I've been writing this blog for over six years always to satisfy an audience of one: myself. But I'm vain and am curious what parts of my blog others like. Thanks to Google Analytics I now know my most-linked posts:

Why SOAP Sucks

Four years of web API development frustration boiled down to 500 words.

Google search history and privacy

Alarm at a new Google feature. I'm not as concerned about it as I was when I wrote this post.

Goodbye, Google SOAP search API

Learning Google turning off my once-loved search API. My comments about "discipline" were considered news to Google watchers.

Games imitating war imitating games

Call of Duty 4 remixes Iraq. Waxy gave it link love, but a lot of the links are search engine gaming. One of the spam pages has a funny picture, though.

Hostile movie theaters

A guest post from friend Marc, a fine cranky rant I'm in total agreement with.

Helping spiders find your new home

Deeply nerdy post about migrating a website to a new domain. Glad this is well linked, it should be useful.

Why Bloggers aren't journalists

My attempt at being controversial calling Techcrunch out for sloppy reporting.

Another gamer emoticon

The usage of <3 to express affection. BoingBoing liked it. Breaking emoticon news: <8 is the opposite of <3, presumably as rhyming slang.

My most linked posts are pretty varied, but generally technical. When I talk to people in person the posts they remember most are the ones about Paris; no one seems to link to those though.

Hey, Goat, you writing your blog?
Go away, Rat.

You know, I like blogs... I really do... You know why?
Go away, Rat.

Because they provide their frustrated creator with the delusional outlet of being a published author, sort of like how the prison warden lets the psychotic inmate scribble "poetry" on the cell wall so he doesn't beat his bunkmate with a toilet seat.

Perhaps you didn't like that analogy.

From today's awesome Pearls Before Swine, a comic strip from Stephan Pastis.

Erick Schonfeld's TechCrunch blog post today tries to cover the new $199 Linux PC being sold at Wal-Mart:

Our Crunchgear colleague John Biggs has an item in the NYT today about Wal-Mart's $200 Google PC that runs a version of Linux called the Google Operating System.

There are two important facts wrong in this first sentence. It's not a "Google PC", it's the gPC. And it doesn't run the "Google Operating System", it runs gOS, a project of Dave Liu. In fact, as near as anyone knows Google has no involvement with the development or marketing of this PC. TechCrunch reporting otherwise is a significant error.

Journalists make mistakes too; why's TechCrunch blog post not journalism? First, the story TechCrunch posted is really just a quote from someone else's story with a bit of unsupported speculation tacked on. Fine for a blog post, not good journalism. Second, despite lacking any original reporting it still gets fundamental facts wrong. Real journalism involves editors who should catch something so embarassing before going to press. Either this post wasn't edited before publication or else the editor didn't think it'd be important to verify something as significant as an entry by Google into the consumer PC market.

On the good side, the blog post comments are great. The third comment gets the story right and there are links further down to good coverage on Wired and ZDNet. User comments are something blogs do better than journalists.

I feel bad picking on TechCrunch for the second time in a week. The issues I'm pointing out aren't just them, it's a lot of blogs. TechCrunch is just a highly relevant target given their influence. People increasingly think of TechCrunch as being like news reporting. It's not. It's an excellent blog.

Some blogger want to do actual journalism? Go research who's collecting the ad referral revenue from ad clicks via gOS' browser. I don't know, but I'm betting it's not Mozilla.

A disclaimer of sorts: I haven't worked at Google for over 18 months. I have absolutely zero inside knowledge about gOS, Everex's products, or any Google plans for creating hardware or operating systems. I'm just reading TechCrunch.

I stirred up some trouble with my post about TechCrunch misusing the term "off the record" or burning their sources. Some reactions: Brian Ford, John Gruber, JD Lasica, Scott Lawton, Dave Winer, even Valleywag. Nothing from TechCrunch themselves. I'd love to hear Arrington explain what "off the record" means to him. He's probably been too busy having off the record conversations in Hawai'i.

Most of the discussion has been about my provocation that "blogging is not journalism". Unfortunately it's a hackneyed discussion, my fault for using a false dichotomy to rile my readers (call it yellow blogging). Of course there's a continuum between stream of consciousness blogging and authoritative journalism and it stretches across media. Traditional journalists aren't perfect. And unsourced rumour blog posts can be amazing scoops.

What bothers me is when blogs do reporting in ignorance of decades of established journalism ethics and practice. Journalistic rules have value. How you treat a source is important; burnt sources stop talking. Authoritative sources make a story much stronger; otherwise you're just blogging rumours. And avoiding or disclosing conflicts of interest matters; if not, you appear biased. It's great that blogs are aggressively reporting rumours and stories. But please, bend the rules of journalism thoughtfully.

One advantage of the blog world is that bad reporting can be corrected by other blogs. Even so, I believe powerful blogs like TechCrunch have special responsibility to be careful in their reporting given their influence and appearance of authority. As Winer notes it's rare for someone in the tech world to publically criticize TechCrunch because of the threat of repercussion.

I like TechCrunch, it writes interesting blog posts about stuff I care about. But it's a great example of how blogging is not journalism.

TechCrunch has a strange habit of blogging things where the only source is off the record. Ie, from today's Valleywaggish story about a manufactured MySpace scandal.

How old is he really? We first heard 40. We dug a little online and came up with nothing. But then we got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record at the Web 2.0 Summit last week: this person confirmed that he's really "36 or 37" and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet for some time.

Or a few weeks ago, about Google and Facebook

Notwithstanding that NDA, we've now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning. Google's goal — to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform.

Anyone talking to media knows that telling a journalist something "off the record" means you're telling them so they know it. It's not going to stay secret. But it also clearly means that the comments aren't to be used a primary source. The point of "off the record" is to steer a journalist the right way so they can dig in deeper and get the real story from a real source, on the record. TechCrunch, though, just reports stuff "off the record" directly. Remember that next time you're being chummy at a party with Arrington.

Blogs are great for discussing current events, particularly shades and nuance from multiple angles. And I like juicy rumour sites. But real journalism has a strong code of ethics, a responsibility to source reports, and careful editorial review. TechCrunch isn't even trying to do that.

For a brief time my blog was serving all 767 posts in a single page and in a single RSS feed. So some folks were treated to four year old blog posts as if they were new. Sorry about that. Mark all as read and carry on.

I turned off clicktracking on my blog too. The data was interesting, but I had stopped looking at it.

I'm kind of late to the party, I guess, but I'm still not understanding Yahoo 360. Every once in awhile I find a link to a blog post there. Like in this Make:Blog article, which links to what sounds like an interesting post. So I click on the link, and what do I see? "To access Yahoo! 360° Sign into Yahoo!". I'm supposed to log into Yahoo to read a freakin' blog article? Oh well, nevermind.

Am I missing something?

Want to know how many people are reading your blog from the hosted feed readers BlogLines, Yahoo, LiveJournal, NewsIsFree, and NewsGator Online? They're all kind enough to put some stats in their User-Agent string when they fetch your blog. I wrote some code to scrape the data out of Apache logs. Here, take it. I had plans to do fancy graphs like I did awhile ago for BlogLines, but the data isn't very interesting. BlogLines blows everyone away with 290 readers. Pretty much no one reads my blog via Yahoo, LiveJournal, or NewsIsFree. NewsGator Online has about 30 readers.

I've finally put a license on my blog content: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0. I did this reluctantly; I prefer a bit of ambiguity and with no license I end up with simple copyright protection which gives me a lot of power. But people are starting to steal my content without attribution: whether it's Real posting it on their site or robot aggregator sites that republish my posts with their ads on them. So now it's clear what's OK. And I'll be in CC's cool search engine, too.

Both Mark and Phil have the same problem I do: feed aggregators make blog reading seem like a chore.