Hackers operating from Saudi Arabia aiming at shutting down Aaron’s CC blog today successfully knocked out one of the servers at Hostings Matters shutting down temporarily a number of prominent blogs, including:

Instapundit
Power Line
Captain’s Quarters
SondraK
Pundit Guy
Chuck Simmins
Small Dead Animals
Radioblogger
Hugh Hewitt
IMAO
Mountaineer Musings
Say Uncle
Counterterrorism Blog
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Castle Arggh!
She Who Will Be Obeyed
Michael Totten
Ticklish Ears
Samizdata
Theodore’s World
Something……And Half of Something
Big Lizards

What provoked all this was a posting on Aaron’s CC cached on Google) responding to some earlier Islamic hacking attacks, derogating the civilization of the Islamic Golden Age, and asserting:

the Muslim world’s contributions to civilization, were entirely derivative, bereft of originality, applying principles derived by Westerners. While script kiddies might have taken down my site earlier this month, they’re no match in the long run against motivation, resources and creativity. Hell, let’s face it, by any quantitative measure, Israel invents more in a month to benefit mankind than Arabs do in a century. OK, that was too generous… in half a milennium.

Stories:

LGF

Michelle Malkin

UPDATE

Also temporarily disabled were:

Big Lizards
Lone Star Times
The Strata-Sphere
Blogs For Bush

I had no idea that so many blogs, some with large readerships, some with small, all used the same hosting service. There is a real vulnerability here.

Readers are being invited to post their guesses.

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Hat Tip to Brian Hughes.

According to Information Week, a trio of Dutch researchers are watching the Blogosphere as a whole, tracking its emotional state, and correlating the changes to external events.

The three from the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) have produced a program, dubbed “MoodViews,” that spots trends in attitudes, if not in latitudes, of more than two million bloggers, and thus, they say, of the overall “mood patterns” of the Web.

“The clearly measurable responses to worldwide events suggest that these instruments pick up the global mood,” Maarten de Rijke, a professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and part of its Intelligent Systems Lab, said in a statement. Colleagues Gilad Mishne and Krisztian Balog work with de Rijke on the project.

Each day, MoodViews reviews 150,000 blog entries for target words and LiveJournal mood indicator tags, then categorize them into one or more of 30 to 40 different moods, ranging from “cranky” and “confused” to “horny” and “hopeful.”

The results are published daily as a series of graphs at the MoodViews site.

Careful, there has been been a significant spike in CRAZY over the last 24 hours. (My guess is that this represents leftwing anger at Michelle Malkin, but I have not yet investigated.)

Charles Johnson found a hilarious profile in the Washington Post, which really paints an only too recognizable a portrait of the angry left blogger:

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. — In the angry life of Maryscott O’Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O’Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O’Connor’s reputation is as one of the angriest of all. “One long, sustained scream” is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers “malevolent,” a “sociopath” and “the Antichrist”? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as “Satan,” or about Karl Rove, “the devil”? Should it be about the “evil” Republican Party, or the “weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving” Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says “I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned”?

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

“Darfur is not hopeless,” she begins typing, and pauses.

“Ugh,” she says.

“You are not helpless,” she continues typing, and pauses again.

“Weak.”

She deletes everything and starts over.

“WAKE THE [expletive] UP,” she writes next, and this time, instead of pausing, she keeps going, typing harder and harder on a keyboard that is surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, a can of nonalcoholic beer, an album with photos of her dead father and a taped-up note — staring at her — on which she has scrawled “Why am I/you here?”

I read their stuff all the time, and this description rings true to me. Read the whole thing.

Andrew Sullivan (foreign transplant, defector from Conservatism, and spokesperson for a special perspective) gloatingly took the occasion of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay’s announcement to rub it in, titling his little screed “ding_dong” (the witch is dead) in archest friend-of-Dorothy style:

You know it’s bad for the GOP when National Review and Instapundit barely mention the big news of the day.

From some reason, whenever I read Andrew Sullivan, the famous scene in The Maltese Falcon in which Sam Spade gives Joel Cairo a lesson in manners has a tendency to spring to mind.

Well-deserved congratulations are in order to Edward Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters who has just been named 2005 Blogger of the Year by This Week Magazine. The previous year’s honorees were the authors of Power-Line, so Mr. Morrissey is joining some very distinguished company. Paul Mingeroff was present to pass the torch, and added his own congratulations.

His CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director-ship

Borders has come in for just a little criticism in the Blogosphere.

And today Mr. Gregory P. Josefowicz, CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, Borders Books responded:

to Charles Johnson, Director, Pajamas Media, CEO Little Green Foosballs, Rock ‘N’ Roller in the Free World, Stealth Cyclist.”

Dear Mr. Johnson (or may I call you “Charles”?),

How witty! how populist! actually kidding around, while artfully pointing out that Charles Johnson (and those other critical bloggers) are, after all, harumph! not “CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director” of anything in particular. Who are they to tell me? and so on, and so forth, etc…. Did any of them make $1,205,897 in 2005 (with a tidy $7,300,188 in options)?

It clearly takes the big brains to sell those books and lattes, and set those corporate policies. But, personally, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find big chain book outlets getting completely replaced by on-line shopping and mail delivery over the next few years, in exactly the same way that movie theatres are having their lunch eaten more and more already by satellite and cable delivery and DVD rental. I also wouldn’t be particularly surprised, a few years down the road, to find Charles Johnson, Director of Pajamas Media making more than you ever did, Herr CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, old boy.

Some might consider CCPD Josefowicz’s rejoinder alarmist:

The last time I read the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States it seemed pretty clear that the government of these states is ordained and established to “Provide for the common defense,” not Borders Books…

I run a bookstore. A book store. I run a big bookstore. I’ve got 34,000 people, real people, working for me every day in lots of places around the US and in other countries too. Those people owe Borders, every day, one good day’s work. Borders owes the people who work for it a safe day’s work. I’ve got stockholders too, but let’s leave them aside for now, because as much as you may think so, this is not about money. (And yes I caught that business about the fact that we’re trying to open stores in Arab and Muslim countries, but as you may have noticed every country these days contains an Arab and Muslim country.)..

Now you and the other bloggers who are sitting around safe in your undisclosed locations may feel that I have a duty to carry the 46 copies of Free Inquiry magazine with those drawings of the Prophet (Peace be upon his raggedy ass.) in the name of being the last, best bastion of Free Speech in America. I feel your pain, but after due consideration I must respectfully instruct you all to just pound sand.

Who do you think we are up here in Ann Arbor, the 82nd Airborne?..

Having read this self-congratulatory poltroonery, I’d normally be commenting that Mohammed-in-Hell (hit the Danish cartoon link button in my right column) will be shovelling snow the next time I buy a book in Borders, but I might get swatted the way a fellow blogger did:

Bidinotto‘s not buying anymore. Door. Ass. Bang.

Yeah, Borders under Josefowicz is a class act.

Ms. Althouse demonstrates why random blog-reading can be rewarding.

At Technorati, Dave Sifry evaluates the state of the blogosphere in February 2006, comparing MSM links to blog links. Although, with a handful of exceptions, Sifry finds that blogs are still lagging the MSM establishment by a huge order of magnitude, he identifies a beginning point of influence in the quantitative link curve:

This realm of publishing, which I call “The Magic Middle” of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers… these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing.At Technorati, we define this to be the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them… there are about 155,000 people who fit in this group. And what is so interesting to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these blogs often are.

We have 191 links as of today ourselves by Technorati’s count (every blogmeter produces different readings).

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Meanwhile, Trevor Butterworth at the Financial Times is skeptical:

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?…

After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics.

The problem is that few blogs do even that much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November, according to the Nielsen ratings, and the physical paper a reach of 5 million people per weekday, according to Scarborough research.

That is one reason why advertisers are still sticking with the mainstream media. The other has to do with the very basic selling point of blogging. “There is a certain loss of control when it comes to advertising on blogs,” said Mark Wnek, chairman and chief creative officer of Lowe New York. “The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketer.”

The dismal traffic numbers also point to another little trade secret of the blogosphere, and one missed by Judge Posner and all the other blog-evangelists when they extol the idea that blogging allows thousands of Tom Paines to bloom. As Ana Marie Cox says: “When people talk about the liberation of the armchair pajamas media, they tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that the voices with the loudest volume in the blogosphere definitely belong to people who have experience writing. They don’t have to be experienced journalists necessarily, but they write – part of their professional life is to communicate clearly in written words.”

And not every blogger can be a Tom Paine. “People may want a democratic media,” says Cox, “but they don’t want to be bored. They also want to be entertained and they want to feel like they’ve learned something. They want ideas expressed with some measure of clarity.”

Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere – tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

Clive Thompson at New York Magazine thinks deep thoughts on why a certain Tennesee law professor gets 150,000 hits a day, and the rest of us do not. Much too whiney and superficial, but offers some interesting gossip on background stories, money, ad rates, and who gets what hits.

…if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level famous.)

That’s a lot of inequality for a supposedly democratic medium. Not long ago, Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, became interested in this phenomenon—and argued that there is a scientific explanation. Shirky specializes in the social dynamics of the Internet, including “network theory”: a mathematical model of how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such as users of the Web.

To analyze the disparities in the blogosphere, Shirky took a sample of 433 blogs. Then he counted an interesting metric: the number of links that pointed toward each site (“inbound” links, as they’re called). Why links? Because they are the most important and visible measure of a site’s popularity. Links are the chief way that visitors find new blogs in the first place. Bloggers almost never advertise their sites; they don’t post billboards or run blinking trailers on top of cabs. No, they rely purely on word of mouth. Readers find a link to Gawker or Andrew Sullivan on a friend’s site, and they follow it. A link is, in essence, a vote of confidence that a fan leaves inscribed in cyberspace: Check this site out! It’s cool! What’s more, Internet studies have found that inbound links are an 80 percent—accurate predictor of traffic. The more links point to you, the more readers you have. (Well, almost. But the exceptions tend to prove the rule: Fleshbot, for example. The sex blog has 300,000 page views per day but relatively few inbound links. Not many readers are willing to proclaim their porn habits with links, understandably.)

When Shirky compiled his analysis of links, he saw that the smaller bloggers’ fears were perfectly correct: There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound links—the A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none. The employment of movie actors follows the curve, too, because a small group appears in dozens of films while the rest are chronically underemployed. The pattern even emerges in studies of sexual activity in urban areas: A small minority bed-hop, while the rest of us are mostly monogamous.

The power law is dominant because of a quirk of human behavior: When we are asked to decide among a dizzying array of options, we do not act like dispassionate decision-makers, weighing each option on its own merits. Movie producers pick stars who have already been employed by other producers. Investors give money to entrepreneurs who are already loaded with cash. Popularity breeds popularity.

In scientific terms, this pattern is called “homeostasis”—the tendency of networked systems to become self-reinforcing. “It’s the same thing you see in economies—the rich-get-richer problem,” Shirky notes.

We were just discussing the noisy demands of the leftwing blogosphere that democrat senators hold their breaths until they turn blue to prevent the confirmation of Samuel Alito. James Lileks says these rules are for making a fool of yourself, but I’d say he has really just identified several of the characteristic features of the customary literary style of the leftwing blogosphere. It always amazes me that anybody can take the ravings of those foulmouthed trolls seriously:

Make Up Funny Names. If a right-wing figure’s name starts with K, like Kate, by all means call her KKKate. Everyone on the right probably shares the values of the Klan, anyway. Especially if they’re against affirmative action and don’t believe in judging people on the color of their skin. (This goes for the other side, too: Hillary Clinton is so much funnier as “Hitlery.” Wanting single-payer health insurance, wishing to enslave Europe under Aryan yoke — what’s the diff?) Remember: Boil down the object of your hate to a single phrase that betrays your incomprehension of the fundamental issues, but lets others know where you stand right away.

Swear angrily. Not just the classics, but the ones relating to excretion and genitalia. Nothing shows you’re a serious thinker like a torrent of obscenities. It’s the reason Courtney Love is invited to speak to the U.N. so often. Added bonus: Lots of cursing means no one will suspect you’re a Christian. If you are a Christian, you’ll be one of the cool ones who listens to Howard Stern spank lesbian midget strippers. Which automatically means you’re pro-choice, so whatever with the G-d thing.

Hyperbolize everything. Granted, everyone punches a little too hard sometimes; everyone throws too deep. Feisty debate is energizing. Nothing is more boring than the torpid droning you get in the Senate, where solons are duty-bound to call each other “my good friend” even if they were stabbing each other with Bic pens in the cloakroom five minutes before. But the pestilential keyboard pounders had best realize they’re just screaming to the choir. Persuading the middle means acknowledging that the opposition is not composed of subhuman Moorlocks who hope global warming drowns coastal-dwelling gay stem-cell researchers. People on the right may be wrong, but it’s quite possible they don’t actually want a fascistic corporate state where the elite tour the country in giant hovercraft, vaporizing Wal-Mart labor organizers with microwave rays. You could treat them like fellow human beings. But where’s the fun in that?

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs yesterday illuminated the impact of Google’s shameful surrender to censorship at the behest of the Communist government of China by linking

tiananmen – Google Image Search.

AND

tiananmen – Google Image Search in China.

When I visited Little Green Footballs earlier today, and attempted to compare Google image search results, clicking on the China-version link resulted in my browser being automatically redirected to the US version. I found it impossible to access the censored China version.

US url: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

China url: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

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RETRACTION

I leapt to the conclusion that Google had deliberately arranged to preclude US viewers from accessing the China-censored-version of the Tiananmen Image Search, but my wife informed me that the China url worked on her PC.

I found, looking into the matter further, that the url worked in Firefox on my own PC. Subsequent reports from other people tell me that the url works inconsistently in MS Explorer on other machines. It is not possible for me to identify the causes, but it seems most likely that these varying results are occasioned simply by the interactions of different software, and are not the result of any deliberate action by Google.