Our Amazing Future

Steve Davidson’s next upgrade to the Amazing Stories site is likely to be an event calendar listing conventions, readings, classes etc. There is a fan who knows something about building the base!

Meanwhile the Amazing blog offers something new every day.

Mike Brotherton has a very clever post about How To Host A Big Bang Theory Party.

Coincidentally, I saw his name earlier today on Technorati when I was looking at the rankings trying to understand why my blog scores much better in the realm of Comics (336th) than Books (827th). Brotherton was leading the “Top 10 Fallers” list for having lost the most Books Authority points – but his blog remains among the Top 100 in the category, with five times more Books Authority points than File 770.

I hope people will take Leah Zeldes’ advice about preserving fanhistorical material in their possession. One thing she recommends is —

If you don’t want to do the work yourself, there are tons of fans out there willing to help. Most notably, the Florida Association for Nucleation And Conventions (F.A.N.A.C.), Inc., has a wonderful collection of scanned photos and printed materials and a small but dedicated cadre of volunteers devoted to putting things online.

Argo, Technorati and Me

Technorati specializes in the inscrutable business of ranking over a million blogs according to their “authority,” their impact on the blogosphere.

For a long time File 770‘s ranking has been pinned in the 15000 range. Compare that, if you will, to Scalzi’s Whatever. Today it ranks 2187 — but it has been as high as 130.

Ranking 15,000th means showing on the list between such internet luminaries as Slot Car News and Budget Travel Phillipines. No reflected glory there, unlike the day Whatever’s ranking of 401 threw it into a tie with Roger Ebert’s blog.

But for the first few weeks of October, File 770 embarked on a giddy ascent of Technorati’s list that seems to have been directly linked to the worldwide publicity for and immediate popularity of Ben Affleck’s movie Argo.

It’s not like I wrote that much about Argo, or more than the average number of people read those posts, or linked to them. However, I noticed that for many days Technorati had seemingly locked on one of my Argo posts as being File 770’s most recent, though in reality it had that status for a day at most. And while that post was locked on, here’s what was happening to my ranking —

October 9, 2012
Rating of 124
Ranking of 9922

October 10, 2012
Rating of 124
Ranking of 9003

October 16, 2012
Rating of 132
Ranking of 8033

October 17, 2012
Rating of 131
Ranking of 7623

October 18, 2012
Rating of 131
Ranking of 6891

October 19, 2012
Rating of 131
Ranking of 5996

October 24, 2012
Rating of 138
Ranking of 5632
(Between Steve Sailer Sucks and BTB Fitness.)

Then overnight on October 25, File 770 plunged back down the charts to 16413, just one notch above the Ashley Tisdale Fan Site. Apparently the market for Argo-inspired posts had crashed. 

One other peculiarity is that along the way, in addition to my subsidiary rankings for Entertainment (2155), Comics (485), Books (1258) and Science (1837) the system gratuitously added “Politics,” for which I ranked surprisingly well (7977) considering my studious effort to avoid ever touching on the subject.

Nor can I explain why File 770 ranks better among comics blogs than books – all the credit probably belongs to James Bacon for pointing me at his Forbidden Planet blog.