journal features

this website is a decade old, I'll probably end it

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2015.02.15

Good ol' emuu dot net, my second website, is now ten years and four months old – and I think I might retire it. Google has once again cut my "pagerank" from its once not-so-loft 3 to a zero, and I'm no longer getting traffic. And I think it's time to strip it down to maybe a "best of" site with just 10% of the pages available. After all, only a fraction of the site seems to be helping anyone (the "how to pages") or entertaining them (e.g. the bird shit record) and the rest is perennially ignored. So I can hardly claim that it's doing anyone any good.

My original site was etherlabs.net; I still have the domain, and in fact still use it for trying new technologies and demo'ing things. But emuu.net was supposed to be a personal website and I have to face the fact that even in 2004 it was probably of a dying breed. I wrote here that I do this rather than Facebook but honestly the thought of screwing around with Google to have "their trust in my website" restored for the umpteenth is frankly tiring.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton