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Successful News Aggregation For Dummies
I find it a bit odd that Our Pal Charles keeps referring to fellow blogger Jim Hoft as “dumb” without realizing how childish that sounds.
Recently Johnson claimed a “gotcha” for a post on Gateway Pundit titled “Oh, Good Grief… Al Gore Explains Advantages of Sharia Law to Andrea Mitchell (Video).” In his own myopic view, Charles thinks that Hoft bought into the satire as true, even though Hoft (in case anyone whose initials are Charles Johnson missed it) clarified that the vid was a spoof. That wasn’t good enough for Mr. MakeUpABunchaCrapAndStompOnIt.
The linked video was an obvious parody by Sooper Mexican who even described it for the slower lizards: “Parody of an interview of Al Gore by Andrea Mitchell where they discuss his controversial sale of Current-TV to Al-Jazeera.”
Now we don’t need to play a dumb schoolyard name-calling game with Johnson. We don’t need to bring up the Tennessee State Flag, the Ohio State Flag, the Laptop Menuboard, the weiner that owned Charles, the Sarah Palin Shoeshine Hoax, or all the other frauds that Charles fell for and promoted as true without retraction. All we need is to look at the little red worm at the bottom of the current Alexa stats:
Looks like Gateway Pundit’s doing pretty well against El Gusano Rojo, and since Hoft is no threat to Charles, perhaps it’s something else…
Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
LGF 2012: The Year in Review
As 2012 draws to a close and we pause to reflect on the year passed and contemplate the year ahead, it’s only natural that we may find ourselves pondering of some of life’s eternal questions. For instance,
Q1: How many consecutive years can a once prominent blog suffer double-digit declines in comment volume before it finally bottoms out?
A: At least four.
Q2: Has the size of the commenting community at this once prominent blog continued to shrink as well?
A: Yes it has. In 2007, it took 118 people to provide 50% of the comments for the year. By contrast, in 2012 it only took 21:
Of the top 21 contributors in 2007, only 2 remain. However, in the face of all this decline and shrinkage, Gus had his most productive year ever, posting more than 31000 times and setting a few records in the process:
- Gus set the record for most posts in one year by a person not named Sharmuta or MandyManners.
- Gus wrote more comments than the next two posters combined. Unprecedented.
- Gus accounted for a record 7.6% of all comments (previous record: Gus, 2011, 4.4%)
- Two years running, Gus flopped 5 rungs up the all time poster list, kind of like a salmon:
Q3: Is this once prominent blog content with the whole echo chamber mil-yo it’s cultivated during the last few years?
A: Apparently yes. 2012 added only about 200 nics to the rolls of LGF commenters, down about 95% from the 4360 added in 2007.
Q4: But did this new blood rejuvenate the commentary bringing greater diversity of experience, viewpoint, and opinion? 
A: Uh, no. Unlike the Class of 2007 which jumped right into the conversation, the Class of 2012 were mostly lurkers, contributing a mere 2% of this year’s comments.
Happy New Year from the BRC!
A Report From The Boiler Room
Although most of the fun is gone, I spent some time and updated my LGF comment stats. As expected, the numbers continue their steady decline into oblivion.
The attached charts are pretty self-explanatory. I’ll explain them anyway.
The average weekly comment chart shows that even the election season couldn’t reverse the downward trend, now entering its 5th year. Without the election, the decline would likely have been steeper. Has LGF hit bottom yet? 2013 may tell.
Maybe Charles will work on getting some new voices in there to liven up the conversation. Only 192 new posters showed up in 2012, down slightly from the 4171 new posters in 2007.
I also have some interesting ‘per character’ stats. Posting rates, karma trends, etc. Gus stories are always fun. I’ll send those later.
BRC Engineer No. 5
Well Looky Here – Another Charles FabriSpike? Go Figure.
Huh. Seems like there was a bigass spike in the 2nd week of October that didn’t register anywhere else on the blogosphere, except at Chuck’s $1.50 All-You-Can-Stand Diner. Charles Johnson’s Alexa spike is as authentic as his ViewMaster stats fed him by MediaManquers and ThinkPerogies. It’s as believable as a menuboard caught in the crossfire of Breitbart’s radioactive laptop. It’s as believable as his assertion that Obama co-opted the State Flag of Ohio before neonazis co-opted the State Flag of Tennessee. Read more…
Charlie Tweets Teh Party Line
For those of you not on Twitter, you’re missing out on an excellent vehicle to view Charles Johnson’s jawdropping ignorance. For example, here’s a recent time line of his moonbat asshattery, screencapped 10 November 2012.
We highlighted one of his IgnoTweets in red, so let’s discuss this “truth” shall we?
First of all, it’s intuitively obvious to the casual observer that Obama’s statement is a lie for the following reasons. Follow me on this, because statistics can be very tedious to parse.
Popular vote for Obama = 61,775,351 [source]
US population as of 17 September 2012 was 314,395,013 [source]
61,775,351/314,395,013 = 19.6% of the general population.
Fewer than 1 out of 5 people re-elected Obama. Read more…
The Ruse and Fail of Little Green Footballs: Part III – The Bannings
This is Part 3 of a monograph about a blog named Little Green Footballs and its founder Charles Foster Johnson. Click the links below for related posts. They will be updated as the series continues.
Prologue
Part 1 – Overview
Part 2 – The Ascendance of Charles Johnson and LGF
Part 3 – The Bannings
Part 4 – The Flounces
Part 5 – The Turnaround
Part 6 – Current Events & The Future Of LGF
PART 3 – THE BANNINGS
Every blogger, regardless of the size or popularity of his/her blog, eventually will have to deal with a troll. It’s no fun when someone shows up with the intent to irritate everyone.[1]
[First banning, post-911, courtesy of The Boiler Room Crew]
No one would claim that Charles Johnson never banned anyone from trolling on LGF. Indeed one unpopular commenter was banned in April of 2005 for his/her continual “baiting” of other posters, often creating an incredibly hostile atmosphere. In addition, there were some posters who for one reason or another went overboard (especially when discussing Islam and the Middle East) and were told that they might be happier elsewhere. Fair enough.
ICYMI: Signs of the LGF Decline
I’ve decided that it’d be handy to have these links and graphs all in one place, so here’s a thread to keep bookmarked for those moments in the TwitterWarrior Theatre, or just In Case You Missed It…
And for the DoD newbies (and I suppose, as a reminder to our regulars), we note again that all these statistics compiled by The Boiler Room Crew aren’t volunteered by Johnson or posted anywhere on LGF, rather they were scraped from his “Blog Engine” (by various methods), right from under his nose.
Anyway, here they are:
Epic decline in Comment Participation:
Epic decline in the number of Unique Commenters:
Epic decline in the number of new account registrations:
Epic decline in the amount of Front Page Content:
I don’t suppose anyone notices a pattern?
Signs of the LGF Decline: Comment Participation Stats
Good Lord is it dyin’ over there at the swamp. On Monday, it took nearly a half hour for the first comment on that Bela Fleck thread to appear.
And the thread before that? It snagged two comments total. Yes, that’s TWO. As in… 2. As in, tee to the double-u to the ohh. TWO! (and one of the TWO was Johnson himself)
No wonder Johnson chose to hide the stats drop-down in the sidebar. It’s fuckin’ boring over there.
He’s gonna put us out of business…
Anyway, the last time we reported the actual statistics on this was back in January, and it was sorta good news for CJ and the gang of Loozards, because we’d determined that it looked like the decline was flattening a bit . But alas, with apparent Newtonian certitude, this freefall cannot be stopped, as Engineer #5 puts together a mid-year graph:
Now, we expect the numbers for this week to be slightly better for the LGF gang, because there’s bound to be a SCOTUS/Obamacare bump, but I think it’s safe to say that they’ve entered into a new era over there. But what to call it?
The Yawnozoic?
The Cricketaceous?
_______________
Signs of the LGF Decline: Unique Commenters
In the past, the talented Engineers here in the Boiler Room have used the LGF archive files to compile statistics for the site’s nose-diving commenting and registration rates, and just recently the steadily decreasing amount of front page content. Today, we’re going to track another compelling sign of the LGF decline: The reduction in unique commenters.
Now, by “unique commenters” we’re referring to the number of individual user accounts that are leaving at least one comment over a certain time period. This is probably the most efficient way to determine the overall size of the site’s active community. When we have Engineer No. 5 track these statistics through the last few years, we’ll have to say that what we see isn’t exactly surprising, but nevertheless a bit shocking:
The graph basically begins around the time of the election of Barack Obama, and from there the rate descends rapidly until around the time that Johnson officially declared his “parting ways” (Nov. 30, ’09). This was the period of what most ex-LGFers refer to as the “Great Purge”, as evidenced by the high rate of public bannings and (presumably) departures of many of the long-time Lizards.
Again, this isn’t that surprising, as our previous work supports this, but what’s really worth noting is the portion of the graph that begins after Johnson’s Great Switcheroo to the left was complete. We presume that Charles was hoping that the exodus of the “righty” lizards would be followed by an influx of “lefty” newcomers, and eventually bring the size of the community back (or at least closer) to where it once was. But what we see here is quite the opposite; the active community steadily continues to shrink.
We had Engineer No. 5 take a closer look and give us a breakdown, using a month when LGF was closer to it’s “peak” (Feb. ’09), compared to last month (May, ’12):
Now that puts the shrinkage into some serious perspective. As you can see on the Feb ’09 side, you have to scroll down to #9 to find a top contributor that hasn’t been banned, and at a glance, only Gus has stepped up his contributions from those days. And although the average posts per active commenter has increased a bit, the size of the active community is a mere ~12% of what it was just a few years ago, and the total comment count shrunk to ~19%.
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