ValueWiki Blog

This morning the AP is reporting the fire is 40% contained. Metroblogging LA has good ongoing coverage.

Here is a photo my friend took last night when we were watching from the LA river. It’s difficult to shoot at night and get the full effect. Suffice it to say the flames were 60 - 100 feet and spread down the hillside in about 15 minutes.

For those of you who missed it in my post at 1:30am last night, here is video another friend took of one of the hundreds of fire tornadoes. This is from our vantage point on the LA River.

As I type this, I still hear the water helicopters and firetrucks, but people seem more confident today. I was worried about losing power like nothern Los Feliz, but so far so good.

This is just my opinion, but people need to stop setting Los Angeles on fire. My neighborhood is burning down again. They’re evacuating Los Feliz. Everything is barackaded up to three blocks north of my house. I feel safe for now because the evacuees are being kept in the highschool on my street.

I blogged about the fire in my neighborhood last month, as well as the drug bust the month before. So this should be another typical day in Los Angeles. But I’ve never watched a mile long wall of fire sweep down a hillside.

Some friends and I got some Del Taco and some beers and walked to the Los Feliz overpass. I regret not having my camera, but found these on flickr. Each photo is linked to that user’s flickr page for attribution. Here is the view from the overpass.

Apparently the fire was set by a homeless man who fell asleep while smoking. Deer and Coyotes have been spotted fleeing the park.

We watched, transfixed, as flames shot 60 - 100 feet in the air. The air is hot and smoky, and my eyes are still burning from the heat and ash. Raging tornadoes form in the heat, shooting columns of fire, smoke, and cinders hundreds of feet in the air - it’s one of the most incredible things I’ve seen in my life.

The tornadoes shoot up one after another and spin around the hillsides, a hundred feet in diameter and just swallowing everything in a whirling inferno. The embers seem to spin at hundreds of miles per hour. The crowd gasps in wonder like it’s the Fourth of July firework display. We sit along the cement ground of the Los Angeles river sharing beers and cellphone cameras. Strangers feel comfortable talking with one another. I meet my friends and neighbors, people from college, and get text messages from all over the city. I feel a part of Los Angeles.

The police shut down Los Feliz boulevard to use as a fireroad. They are organized and efficient, and Los Angelinos pump their fists in support as the firetrucks thunder past. 75 fire companies have responded so far - we saw trucks from as far away as Monrovia. The helicopters fill their water tanks in Silverlake reservoir, then thunder over my house to make dangerous water dumps into the massive wall of flames.

Squadrons of police cars - 30 at a time - more than I’ve ever seen at one time, sweep through the streets shutting off traffic. They order everyone off the streets. Los Feliz Boulevard is a 6 lane thoroughfare that connects with the 5 Freeway, but tonight it is a fire road for the hundreds of firetrucks. And hopefully a fire wall to protect greater Los Feliz. The LAFD is trying to save the Griffith Park Observatory which just completed years of restoration. Those guys are going to have a tough night.

One of my roommates packed her belongings and left to go stay with her mother. The flames are a good half-mile away and I’m going to wait it out.

Update 1:30am My roommate took this video of one of the fire-tornadoes and placed it on a friend’s website. They were launching every minute or so. She also took this video of the inferno from Los Feliz boulevard. Mayor Villaraigosa is stationed on my street, so I’m assuming things are safe. Boing Boing (a directory of wonderful things) reported looting, but I think things seem orderly. The LA Times Blog has good coverage.

My alarm clock is my cellphone. I’ve become fairly adept and hitting snooze without opening my eyes. But this morning this strategy backfired…

I somehow managed to start my day by fumbling my cellphone into the glass of water on my nightstand.

I desperately tried to resuscitate it with a hairdryer. It was like a scene from ER, with me blowing air into the cellphone and shouting, “I’m not giving up on you!”

I performed emergency surgery, completely dismantling the phone (which always helps) and blow drying the individual pieces. But to no avail.

It was my cellphone’s time to go. So long, little RAZR. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Business Week has the scoop; the number of active blogs in English is decreasing. David Sifry, whose Technorati reports can make it sound like the internet’s 70 million blogs will continue expanding ad infinitum, was called into question by Heather Green at Business Week.

Sifry’s numbers on the actual number of active English language blogs (at least one posting in the past three months) reveal there are really only 15.5 million active blogs worldwide.

Total English Language Blogs in Decline

In May 2006, 36% of all blogs tracked were active, and as of March 2007, that number has fallen to 21%.

In a further sign of decline, the number of daily English language posts has fallen to 495,000 in March from 507,000 in October.

Why Are Blogs in Decline?

ValleyWag offers some speculation on why blogging is levelling off. Namely, after the initial gold rush, people are realizing that successful blogging is time consuming and requires hard work!

The blogosphere is filled with experts touting how-to’s on Part Time Blogging, Full Time Income. I chafe a bit when I come across these as I think they are a bit deceptive and may lead people to blog for the wrong reasons.

Zach and I have never monetized the ValueWiki blog, but I can hardly imagine what our eCPM would need to be to justify the mind-numbing hours it takes to research and format a post like Top 100 Finance Blogs or Top 50 Web 2.0 Blogs. I’m not convinced that ad income is a good rationale for anyone to begin blogging. It could very well be that blogging simply because you enjoy it is the only sustainable motivation.

Blogging is a Time Suck

I think I went into blogging with some misconceptions about the time requirement. Tracking my traffic and feedreaders, I suspect I need at least 10 posts a week to retain my readership, and at least 15 posts a week to grow my readership. This really stretches the definition of “part time.” It’s not that I’m a slow writer so much as a slow reader…staying current on the blogosphere requires a lot of daily reading.

I also notice that most of the “A List” Bloggers came early to the race. Developing a loyal readership was arguably easier in 2005 than it is in 2007. I imagine it will be increasingly difficult for new bloggers to penetrate into the ranks of the A-List. The increased competition for eyeballs may be a part of the reason why new blogs are declining.

Rowing Upstream

Growing blog traffic and technorati rank is like rowing a boat upstream; if you’re not going forward you’re going backwards. If I go a lazy week without posting anything noteworthy, my technorati rank slides quickly since the rest of the blogosphere is continuing to build their link cache. For those like me who make the mistake of occasionally following their stats and rankings, it is a never-ending arms race!

I’m not surprised to view these charts of the blogosphere plateauxing. Like other internet booms, we may be entering a period of “consolidation.”

I would be curious to see numbers on average time bloggers spend blogging. If anyone has these numbers, or would like to provide their own, please drop a note in the comments.

8:31pm…done blogging today…

I am going to be out of town again, tomorrow! So this week will not go down as my most prolific week of blogging. I am under the work tidal wave. Hope to swim to the surface soon.

In the meantime, look at Jimmy Wales’ travel schedule. I want his job! Netherlands, India, China, Switzerland, Australia, South Africa…

…And I am now digging my way out from a pile of work.

To all the people who I owe emails to, please do not form a lynch mob.

By the way, San Francisco was awesome.

The following interview is with a Chinese citizen who wishes to remain anonymous. “Anon” found this blog through Wikipedia and contacted me following my coverage of Chinese government corruption. Here is a fascinating look at internet censorship from inside China.

Finally, for those fluent in Chinese common language, I refer you to Chinese Wikipedia, and Andrew Lih’s brief English language summary of Chinese Wikipedia.

 
The Interview…

 
Jon: How do Chinese access Wikipedia?

Anon: Chinese are able to access wikipedia using a proxy or something like Tor. This is a side effect of government censorship. But this is somewhat time consuming, so we won’t do it everyday, and not everyone likes wiki.

There are at least 3 levels of censorship:

1. Blocking the domain name. It is easy to counter, one can just type the correct ip.

2. Blocking the ip, then we need a proxy

3. The routers will unpack the http packets to check them automatically, so we need Tor.

Wikipedia is in the second category, but Tor works with it too. Unfortunately wikipedia can’t be edited through a proxy.

Jon: What is Tor?

Anon: See you don’t know it? Cause you don’t have to deal with censorship .

Tor is “An anonymous Internet communicating system”. Actually there are many of them. It is not the commonly used one, but I won’t name the others.

Jon: Why Do You Think ValueWiki is Blocked in China?

Anon: I can’t find out why they block ValueWiki. I don’t think you have any topic which will interest CCP firewall. They only block those talking about politics, and the blocked site are usually famous (in politics) or in Chinese. May be it is a mistake, or because your ISP hosts another site which is blocked, or back luck.

Jon: How Much is the CCP Censoring the Internet in China?

Anon: They block many sites but I think they fail to block information. Also CCP LOVES the Internet, so they can’t block it entirely. Also thanks to techniques provided by American companies, they can go for this solution.

There is a new phenomenon in recent two or three years, many Chinese talk freely on Internet. Internet is always more free then other medium but I mean even main Internet portals like sina.com are somewhat free now. The government no long tries to cover disaster death numbers. Scholars, lawyers criticize corruption, tax collectors, one-child policy openly. The comments under those topics are even more brave. If you can read Chinese, you may find you can’t believe what you see in a Communism country.

Also you can find Maoism zealots on the internet too, while it is not very easy to find one in normal life, maybe it is the nature of Internet.

Jon: What Information Gets Censored in China?

Anon: I think the key is: CCP isn’t zealot of Marxism, it doesn’t censor internet to protect communism, instead it do it to protect its current member’s interest. So something you may think they should censor, but they don’t, something else you may think they shouldn’t, but they will. And the system is not managed by a single person, so the rules may be different in different cases.

The topics about 6.4, F lg are among the topics ranked top in the black list. You don’t have to be blocked if you talk about Mao.

Jon: Do American companies engage in censorship?

Anon: The system uses man power to review sites, and also employs automatic checking by using some “cutting edge” techniques provided by US companies. It may be the biggest use case of “advanced firewall techniques”.

Censorship gives some local companies advantage over their American counterpart, because they can adapt to it more easily. For example, although there is not public papers talking about it (who dare to talk publicly about this after all), I believe this untold secret is one of the reasons why Baidu.com can be ” the only company kicks google’s ass on earth”. If someone use google to search something, it can crash due to censorship. This is very annoying, especially when the searcher may just want to find some normal sites. Baidu doesn’t have this problem because its system “cleans” the results at its core. Baidu can also have better “government relationship” due to this. Also there are many Internet rumors accusing google is censoring the Internet, from those who don’t understand what is happening. It seems to be the case because google will crash while baidu will give some results.

Jon: Can you talk about Google.cn?

Anon: Google.cn is a “cleaned” search engine like those provided by Chinese companies.

But one will try to use a proxy if he believe Google can provide more information, he will use baidu.com if he don’t care censorship. So no one use it, actually many Chinese don’t know there is Google.cn.

If someone tries to search some blocked sited using google, the browser will redirect to google.cn sometimes, but most time it will simply crash.

Jon: When I was in Yunnan, I heard frequent rumors of Chinese journalists disappearing for publishing articles critical of the CCP. Can you confirm this?

Anon: I heard this, but I can’t “confirm” it because what I got are rumors too. I can only say I believe CCP can do this and have done this, but they do this less then before. If they will arrest everyone who have wrote articles critical of CCP, they really need much more prisons to hold them.

And you don’t need to worry about your personal security in China, Americans are at the top of CCP’s “human importance ranking”, following by other foreigners.

Jon: When I was in China, I was amazed at how many people were learning English and interested in America. How do you think people in China feel about America?

Anon: It is easy to tell that Chinese love American culture. You have seen it. American movies, songs, TV shows, pc games are very popular . NBA has MANY fans here. And I think globalization is more welcome there than other developing country, globalization sometimes means American style, at least here.

American politics? It is harder to tell. While Chinese are impressed by American wealth for decades, and now average Chinese begin to admire American democracy, China is still defined as “competitor” by big brother Bush, and he is not popular. You can expect there are some die hard communism zealots too.

Jon: Do you believe China will someday Have Democracy?

Anon: Sure China will have Democracy someday, isn’t every American supposed to believe Democracy will dominate all the world ? Many Chinese believe democracy is the true solution, and I have reason to believe that poorer Chinese believe this even more cause they hate CCP much more than richer people. But you have to understand that because Chinese was living in miserable conditions for centuries, and they life are just getting better and getting somewhat freedom, so an armed revolution is not a good idea. After all, if most people can’t get true information, this type of revolution will surely create a new Mao. CCP itself seized the power in the name of democracy by fooling people.

Better life is why China didn’t collapse as someone wished, it is also the reason of why Chinese want democracy more than ever. Chinese live better in recent two years, and can get more information freely. The government give out some information which was censored in past year. For example, it is a high rank officer who pointed out that the government wastes more money on itself (30% of government spending) than the sum of Chinese education, medication, technical spending. I mean current government is not worse than the old one. But why Chinese criticize government more then ever years? I believe it is because when more Chinese can feed themselves they have “luxury” to ask for democracy and equality. Also because the openness of Internet,
it is almost impossible for government to stop all information sources.

I believe better life, better education will cause more people believe in democracy, may be eventually create a democracy government.

Really thanks for you care about China, as you said, I have found many Americans are fascinated with China, are most Americans or I am simply lucky?

Jon: I think most Americans are fascinated with China and look forward to China opening its culture to the world. Thank you for talking with ValueWiki!

April 11, Anon responds: About the relationship between American companies and censorship, I want to say something. The government does need its own stuff to implement some parts of the firewalls, but ip filters, smart firewalls (which can unpack http packages) are invented and provided by Amercian companies. I am not accusing them, if there are not these techniques, maybe the government will simply shut down the Internet. They have tried to shut down google for some days.

No offense to every other person I know on the internet, but I just want to officially go on record saying that I have searched my feelings, and found that I have no urge to twitter.

I got the flu this week and spent an inordinant amount of time watching 24. I decided it was time to compile some of the internet’s greatest 24 links, for any ValueWiki readers awesome enough to watch this show.

The Internet’s Most Badass 24 Links

10. Jack Bauer Top 100 Facts

Some gems…

* Once, someone tried to tell Jack Bauer a “knock knock” joke. Jack Bauer found out who was there, who they worked for, and where the goddamned bomb was.

* Jack Bauer’s calender goes from March 31st to April 2nd, no one fools Jack Bauer.

* Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

9. Jack Bauer Kill Count

This site provides a video and still shot of each kill, along with the method. For instance, on Day 4 Jack killed 13 terrorists using a HK USP Compact with Silencer. Then in hour 14 he took off the silencer and killed 17 more terrorists with the Compact. This doesn’t include his other killing methods, such as neck-breaking. All told, Jack’s body count on Day 4 was 44. That’s one kill every half hour; not bad for a heroine addict.

8. Dave Barry’s 24 Blog

Humorist Dave Barry watches each episode and comments in real time. This is because 24 is all about real-time. Hundreds of readers comment every week, and Dave provides good pictures of the actors such Keifer Sutherland, Powers Booth, Ricky Shroeder, and Mary Lynn Rajskub.

7. The Jack Bauer Tracker

A map of all of Jack’s locations over the past few seasons. The guy who built this probably has level 5 clearance from division.

6. Wikipedia

Wikipedia has surprisingly thorough entries on all major and minor characters from all 6 seasons.

5. Jack Bauer’s Politics

Time Magazine thinks 24 is conservative propaganda. The New Yorker got their panties twisted last month over torture on 24. For what it’s worth, The American Conservative takes a neutral stance in “What Would Jack Bauer Do?“. This Blogger thinks Jack Bauer is some kind of sissy Democrat. Personally, I think the current season is leaning way left, and other seasons have leaned right.

4. Jack Bauer’s Twitter Page

I don’t know how Jack has time to post to twitter during an international crisis. I guess he uses his awesome PDA.

3. Jack Bauer versus Chuck Norris

Site devoted to discussion and analysis of this important issue.

2. 24Quotes.com

Example: “You’re going to tell me what I want to know, it’s just a question of how much you want it to hurt.” - Jack, Season 5

1. YouTube

Some videos that are awesome.

* Damn it!
* Catchphrases
* Jack Bauer Animated
* Jack Drops the F-Bomb
* The Vampire Kill
* Brokeback CTU

Brokeback CTU…

Please note, Season 6 is pretty lame, and 24 is dangerously close to Jumping the Shark. Vote on JumpingTheShark.com to make your voice heard. Maybe Jack Bauer will go torture the writers until they get their act together.

This week, I’ve been enjoying the latest flu that everyone’s been catching. If you must know, it’s a delightful cocktail of fever, fatigue, and phlegm. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about how the internet is weird.

Being sick, I was worried that ValueWiki would go down the tubes if I ignored it for a few days. But, much to my ego’s dismay, this is not the case. Bizarrely, ValueWiki is suddenly experiencing record traffic.

It’s as if the internet is saying, “Hooray! Jon is sick!”

Google’s page rank is constantly updating. The next pagerank export is estimated to be around April 15. I will be curious to find out what’s going on.

In the meantime, more chicken soup and reruns of 24.