Bringing Sexy Back to the 90-9-1 Neighbourhood

The Runcible Beast says thank you

(Dear Blog, I suck.) Leave it to me, the habitual blog neglecter to write a New Year’s entry 11 weeks late. Oh Merciful Zeus. My sister warned me that if I continued to churn out link love / self-love promos, she’d stop reading my blog. Next, a friend complained, “You used to blog about sexy food… sort of. Now, it’s a blog about a c-a-t.” (Ah, mon ami. Any day now, I’ll be blogging about c-a-t food. Or sexy c-a-t food. Or The Effects of Sub-Violet Light Spectrum Deprivation on the Development of Fruit Flies. But you’d still read my science experiment.) And so I return to the science fair to observe a blog milestone (2222+ comments) and to fulfill a blog meme tag. Meme tag virgin no more. I fended off that growing tag list since 2006, but today I succumbed to Momentary Evil Meme Effect.

After this mile high entry, my sis will probably stop reading my blog. I’ve been away from my blog for so long that I feel like… reintroducing myself. Hi? I’m going to run a “Max the LOLcat Photo Caption Contest”. Come back for details.

90-9-1 in the title refers to the 90-9-1 rule in Jakob Nielsen’s scientific research which found: “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Ah, that explains why I can have 900+ subscribers and each post gets only about 20 to 60 comments. No… I still don’t get it. Gah… math.

The 2,222th comment was hollered by one of my regular readers, Fendi whose blog is all about his Fabulous, Fashionable, Fearless Fendi self, striking a pose and giving good Face. (What?! I can borrow from a Madonna song if I want to… Hmm… I could’ve titled this entry, “Like A Meme Virgin, Touched 591 Times”.) Special shout-outs to Ann (who threatened to pester me for updates) and Lil who commented, “I’d reckon you’d make a great sales blogger — you’d do it with the same sort of dignity that escorts do. You can be both empowering and a ho.” Bwahahaha!

I always said that if I ever did a meme, I’d totally make it worth my pain time. For the record, I do NOT hate blog meme tags, despite the fact that they can be both a form of flattery… and ahem, a curse. Nota bene, if you tagged my blog’s lazy ass, rest assured (or not) that I’ll definitely do ‘em… some day. Time moves s-s-slowly in my blog, so if you tagged me in 2006, the tag will eventually pop up in my blog in… 2008. I maintain a big to-do list. Yes, I suck.

The tag I have chosen to do first was assigned by a blogger who goes by the moniker, “Pusa“, the Filipino word for “c-a-t”. Uh-huh. I’m not exactly sure what I wrote to deserve the Sexy Blogger Award (coz mentioning the word “porn” every so often doesn’t count) and Beautiful Blogger Award. But… thanks.

I was given the Sexy Blogger Award Blog Awards Winner - Beautiful Blogger Award

And the WICKED PART of this post? I tag… y’all!!! EVERYONE who’s left a comment on my blog (minus spammers and pingbacks/trackbacks). Statistics: 2,229 comments (including 54 by me) for 93 posts in 1.5 years (not including this entry), 591 commenters (not including myself), and 900+ feed subscribers.

I used a couple of nifty WordPress plugins in combination to help me to compile a huge list (Top Commentators and Broken Link Checker) along with some good old fashioned manual labour for checking quality. Doing this lengthy exercise helped me to rethink my overly generous comments policy of removing nofollow on all author links in comments, which attracted a lot of spammers and overly aggressive SEO types. (I might reinstate nofollow. Sigh.)

Go forth, Sexify, Beautify & Justify My Love! But if you don’t want to TAG OTHERS, just consider this a thank-you. 591 TAGGED (96% personal blogs).

[ UPDATE May 18, 2008: Sorry folks... I decided to remove the ginormous list after a pal explained to me that the Google gods might consider it as a link farm. So, who's #1 on the list? My good pal, Evilgenius (65 comments)! She also topped my previous 1000+ comments milestone list. Thanks, y'all. ]

But after reading this, if you think I only care about “quantity”, you’d be wrong. The list helps me to determine who’s reading my blog and to focus my gaze on them. I sometimes follow those who follow me (even during my absences).