January

If you’ve been following my Links page lately, you’ll know that I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the new Block View search for A9 and Amazon Yellow Pages. Amazon photographed virtually every street-level business in Los Angeles, among other cities, and it’s a very fun toy to play around with.

More recently, A9.com was mentioned in a small bit of awkward dialogue on Thursday night’s episode of The O.C. Waxy reader Eric Vaughan went to the trouble of finding and editing the clip. Watch it below, and judge for yourself:

theoc_a9com.avi (3.7MB, Windows Media)

Even though this appeared to be a clear example of paid product placement, A9.com’s CEO denies that it was paid for or that they knew anything about it.

This seems very unlikely, especially considering A9’s somewhat-obscure status in the non-geek world, the timing of the episode with recent publicity, and The O.C.’s use of the full domain name instead of simply “A9.” (Has anybody ever used/heard the term “A9.com’d” before?) I don’t even particularly care about the product placement, but I don’t like attempts at covering it up.

One way to settle the issue would be to contact Allan Heinberg, the writer of that episode, or any of the producers. I’ll try to do some research on Monday, but please e-mail me if you know anyone that might be able to help.

February 21, 2005: I have two reliable sources that confirm that A9 was not even aware of the O.C reference before its broadcast.

Today is the fifth anniversary of Boing Boing’s relaunch, the day they switched from a traditional webzine to uber-blog.

To commemorate the birthday, the gang released a complete dump of every Boing Boing entry for free download. I’m hosting the torrent on my tracker, and I pulled together some statistics. (Is anyone surprised?)

Try my new Boing Boing Statistics. Most notably, use the keyword tracker to search the popularity of keywords over time, broken down by author. This is outstanding for looking at trends, or the uniquely quirky obsessions of each author.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, or have found other uses for the data dump.

January 22, 2005: By request, here’s a direct download of the 5-year archive.

Occasionally, I get people asking me how I find good Waxy Links… Well, since MovableType stores everything in MySQL, it was simple to write a few queries to crunch my statistics.

So, here are some Waxy Links statistics, with a breakdown of my top 100 sources since I started including “via” source attribution in March 2004. Note that I’m grouping my top-level domain, which explains why Del.icio.us is firmly on top. (The Del.icio.us homepage, individual Inboxes, and Most Popular page all get lumped together into one record.)

Not surprisingly, this is a representative list of many of my favorite weblogs. Lots of great underdog bloggers in here, like Simon Carless (listed as “mono211.com”), Jason Cosper, Nelson Minar, Brett O’Connor’s Negatendo, Phillip Lennsen, and many more.

I’ve also included a breakdown of link activity over time, the busiest link days of all-time, and my link history by weekday. It looks like I peaked last summer, with a record total of 37 links in a single day! My posting activity slowed a bit during the fall and winter as deadlines at work started picking up. Not surprisingly, Mondays are the busiest days, but I was surprised to see links slow down throughout the rest of the week.

There are some main Waxy.org stats, as well. The most-commented entries, my complete posting history by month, and spam comment denials from MT-Blacklist.