The general advice for newbie bloggers is to submit their blog to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. I have so far limited myself to facebook but have decided to expand to the technocrati due to the coolness of their name (oh and they are the uber site of blogs as well). I have also subscribed to my own rss feed, how sad is that?

I think I stumbled on the ghostly cyberspace footprint of my PhD supervisor yesterday. Of course it might be a figment of my imaginationn, but it left a most unpleasant feeling. I decided to start another blog about food and recipes, I was going to call it ‘Special Circumstance’ in honour of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, as in food recipes for special circumstance of being redundant and not having any money. I decided to do this one on blogger, since I’m trying to get Google to like me, but it would not allow me to call it that, apparently the URL had been taken. I checked out the site, and I found PhD Supervisor’s attempt at blogging (only two entries, from 2002)! I admit the evidence that it was him might appear flimsy, the first name (that’s all that was there to identify the blogger) fit, and the topic, Church of England politics, was something that he had strong opinions on, but that is not much to go on.

But the posts had a very strong psychic signature of him. Believe me, once you’ve done a PhD in somebody’s lab, and had them correct your thesis, their mental processes are indelibly imprinted on your mind. As soon as I started reading, long dormant memories came rushing back. It was a very unpleasant experience, not because he was a terrible supervisor, but there was a very strong yuck factor. As if I had walked in on him naked! yuck!

Surfing blogger posts led to a rather positive conclusion, the blogosphere is littered with with the bodies of dead posts. This is rather reassuring, the numbers suggested for the quantity of posts are truly staggering, apparently every 6th human being is a blogger (and that includes babies). However, if these numbers include blogs that have been long abandoned, then the statistics are not as scary as they appear for a wannabe like me.

It is rather annoying that nothing is being done to tidy up the dead blogs. I really like the name ‘Special Circumstances’, and yet I can’t use it because it’s being wasted on two short posts from 2002. I think blogger should do something to retire blogs that have been abandoned that long and release the URLs. Incidentally it is rather scary that PhD supervisor and I came up with the same name. All this is very disturbing.

Apart from trying to start another blog, I have started making lenses on Squidoo. The pay system is pretty complex, I think it’s geared quite a lot to selling things from Amazon and Ebay. It has a lot of mods for putting in photos, there is even a flckr mod, and an ebay mod. I now have movies of geckos and frogs on the lenses! I wish somebody would actually come and see them! I have also been reading up on backlinks, ahh the backlinks, I have made some, why is nobody seeing them? There are some squidoo specific sites where one can put one’s lens to make it more ‘visible’, I have tried lensroll, and also SquiDirectory – A Squidoo directory.