have you noticed how the flakes and the crazies stop posting after a few weeks or a couple of months?
Not only is quantity of visits increasing on TOD, counter to all the naysayers, I perceive a distinct increase in quality of comments over the past six months.
(And NO, I am not counting my own sterling contributions in that evaluation.)
P.S. I used to think Totoneila was a crazy with his biosolar habitats and earthmarines, but now I value his input for the reasons that he does try to offer solutions and advance the discussion and doesn't get into counterproductive pissing contests with simultaneous release of hot air.
[http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/popups/ken-02.html]
1) Some of our best posters have significantly reduced their input here. My guess is that the average level of dialog is not sufficient to hold them here.
Note, however, that we continue to get very good first posts from people who have lurked here for months. We should [nicely] question these newer members of the community about the factors that attracted them here, and those that put them off.
2) On attracting elites here: most of the oil-issue elites seem to operate under their own names, as known entities. TOD is all over the place: some posters are known by actual name and (much more rarely) affiliation, some are thinly veiled, and some completely pseudonymous (for good or bad reasons). While Matt Simmons might engage with a known person, I suspect he's less likely to dialog with Zorro, for example. [Apologies if we have a "Zorro."]
I think we can get into a dialog with others in the blogosphere, like James Hamilton--it has happened before. But beyond that, there is an asymmetry between a known elite interacting with shadowy characters. And if we had one rude interaction, they'd be gone.
I have noticed that some of the regulars here are specially vicious about flaming first-time posters and that this is done without any regard to the quality of the post. Hardly the sort of thing that encourages a new poster to return.
The left-o-sphere is very focused on ousting the GOP, because they figure that the Democrats are slightly less evil, and even that slight difference means a lot in absolute terms.
As such they see the world through 3D glasses - every issue is seen only in shades of red and blue.
I think they perceive peak oil as "red" because it makes Bush's war in Iraq seem less pointless.
I told my brother about peak oil in 2005 and he grasped the consequences pretty quickly. His stance is, "so what, it's ten years away." Ten years seems really short to me, since we are talking about the permanent end of modern times?
I'm not sure what you need to do aside from continuing to do what you are doing - excellent factual based analysis of data, clear headed commentary, with a focus on peak oil. While you might touch on social fallout from peak oil from time to time, I don't think that's as fruitful to pursue as the possibilities are huge and at the same time those possibilities bring out widely divergent (and competing!) positions from each of us.
Stay focused on peak oil, would be my request and advice.
I am a follower of Nobel Laureate economist Herbert Simon; in other words I am a "satisficer."
It turns out that "maximization" is an empty concept once one masters the "Theorem of the Second Best," which few noneconomists have heard of.
Keep coming back! You, LouGrinzo, Halfin, and others are needed here for discussion balance. IMO, it is reading the broad spectrum of the various TODer interpretive analyses to graphs put up by Stuart, Khebab, and all the other wonderful data freaks that makes TOD so rewarding.
Those of us who try to remain 'permeable to new evidence' need a rainbow of TODer replies if we hope to accurately navigate the days ahead. Until the 'rear view mirror' absolutely, positively confirms a global consensus of decline--we need all the technical help we can get. Your email connection to Skrebowski, Colin Campbell, et al, is a very valuable TOD resource. These guys are probably too busy to ever come to TOD.
The RR & Vinod Khosla keythread format is the discussion model that TOD should expand if possible:
A. AlanfromBigEasy & Secretary of Transportation Maria Cino
discussing RR,Mass-transit,etc vs the merits for more freeways. After reading her bio, my guess is Maria is totally uneducated on required postPeak transport needs. Alan could greatly bring her up to speed.
B. TOD PHEV experts & high level automotive designers: ThatItImOut and others having discussions with DrZ and others on future automotive directions. Let's ask Dr. Z [or an appointed spokesperson] to come to TOD.
C. If we could get Kunstler to be a regular--I would love to see him debate here on TOD the head of the National Association of Homebuilders.
D. Other examples?
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
That can lead to high traffic, but fewer inbound links.
IMHO.
Just look at Technorati vs. TruthLaidBear and you will see huge discrepancies in the ranking in the top blogs. The tilt reaffirms the rightie tilt.
I don't know what this means for TOD, in that it tends to be politically neutral.
The higher the traffic numbers, the more it will cost to run the site and the higher the noise.
As we continue on the downside, the traffic will rise here. So why worry about boosting traffic?
In the second Star Trek movie, Captain Kirk risked the whole to save Spock.....
I am not necessarily wedded to growing TOD "bigger." I am much more concerned with growing TOD "better."
Better to me means having an impact--whatever the bloody hell that means. It means having a discourse and thinking things through with the smartest, most informed people in a space that is conducive to ideas, evidence, and well-reasoned discourse.
Ignore the trolls, people. They are not worth feeding.
TOD has developed a number of cadres of "specialists" for tackling each problem from a number of different angles.
It's only after you turned a problem over a couple of times and examined it from all the angles that you can get a better grasp of its different dimensions. Tunnel vision is not the wisest way to go.
Take RR's debate/dialog with Vinod Khosla regarding corn ethanol for example. What are the angles?
- Soil depletion? yes
- Aquifer depletion? yes
- Resource allocation (other solutions foregone, economics)
- Chemistry/energy balance analysis? yes (EROEI, etc.)
- Scalability, reliability
- Political consequences, special interst groups
- Mind control, selling it to the public (BTW have you seen the ADM "fresh air" commercials yet?)
- Global Warming (How does ethanol solve the CO2 emissions problem? What other emissions, pollutants are involved?)
You need a lot of experts in a lot of fields all chiming in at once. Only then can we get a deeply multi-dimesnsional grasp of the pros and cons.Doesn't mean we will come to a consensus. But at least we will have done a deep dive analysis rather than accepting things at face value.
As the 'better' is discovered, te volume will increase.
Look at the "slashdot" effect today. This little old site as designed could not handle it.
Are you ready to put up slave database servers and squid proxies?
Don't worry about traffic - worry about editorial integrity.
I've been running an internet service provider (ISP) since 1994. My professional and my personal advice is focus on the beef, not the hits. You care *who* is reading this site, not *how many*. Kunstler can handle the masses.
What are the stats? Lots of hits or RR, Westtexas, thatsittoast and the other editors getting media time? What is the meaningful transaction? Do I have to answer that?
cfm
How Peak Oil will Definitely Improve Your Sex Life ?
(HPOWDIYSL)