Put Yourself to Bedlam

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination. ~Andrew Lang

Today marks the occasion of my photo galleries at Pbase.com passing their 420,000th hit - 420,238 to be more exact:

For years I've been watching these stats and trying to learn as much as I can from them.  For instance I've studied what I think people are most attracted to in my work from their comments. I've learned something about what makes for popular searches on the web - mainly by extreme guesswork because the one thing Pbase is waaay behind on is detailed statistics. They offer nothing like the information available through site meter and the like.

It's too bad, and I'm definitely tempted to go elsewhere. But then again - 420,000+ hits is no small change. This little number: Spooky Fish Tree  has 16,576 hits all by itself, making it my most viewed page in history (probably from now until forever).

Without actively soliciting, I've sold prints to website visitors and I even helped out Bread & Puppet while they were on a national tour with no press kit by offering images of their work to newspapers for free (it was the least I could do).

I realize it's probably past the appropriate time to create a Kimberley-Hannaman-Taylor or Artiface Galleries.com proper, but when and if I do, I think I'll leave the galleries at Pbase alone for the long haul. Like Major Tom and Hal, they can perpetually float in space abstractly hoping to connect with whatever finds them out there.

Statistics suggest they'll not want for attention any time soon,

XXKHT

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.  ~Gregg Easterbrook

"And are you not...a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a 5 week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" *

I'm a huge fan of the Google. You  might even call it an addiction.

Rarely a conversation passes that I don't find myself reaching for the computer to look up a reference and if I don't have access, I make a point of doing it later. In fact, I've recently begun carrying a small notebook with me for just that reason.

I like to look people up as well. Whenever I meet an interesting person, chances are good that I am going to google them. I google myself routinely, as I did today because it was brought up in a conversation over the weekend - the group considered the googleability of each other.

Depending on which search words used, I can have anywhere from one or two links to two pages if you use my maiden name and the word photography.

To my pleasant surprise, there is a talented Canadian photographer who shares my name, as well as a "renowned psychologist" who is currently starring in "Psychological Minutes" on YouTube. Take away the 'berley" and you get "Kim Taylor" , a musician from Ohio - top position above my own on the google list for straight name recognition. It's fun stuff.

It's also fascinating to explore the etymology of the word Google. The heading quotation of this post* is paraphrased from Douglas Adam's, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We can assume he created the word from the root googol which means "The number 10 raised to the power 100 (10¹⁰⁰), written out as the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros."

The word googol was coined around 1930 by Edward Kasner, an American mathematician who found himself working with numbers so huge that they required a name for brevity. According to Merriam Webster's Word of the Day:

"While it is possible to write that number using standard scientific notation, Dr. Kasner felt that it deserved a name of its own. According to his own account, Dr. Kasner asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to pick a name, promising the boy that he would use the word in the future. Milton made up the word "googol," and so the enormous number was christened. Dr. Kasner kept his promise, and the word has spread and been widely adopted by mathematicians and the general public alike."

So there you have it. More fun stuff from the world wide web...everything you ever wanted to know and no longer have to be afraid to ask.

XXKHT <-wears her nerdiness on her blog

And What to My Wondering Eyes Did Appear?

But a combination Jib Jab/Rather Good Holy Daze Greeting Video....starring ME!

Don't send a lame Starring You! eCard. Try JibJab Sendables!

Thanks Jib Jab!

XXKHT

It seems to me... that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy. -- I. Asimov; Foundation's Edge

What is privacy?

We all claim to want it, yet we all willingly give it up in various ways nearly every minute of every day - and the internet is the gossip queen of the global neighborhood.

Yesterday, I signed up for a site meter widget because it was free, and because I'm curious, and because I would like to know if anyone's actually reading this blog.

I openly confess that, to me, blogging is a kind of mental masturbation; it's absolutely the kind of intimate act meant to be viewed in public - an exhibitionists revelation of their mental process. Of course, I can't speak definitively for other bloggers, and though there are exceptions to every rule, I'm pretty sure this is a universal truth, even as most bloggers would be loathe to admit it (for obvious reasons).

The thing is, I'm super conscious of our loss of privacy in this day and age. With each lazy concession, we  give more and more power to those who would harm us with their data collections, as we set our minds ever more rigidly into the denial that the bad guys won't get us (yet), somewhat like a child believes that if they stay beneath the covers the under the bed monsters won't know they're there.

This one thing is for certain: The monsters are hungry, and they definitely know you're there. And not just that you're there, but what your bed covers are made of, where you got them, which method of payment you used, if you bought them out of state, how much tax you paid, and when the last time you purchased a blanket was, and perhaps even an estimate of how many blankets you have in your home; and while they're at it, what your average heating bill is and which fuel you use.

I read somewhere recently that your cell phone can be used to eavesdrop on your conversations even when you're not talking on it - even when it's OFF. Apparently, you have to take the battery out of the device to be safe from this type of surveillance.

Additionally, a few years ago, I read that Gillette announced it was using the latest cheap nano-technology to install tiny cameras in their product packages in addition to the aisles that the products are placed in - to monitor - for scientific purposes of course - who's buying their products and where they're taking them.

This particular personal product/surveillance tool really really bothered me because, where does a person shave? Ahem. In the bathroom or shower of course. Talk about the Naked Truth!

Even with rampant willful ignorance, there can't be a person alive who hasn't considered that we just may have reached critical mass on this issue.  London has a camera on every street - 10,000 of them and this just in: some with machine guns attached! Every mall, shop and many street corners in America are on not-so-candid camera as well; the situation has surpassed absurd. Our bathrooms people! Our bathrooms.

And so this afternoon, as I toured the features of PYTB's spanky new traffic widget (did I mention it was free?), I experienced a mixed reaction of info-junky rush and dogmatic philosophical shame. My ethics are definitely in question for using this device. I'm not selling anything! I don't need to know that a surfer from San Francisco spent 10 minutes here and looked at 3 pages while he/she was at it, and oh by the way, they use Mozilla Firefox as an operating system which they connect through comcast cable, and they arrived via so and so's blog link, and left to go to such and such place.

I don't need to know all that. But I love to. I do.

Apparently, I'm not just an exhibitionist, but a voyeur as well. And while I'm at it, better toss masochist onto the heap. Joy.

The words of Schleprock are gloomily repeating inside my head....
"We're doomed. We're all doomed."
(especially me..)
XXKHT

"He who would trade liberty (or privacy) for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty (nor privacy) nor security." --Ben Franklin (and KHT)

Post script:

I received the following in an email from a good friend immediately following this post:

"I guess I won't be visiting your site anymore...Would you send your blogs to me directly?"

Here is my response (a bit defensive, I admit): 

(Dear Friend:)

If you think any of the sites you ever visit aren't using the same surveillance, you're completely in denial.

The site meter widget I added is not unique; it's just one of a gazillion options for traffic monitoring - and at least my blog wears a button telling the visitor that it's being done. The typepad website was monitoring visitors with a less comprehensive version (only to me!) from the git go, and the site meter widget is merely an improvement upon what information I get to view of that surveillance.

Allow me to use your favorite site as an example: here's a quote from (Insert Political Watchdog Site* here):

"(Insert Same Political Watchdog Site* here) provides headlines, news, and commentary for a geographically-diverse, politically-savvy, pro-democracy, anti-hypocrisy web community, reaching  five million* people a month and growing.
*"Visitor statistics courtesy of Urchin Web Analytics v5.6.00r2"

I wrote to them to ask for sure whether they use a tracking device before I found the above in their About section. I'll let you know what they say specifically about it, if anything.

I'm very eager to stimulate a discourse on this topic, so comments are encouraged and as yet unmoderated. Bring it on.

**the name of the site is withheld because I did not ask permission to quote it, but their own description, sans name, is intact:

"Art is never finished, only abandoned." - Leonardo da Vinci

I had to jack this from Rumproast - a very funny blog I sallied into from Missing the Moon tonight.

It's da Vinci's Last Supper in 16 billion pixels. Once there, you can scroll around the canvas to examine the minute details.

I am fascinated by it and have already spent a huge amount of time looking at every little thing...
Pixelated,
XXKHT

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” --Leonardo da Vinci