Snowman On Fire

Attention bloggers and particularly WordPress users: WordCampNY is now open for business, just one month away.

Details: Sunday, October 5, 101 Park Avenue, New York, 4th Floor.

I’m proud to announce that my employer, Sun Microsystems, will be hosting the event (we’re donating use of the space), and I’m looking forward to seeing some fellow sports bloggers there. Tickets are $30, and include lunch (the “no eatin’ no meetin’” rule is firmly enforced when I’m involved). There are great speakers covering video blogs, security, and WordPress innards, and we’re working on a final speaker from — the NHL itself.

Now only if we can get *ookies there we’ll have Pookie & Schnookie to meet for cookies (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Writing is much like a sport: if you don’t exercise and practice regularly, you start to flail and eventually struggle to find even a few worthy ideas. My work blog has suffered from lack of attention for the past two months as travel, business management and lack of attention conspire to make it harder to get going again.

I’m determined to stay as fresh as possible, though, and think it’s high time to tackle one or more of the four writing projects that sit in various states of disarray around my laptop, desk, three notebooks and a sheaf of printed pages and scribbled notes. I’ve thought of an adaptation of Bruce Springsteen’s Jungleland, interpreted thirty-odd years later using only social media. That’s a zygote of an idea that’s unlikely to gestate any more. I have the oft-thought-of, infrequently-contributed to hockey book, now idling at about 60 pages and in desperate need of some motivation. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received has come from Cory Doctorow, who tries to write a bit each day, typically 300-500 words. That doesn’t sound like much until you attempt it every day as a job. Five hundred good words are quite different from, say, a dozen emails of fifty imprecisely chosen words.

My idea for a sci-fi short story inverts an axiom of space opera sci-fi in which quantum mechanics can be used to send information faster than the speed of light. What if the no communication theorem that makes this idea the stuff of fiction wasn’t true, and in fact, you could instantaneously transmit information between two entangled quantum bits? But what if the entanglement depended upon normal randomness and observer independence, and you were able to effectively confused the transmssion by changing the observer’s state? OK, this has nothing to do with hockey or baseball or golf, but it’s a project that gets random brain activity when nothing else is going on.

Most likely candidate to get some attention, and soon, is a short story that I’ve outlined and sketched in to about 10% completion. It started when pondering why hockey players (like most athletes) have innumerable superstitions, and what would happen if general managers and coaches played by the same rules. At the time the idea hit me (around Christmas) I was hoping the Devils would shake things up a bit, and this was one of those random thoughts that floated in over the mental transom. So in the interest of setting goals and sticking to something of schedule in the interests of rebuilding my writing chops, I think I’l work on Like Heaven But Colder, a short story in six parts. If I can write one part every week to ten days, that takes us into free agency and the formal off-season when there should be real hockey content available for comment.

The story will be available under a Creative Commons license with only some rights reserved, so if you want to take it and turn it into a comic, a set of drawings, a derviative work of fiction, or anything else you want to share with puck heads on a non-commercial basis, go for it. I guess I have to write something before you can actually go for anything, so the puck is back in my end.

Got this incredibly slick stick from Meredith Gran, author of the Octopus Pie online comic. She asked readers to send her hand-written notes so she could see others’ scribbles; what we got back was a personalized note backing mass-produced iconography. “Team Asthma” is how my wife has referred to my hockey endeavors over the years, interspersed with “Inhaler League.” All terms of endearment of course. I doubt the American Pediatric Society or the NHL are going to call me for public service appearances when probable Cup-bound heavy breather Gary Roberts fills the role nicely. If you’re wondering what the intersection of Brooklyn based comics, aging NHL stars and even older left wings looks like, it has roots in this four-month old comic that cemented me as an OP fan.

I check the logs on this blog every few days just to get a sense of what kind of topics generate traffic, and how people find my blog amidst the millions of voices on the net. I’ve discovered some interesting and perhaps perturbing truths:

Google AdSense is really self-referential. Before rebuilding this site, I had an ad click-through rate of small fraction of a percent, but I defniitely had click-throughs. And those clicks shaped the types of ads that appeared under each entry: some NJ Devils related things, ticket broker ads, occasionally pointers to eBay auctions. Once I rebuilt the site, I’ve been getting somewhat moronic ads based on the “snowman” keyword and the “on fire” modifier, including fire equipment, Frosty the snowman related electronic kitsch, and other things that register somewhat above oral surgery in terms of interest to the average snowman reader (all two dozen of you). I’m not asking anyone to click, because (a) that violates Google Adense’s terms of service (it’s a blatant form of click fraud) and (b) I do not want more stupid ads like these littering the site, and clicking on them only makes Google think that “they’re working”. I’ll point this out to my Google friends; if you are displaying 400 ads a month and not getting any click throughs, maybe it’s time to change the sort algorithm?

In response to a promotion from the hosting company that keeps the snowman chill, I signed up for a Google Adwords account. This is the flip side of AdSense — Adsense displays the ads; AdWords lets you pick keywords and phrases to which to attach your ads. My one-liner advertising the Snowman On Fire blog has been shown about 50 times this week, without a single click — so I haven’t paid for any of those displays, but at the same time, the net effect has been exactly what I paid for. Just for chuckles, I sponsor some of the popular mis-spellings that would take people to a Devils related blog, like “Patrick Elias”, and I get more displays there than on the normalized keywords. But the opacity of the process bothers me: Google decides what each click is worth, and one good click might exhaust my whopping advertising budget (best described as “a Hamilton per month”). With a small budget, I’m precluded from ever displaying in a high-click value market, like someone searching for “Stanley Cup,” because any click would exceed my ability to pay for it. But this seems to point at the converse of my click-through problem in AdSense — why not let market forces determine the value of clicks, so that the overall value of click-throughs increases, rather than assigning some known only to the Googleplex value that makes the market slightly more murky that NHL caponomics?

As much as I’m aggravated by Google AdSense, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Project Wonderful. PW is the ad engine that powers most of the online comics I frequent, helping the authors pay for, well, electricity and beer, I think. I put a footer with three buttons at the bottom of the page, and it turns out that my few page views a day are generating a steady stream of revenue. Not much - a few cents a day, but more than I’m seeing from displaying irrelevant and irreverant Google ads in the same context. The big difference is that PW charges by the day, and sets a market price for display ads using a public auction. You can make your own decisions about the value of having an ad show up for particular content, because you see the style, shape and sequence of the content. There’s full transparency, and that makes the advertising process both wonderful and a self-directed fulfillment.

And for the cosmic coincidence of the day: I love seeing readers arrive here through some tortuous, circuitous path. Earlier this week, someone searched for the phrase “I will praise him the rest of my days,” a phrase usually reserved in our household for Marty Brodeur or Patrik Elias. However, there was a typo in the search, and the phrase “I will parise him the rest of my days” landed the searcher at the snowman’s feet. I only see actual page loads, so I know that the person who went in search of praise found a praised Parise here — something made the person click, and for that action, I’m happy for the rest of the day.

I finally did something I swore I would do weeks ago: I finished putting up all of the posts that were eaten or lost when I upgraded my blog site, and then decided that I was going to tackle the problem of cached links to the old site. When I first started using WordPress, I used the numerical indices for blogs, so links to entries had the form
http://agrosnowman.com/snowman/?p=34.
Not at all indicative of the content or potential puns included in the title. Upon re-install, I chose the compacted title as a permalink for each entry, which seemed like a good idea at 1:00 AM on a Saturday night when my wife was annoyed that I was typing rather than doing something more, well, productive.

After spending a few hours looking at PHP books, searching a bit, and some trial and error, I actually wrote a piece of code for the first time in about five years, and more miraculously, it works! If you go to one of the “old” entries via a cached link from any search engine, the little code snipped I put up will map that “p=##” mess into a proper blog title, and then redirect you. Writing code has never been my strong suit, and I still find it somewhat surprising that my prose writing has far outpaced my code writing when 25 years ago I couldn’t conceive of that ordering under any circumstances.

In any order, approach, or way, I’m pronouncing the Snowman back to full strength, with all previous content once again available, and in theory I shouldn’t drop anyone on the cold hard floor of the Internet. Now if only the Yankees’ bullpen could manage the same.

The hockey off-season brings a surfeit of warm-weather activities: golf, baseball, rollerblading, and my favorite, reading. I don’t find it at all incongrous to read hockey books when it’s 90 degrees and humid. To help share the warmth, I collected my list of favorite hockey books in a sidebar page, and I’ll get around to updating it in the next few weeks.

Just finished Jack Falla’s Home Ice and Saved. I think you have to read them in that order; Home Ice is about the joys of owning a backyard rink and is a collection of his essays and stories, all true. Saved is a work of fiction, but like all good fiction, a little bit of the author makes a celebrity cameo appearance. It’s especially appropriate for this playoff season, but I won’t spoil the ending.

Several years ago, the NHL decided to make a push for “non traditional media” coverage, given that it was barely registering fifth in a four-sport nation (NFL, MLB, NBA and the NHL being the “top four”, although NASCAR generates more of an audience in the top four spots). Since then, the use of video and the YouTube deal, encouragement of bloggers and even a zero-cost blogging infrastructure and fan page system on nhl.com have helped move this idea along. The basis for the non-print, non-television coverage push was that NHL fans tend to be more technologically literate, more affluent, and more inclined to consume multiple media sources than other fans. Which is another way of saying that if you can afford tickets at the Rock or the Garden, you probably own a computer and high speed internet connection.

During this rather tortuous season, I found myself reading Tom Guilitti’s Fire & Ice nearly every day, more for his insights into practices, post-game reports and press conferences that made me feel like I was there. Tom is the Pat St. John (in his WNEW-FM prime) of the sports blogging world — when he’s on, you feel like you’re talking hockey with your best friend, even though you’re talking to a screen and nobody is listening (sounds like a Linkin Park song, sorry).

I also began regular consumption of John Fischer’s In Lou We Trust blog, and John was kind enough to send props the Snowman’s way. Unlike the real sports journalism world, bloggers tend to nod to each other except when we’re stealing content and themes. John writes like the guy who sits down low on the glass and cheers as much for good defensive plays as flashy goals. Rounding out my four corners of Devils dailies were the five-man 2-Man Advantage show and the iconoclastic, self-deprecating, and vocabulary-creating duo at Interchangeable Parts. Along with my morning dose of comics, these became my sports pages, editorial columns, and entertainment.

Now if only Lou & Jeff would figure out that there are quite a few readers and writers out here who are willing to make up for what constitutes marketing in the Mulberry Street Gang by promoting the team, the arena and the entire league. Why not have a “Blog with the Devils skate”, or a regular, weekly e-mail Q&A between bloggers and players (and management, if they actually use the web)? Invite the bloggers in for a virtual press conference, held with a webcam, a conference call line and some links off of the team website.

Looking through the statistics for this blog — which are minimal and very short-term, as I don’t pay for anything other than hosting space — most of the traffic comes from searches, and some of that from image searches. Pictures I’ve taken at practice, or at the Rock, show up in Google image search and result in traffic to the site. This is the new marketing — it’s not about reaching the people who already know where to find the Devils web site, nhl.com or can navigate the side roads around Newark’s Broad Street — it’s about finding the folks who were looking for something else and happened upon something Devilishly interesting. There are so many low-cost, high-return activities in which we — bloggers, aspiring writers, or just general Devils hangers-on — would participate. Just open the door to the bench, guys.

I’m going to ruminate more about this season, think about my wish list for new blood to be squeezed from this Rock, comment on the playoffs, the state of hockey, the post-season antics of my own NJ Ice Dragons HNA team, and whatever joy I can find in the Mets, Yankees and Olympics this summer. After all, I want to see how the Kathryn Bertine story ends.

I’ve been trying to squeeze the most out of the latest version of WordPress while simultaneously moving, converting, converging and editing down old content. I’ve taken down the old homepage of agrosnowman.com and replaced it with a pointer to the blog; anything of interest there now shows up as a page on the right-hand nav bar here.

In an attempt to get more readership, and after that, more sponsorship, I also signed up as a Project Wonderful ad destination. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see three ad boxes that are up for bid; anyone who wants to sponsor the site can do so at the “market rate” determined by a continuous auction for those three spots. It’s one of the features I like in R. Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties comic web site, so I followed suit and put a similar footer here. Now all I need are sponsors: the going market rate to run a footer ad here is whatever epsilon charge about absolute zero is at PW — probably a dime a day (you could feed a starving child, or support a well-fed Devils fan).

Next steps: bringing over the entire hockey book list as a page, editing the theme a bit more to make it more red&black friendly, adding some custom graphics, and of course loading the last 60 or so entries that got lost in the shuffle.

I’ll admit to a bit of off-hours entertainment this week that didn’t involve Devils games: I started reading Questionable Content, an aboslutely brilliant web comic, and was so intrigued by the few panels that I saw that I went back to square one (post one, if you must) and began reading the whole strip.

This is the beauty of web comics — unlike something in your local newspaper, you don’t enter storylines without context. You can absorb the crispy goodness of someone else’s warped mind and see the whole thing evolve. I’ve been digesting about 150 strips a day, with a goal to get caught up to early 2008 before I head off to China next week. This is definitely a strong-R rated strip, and there are references that I’d have to explain to more than a few of my friends. But after spending reasonable amounts of time in the 413 area code, and working at a college radio station for a few years, I can say with certainty that QC captures the mash-up of both. Perfectly.

When you’re reading something, and one of the characters reminds you of a good friend in every way, then the illustrator and writer have connected with you such that art imitates life. It makes for a good story, even if your own life doesn’t have the same number of parental warning labels affixed.

Things in snowman-land are slow, and I’ve already opened a trouble ticket with the powers that be (or more correctly, the iPower that hosts this site). Looks like some database performance issues since they moved my web site to a new hosting farm. I’m learning plenty about mySQL, the database that holds all of the content, which provides a nice crossover between work and play: my employer, Sun Microsystems, is in the process of closing an acquisition for mySQL AB. Time to get smart both ways.