Welcome, New Users, to The Daily Kos. This Diary is intended to help you orient yourself to the site and ask questions about how to use it.
In the Body you will find some links intended to get you participating more effectively. Also in the Body this week is a discussion of Don Imus Diaries at The Daily Kos (dKos).
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Don Imus Diaries
Wow, there sure seem to be a lot of Diaries about Don Imus. Just how many are there actually?
We'll use our good friend Search with the sid Restricted Query to help us out. Since the offending remarks were made on Wednesday the 4th we'll start looking there.
Those numbers look really authoritative all lined up like that, but there are some problems with my methodology.
The Treachery of Numbers
The only practical way to Search for statistics of this type is by using swish-e Searches (also called 'Database' Searches in Search Help). Unless your particular search falls within one of the time periods you can select using the From: To: boxes the standard way of teasing out this information is using the 'story id number' or 'sid' to isolate days.
Each Story and Diary is assigned a unique identification number in the dKos Archive. By an amazing coincidence these numbers are based in part on the publication date of the Diary. THEY ARE NOT DATE STAMPS. To the database their most important quality is that they are unique and some programmer made the decision that a good way to generate uniqueness was to incorporate the publication date.
So far so good.
The problem is that although this number, part of the 'sid', is supposed to be based on the day you push the 'Publish' button in the Diary Editor (called the 'Evil Diary Editor' or 'EDE' by some), in some cases it is based on the date the Diary was initially composed and in others it really is random.
If you want to look at a good example of this try running the 4/6 Search. The diaries-
have the 'Search' string |"imus"| but were clearly not published that day.
What's more Another bush canis lupus on the prowl is not clearly a Don Imus Diary, I think Johnny Rapture misspelled 'I must'.
There are 2 other effects I have encountered. Total numbers tend to jump around. jotter tells me that the search is deliberately designed to pick up a bunch of duplicates (wouldn't want to miss anything). There is a back end that sorts them and eliminates the duplicates, but sometimes it works better than others.
The other thing is that when you look at Comments, they're always attached to the 'date' (meaning 'sid' in reality) of Diary they're in whether they were typed on the same day as the Diary or 2 weeks later.
jotter, for his results, captures almost everything I think and sorts and dumps duplicates externally in Excel or something like that. cskendrick uses some of the same techniques in support of Top Comments Top Comments by mojo. Wish I was good like that.
Gee ek, that's 50% of your sample. How can you say anything useful if the data is as bad as that?
The more you look at the better you get.
Richard Gilmore, my dad, is not in worldwide insurance brokerage at all. He's a marketing researcher, not a pollster, and if you're spending live jive money you make decisions based on small samples all the time.
The less you have in your particular basket, the less confidence you have in it, but you don't ignore it unless it's wildly outside of the trend over time. He had all kinds of math to support this but I am a poor student and his handwriting is terrible.
I'll simply say that I have reasonable levels of confidence in all my observations. The ones based on a small sample are the most likely to be wrong but I'm pretty sure about all of them. The percentage of total traffic is about as good as any national political poll, meaning ±4-5%. 16% could be 11% or it could be 21%.
When I can I get my numbers from jotter. The daily total diary count is lifted straight from High Impact Diaries so as far as I'm concerned it's 100% accurate.
If your sample is small enough, like the 4/6 sample, you can actually go in and hand clean the data. If I think that's important enough I'll do it, but for the most part I'm only concerned with trends.
I intend to use this technique to look at other meta statistics and posting trends in the future, including Comments and Ratings. It is not perfect, but it's the best I can come up with.
What about Don Imus?
Well, ever since he dissed my boy Howard Stern over at the old WNBC I've had it in for him. Surprised he was fired actually, because Howard always contended Don owned the transmitter as part of his contract. I kind of liked the format, as Chris Dodd observed- where else are you going to get 20 minutes? NPR? Other than that I'm supremely uninterested in Imus, except as a phenomena.
Periodically waves of enthusiasm sweep The Daily Kos and we all start talking about the same thing. A lot.
First you have the Breaking Diaries, where everyone tries to scoop everyone else. These Diaries are notable for their shortness and paucity of links. One or another of them will become very popular and climb the 'Recommended Diaries' List and everyone else will feel cheated and hurt.
After there are like 3 or 4 Breaking Diaries in a row and one or two on the Rec List, long time users who are less easily amused than I am will begin to point out that the substantial content of the Diary has already been addressed. Some are more polite than others.
A reasonable request to delete your Diary should be honored before it garners substantial numbers of Comments, otherwise you are disrespecting your Commenters. Many times though, those who are not broadband enabled or who have limited amounts of RAM prefer a shorter thread to express themselves in, and this is a perfectly legitimate use of a Diary. Don't let people tell you different.
Still it is a fact that even if you have 'Recent Diaries', Show '50' Diaries, Set; your Diary does move another Diary, probably about something equally worthy and more to the point- different, into areas of the site less easily accessible except by experienced users. As Stephen Cølbert would say, it's a gut call.
If you are a considerate Diarist, before you push 'Publish', you will check the 'Recommended Diaries' List (that's the 8 at the top right) and the 'Recent Diaries' list (that's the 50 underneath on the right) for Titles that indicate the content is similar to yours. It is really the very least you can do.
If you wish to be thorough you will check The Window Of Time that is the Recent Diary List or better yet The Magic Bullet (because sometimes people use misleading Titles and I always advise that they do- otherwise no one will read your stuff!). You can click through on your Tags or Search for the I-man too if you want, and all of these views have a time stamp.
Why is the Time Stamp important ek?
If it hasn't been talked about in 8 hours, it's ok to talk about it again. Different people hang out at different parts of the day. If there have been real developments it's always ok, but as a general rule even 2 hours is too close if you have nothing new to say.
But Wait! There's More!
Though it doesn't always happen sometimes a respected and popular Diarist will post a Thoughtful Diary on the subject. They will be well researched and well written and will respectfully share the Author's personal view of the significance of the event. These are good Diaries and worthy of the reputation of the Author. I hope I won't embarrass him, but when I think of Diaries like this I think of Carnacki (who is silent on Imus, what gives?).
This is also what those people who post on the left side of the page do (Front Pagers). If they don't acknowledge your far superior work sometimes you can give them a gentle nag and they'll relent, but you can't feel bad if they don't.
Do you think their tools for looking at dKos are that much better than yours?
Frequently though we'll segue straight into round after round of what I call Confrontational Diaries. These tend to be long and rambling.
Not only do I care more about this issue than anyone else, but you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground! I knew Jack Kennedy. I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was my friend. You are no Jack Kennedy.
You can talk, you can bicker. You can talk, you can bicker. You can talk, Talk, TALK!; BICKER!, Bicker, bicker. You can talk all you want to but it's different than it was.
No it ain't, you just gotta know the territory.
So it continues, usually for days, but not before the appearance of the SHUT YOUR FUCKING PIE HOLE! Diary.
- Shut up! All of you! I'm sick and tired and I don't care who started it. You're both going to your rooms right now and think about what you did. BECAUSE I SAID SO THAT'S WHY! Ungrateful kids, you know before we had scoop we had to carve our HTML in Rocks! Both ways!
When people really get sick and tired of an issue you see the Rodney King Diaries.
Can't we all just get along?
Let's look at those numbers again-
My main point is not that this is unusual, it's that it's normal.
Search and replace and I could name a dozen others that differ only in the details.
23% is a big number, but it's a partial sample I did at about 4 PM EDT. I can't really believe that one out of every 4 Diaries is a Don Imus Diary. It's probably only 18%.
Because good theories are predictive and measurable, here's my prediction-
There will be a LOT of Don Imus Diaries this weekend, then...
If Imus attracts you as a metaphor and you have a Diary that you've invested a lot of effort in I'd wait a few days so I didn't have to compete for share. But in reality I sign my name to crap and I don't care.
Because I write about.
And that gets you know where.
There are other things to talk about. Let's get started.