And still: 200,000 hits a day.

Someone needs to do a study of blog traffic and really get down to nuts and bolts of why certain sites get big. I become more convinced each day that it has little to do with talent and more to do with reaching some kind of critical mass of readership after which point things start to snowball. My own blog was exhibit A in that regard. Not nearly as good as yours or Goldstein's (or a host of other people's), but more widely read than most.

Maybe it's time for me to read that Malcolm Gladwell book about tipping points.

That's what I'm countin' on. I just need to get to 40,000 or so and then it's OPEN THREAD CITY, BABY!!!

That's just how I roll.

You know, I'm starting to suspect that Allah sticks a "my blog sucked" bit into every comment just to hear us poor schlubs praise him some more.

I'm also starting to suspect that Duncan Black has been replaced by a 10-line perl script.

I think somebody's got a crush.

Atrios- post after substantive post, meticulously and analytically stickin' it to the man!

It's not false modesty, someone. My hand to God. It fucking genuinely bugs me that people like Jeff and Ace aren't bigger than they are.

As much as I like Little Green Footballs, my visits there are not very frequent.

LGF has the habit of posting excerpts of articles and their links. That's all well and good, but most of the time LGF offers no comment, no analysis. I want to read comments not visit a directory of current stories (mostly about the Palestinians and other Muslims).

LGF has a lot of open threads, too, with oddball pics at their entrance.

"six open threads

two "housecleaning posts," one about comments, the other about traffic

five or so links without comment

one extended quote from a WaPo writer without any original commentary

and about four medium-sized paragraphs, in total, of his own writing."

Maybe it's just because it's getting close to the Holidays, but I couldn't help but try to fit that into a song somehow while reading it...

Yeah, the open threads at LGF are unfortunate. One of the guys who comments at Protein Wisdom said recently that when a blogger starts posting open threads, his commenters have officially outgrown their usefulness. I agree.

Oh Moon God,

Your stuff struck a lot deeper in the viscera than others'. (Esp. Jeff, who's intentionally esoteric.)

Let's just say there's a lot more -- and stronger -- free-floating sentiment out there about Islamonuts than pretty much any topic you can name (like, you know, Martha Stewart, D&D, etc.). The PC that makes Charles Johnson's great blog almost unmentionable in polite company keeps it an underserved segment of the culture.

Who cares? I wants me my 200,000 hits per day. Tomorrow I'm going to start forty-three open threads.

Allah,
You were the one that pulled me in. I probably should hate you for it. At the cusp when photoshop got its chops, with a schtick that took genius to maintain.

no crush..."Mongo straight"

I wonder if there is some correlation regarding the creativity of the commenters, and their volume. Maybe Ace's fans are just too damn clever for his own good.

It's just depressing to think that Ace is posting sharp, funny stuff every day when, traffic-wise, he'd probably be better off photoshopping Howard Dean's face onto a horse's dick.

Want me to show you how to do the Dean/dick transference, Ace? Twenty trackbacks guaranteed.

Atrios goes in cycles, but the comments are interesting. Lots of people following esoteric info contribute there. So the open threads can be worth reading.

Well there's a shock.

That's just how I roll.

What started this silly line?

It fucking genuinely bugs me that people like Jeff and Ace aren't bigger than they are.

I have mixed emotions. Sure, they deserve more recognition. But when AOSHQ starts getting 265 comments for any stupid post, like at LGF, the sense of community will be gone, and so will I. I'll be camping out at some little blog like Letters From Desolation Row, trading insults with Laura and Sobek.

You know who I blame for all this? Pajamas Media. That's who.

Just ... because.

"TJHIR" is from Anchorman.

Michael is right. It may not be so great for Ace, since the Crazy Blog Money(tm) is a bit scarce, but the current size of the blog is about perfect for us comment folk.

Ha ha.

Sounds like it's more forum than blog at this point. Maybe you should buy some limeware.

"TJHIR" is from Anchorman.

Isn't the line, "That's how I roll"? No "just" in there, I don't think.

Heh. Atrios just posted a couple items. Not open threads.

Ace, if you post any more open threads I swear I'll post my Itunes list.

I swear I'll do it.

Don't turn this blog into that crap forum that Megan likes.

I swear it!

"TJHIR" is from Anchorman.

Thanks. I had to google the reference, but at least now I understand all the goofy quotes from an earlier thread.

"Open" threads can be fun, but they really work best when the commenters just take over an existing thread and have fun. Recently I was watching a thread at Tim Blair, who was absent (in New York with Ace at the OSM event, if memory serves). His commenters had a great time trying to push a thread to 500. It was really just about 20 people (with a little help from me), but they were having fun and taking a great deal of national pride getting an Australian thread to 500 in Tim's absence. It took them four days, but they made it.

Imagine that. A handful of people totally dedicated to giving Tim a 500 comment thread, and loving it. It was pretty cool.

I think I counted 22 posts in four 1/2 hours on this blog.
I can't think of anything I can do 22 times in 4 1/2 hours.

Time for sleep.

It fucking genuinely bugs me that people like Jeff and Ace aren't bigger than they are.

BTW, Allah, you really shouldn't put Jeff and Ace in the same category.

Jeff veers from tendentious to ridiculous to some-times-funny-or-interesting. He just does not produce the same consistency of content that Ace does, although I still read him (but rarely comment).

Even worse, Jeff is on speaking terms with Bill (which I still read, but never comment, because I've been banned).

Thanks, Ace! That Atrios bit has had me laughing so hard I am literally crying! What a sick waste of Internet bandwidth that idiot is!

And Allah...

"It's just depressing to think that Ace is posting sharp, funny stuff every day when, traffic-wise, he'd probably be better off photoshopping Howard Dean's face onto a horse's dick."

Damn funny - but wouldn't Dean's face on a donkey's ass be me appropriate as a political statement? Just sayin'...

And, of course, Jeff is an arrogant cock who would only get more and more annoying as his popularity grows, while Ace strikes me as a pretty decent guy who would probably stay so even if he displaced instapundit.

I came into the blogosphere just as Allah was leaving so I missed all this good stuff I keep hearing about!!

Have you noticed on this Atrios open threads all people do is bash Bush? When we have open threads we just go all directions. (mostly perverted, but I digress)

Michael,

While Ace is wonderful, no doubt, Jeff is wonderful as well, but just in a different way. Which is what makes the right side of the web so great.

Is Ace not on speaking terms with Bill?

I can't imagine Bill would have made Ace mad or anything? Bill never makes anyone mad because he is so nice.

*giggle*

Actually, RWS, on the thread I peeked into there were some people calling for more catblogging. Huh. Looks like Atrios is the place for all the frou-frous of the moonbatosphere.

On a completely unrelated note, are you going to take any of my NYC suggestions? ;)

Which suggestions were they????

Did you leave them on my blog??

Give them to me again! I want all the suggestions I can get!

OK, here's what I said food-wise on the blog:

How much do you want to spend, RWS?

One place I suggest checking out is Otto, Mario Batali's place on 8th St. and 5th Ave. Mind-blowing Italian wine list (all reasonably priced), excellent mini-dishes (antipasti type things), and the only good pizza in Manhattan. And it's a very New York place.

There's lots of very good ethnic places -- Korean near 32d St. bet. 5th and 6th, Thai in the 50s on 8th, Indian in the east 20s, etc. Also plenty of places to splurge on sushi, French (my favorite: Aix on the UWS), whatever. Depends what you want. No good BBQ though.

I would avoid anything in the Theater District proper, however, unless convenience absolutely dictates. Bang-to-buck ratio is distressingly low.

As for other stuff, there are some amazing exhibitions at the museums through the holidays. The Sun has a nice rundown.

Oh, and if you want to try some trendy new-ish places, look through recent-ish (online) iterations of New York magazine's food section. Good stuff.

Allah is like the James Dean of the blogosphere. Allah's body of work is thin, but his impact on the medium is monumental. So I've heard.

I don't where I found AoS. I think it was from Ace Pilot's map. Was AoS on that map at one time?

I discovered Allah at the beginning of the "lawsuit."Which, I believe, was the end of his blogging? Maybe he was blogging elsewhere, I don't know.

Like an idiot I was still clicking on his site occasionally until a few weeks ago. The A-Rod is a choker pic was up for like months. Then the godzilla at the Superdome was up for weeks. Now, Allah still has an 8 week old post on his blog. We must due for another post any day now.

Oh, yeah, the parallels to James Dean are uncanny and downright bizarre. Just ask him.

P.S. A photoshop of Dean's face on donkey's ass is a great idea. Please do it.

Or put him peeking out of Osama's beard.
That would be funny and cute.

Oh shit.
I meant Howard Dean's face on a donkey's ass, not James Dean's.

Actually, it took me the longest time to figure out that the Ace whom Allah kept linking was this place, not the Ace Pilots blog which I really couldn't stand.

Hey someone, any recommendations for restaraunts in Little Italy?

Ace isn't bigger than he is because blog popularity is a power law distribution, and the dice just haven't rolled his way yet.

Allah had a really nice way of providing an acerbic narrative for the news which let you flow from link to link. And the Allah-schtick never failed to crack me up. Eventually he decided he was too sophisticated to call us kufrs anymore, but I gotta tell ya, after a hard day there's nothing like being railed at and called 'kufr' and 'Jew.'

Very nice, geoff.
Allah, may he R.I.P
We hardly knew ye.

Ace isn't bigger than he is because blog popularity is a power law distribution, and the dice just haven't rolled his way yet.

That was a really cool link. Thanks.

That was me. I wasn't trying to impersonate Josie/Blonde, I just forgot to sign in.

I originally saw this link on denbeste.nu.

Bart: yeah, avoid them all. The whole place is a tourist trap.

Actually, word is that there are a couple of good old-school red sauce places mixed in with the blatant ripoffs, but the whole neighborhood's always put me off too much to try.

I wonder if there is some correlation regarding the creativity of the commenters, and their volume. Maybe Ace's fans are just too damn clever for his own good.

As a relative newbie to this whole phenomenom it seems to me that Tom has hit on a part of this. What attracted me to this place was the varied and interesting topics posted by ace and co. and of course the unfailingly witty and insightful thoughts of the poster. What kept me coming back were the responses by an equally funny and insightful group of readers. Knowledgeable, insightful and acerbic.

That can be a very intimidating combination. It takes a lot more thought to respond to a substanitive thread and a willingness to risk your cojones every time you open your mouth than to just put a "tee hee" or "me too" on a meaningless thread.

In short, blame your readers.

Yeah, me too.

LOL

WooT!

Free cindy sheehan, you republithug kkkillers!!!!

When's the new thread going up? this one is getting stale. Kos would never let us go this long without opening up a new open forum!

Atrios is starting to creep me out, man.

Newest thread:

Open Thread

On the darkest night so painful do you hunger for thread midst the torture of being one?

-Atrios 5:17 AM

Comments (197) Trackback (0)

Maybe I'm not hip, not with it.

But what does that mean?

That's how I roll

No "just" in there, I don't think

that's how I remember it too.

You guys and allah are right. No "just." I checked last night.

I thought Ace posted open threads so he could sneak off and play Operation.

Thanks someone!!!!!

But how much ARE you looking to spend, and on what? We can give lots more specific recommendations...

http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/

Prepare to be astounded. Really.