Acts of Volition in 2002: A statistical review

2002 saw Acts of Volition slip from being a multi-author weblog to a paltry 1-1/2 author weblog. While this may have cut the volume of posts, the participation of readers has been great. Writing for AoV has started to feel less like traditional writing and more like having a conversation with the readers.

This chart shows the relationship between aov posts and readers replies over 2002 (note – the chart is a little misleading – the two lines are charted on separate scales).

Here is Acts of Volition in 2002 in numbers:

Posts Replies Replies per Post Posts per Day Replies per Day
January 16 180 11.25 0.53 6.00
February 10 202 20.20 0.33 6.73
March 11 131 11.91 0.37 4.37
April 6 55 9.17 0.20 1.83
May 10 114 11.40 0.33 3.80
June 9 40 4.44 0.30 1.33
July 14 146 10.43 0.47 4.87
August 11 75 6.82 0.37 2.50
September 7 55 7.86 0.23 1.83
October 9 118 13.11 0.30 3.93
November 8 101 12.63 0.27 3.37
December 8 109 13.63 0.27 3.63
Total 2002 119 1326 11.14 0.33 3.63
Red bold type indicates the highest figure per column.
Blue bold type indicates the lowest figure per column.
* The NX Petition was only available for the first few days of November.
 

one year of aov

Steven's 12th birthday at the Garrity family cottage in Stanhope, PEI, August 1990 - cropped from the photo are Steven's sister Emily and silverorange's Dan J.
In the wee hours of August 25, 2000, one year ago, Matt christened the newly formed actsofvolition.com with the inevitable inaugural post. Matt put it well:

I realize the excitement of having ones own website is not one which extends very far beyond the proprietors of the website, but if everyone will just pretend to be as thrilled with the concept as we are that’ll be just fine. No matter the level of outside enthusiasm, I know we’ll have fun.

We know how we feel about the last year of aov (pretty good). What interests us much more than that is:

How do you feel about the first year of aov?

 

aov lets down its collective guard

you have nothing to say
It has recently come to our attention that there are other people in the world, some with opinions. After much thought and a little debate about community on the web (and more specifically, on actsofvolition.com), you can now reply to our posts on aov.

See the reply link under the title of each post.

 

aov does xml

First, let us get some acronym* definitions out of the way:

  • aovacts of volition
  • XML – Extensible Markup Language
  • RDFResource Description Framework
  • RSSRDF Site Summary

With that out of the way, aov has setup an RSS channel. RSS is an XML application based on the World Wide Web Consortium’s RDF Specification.

Now in english: RSS is a simple format for web syndication that lets any site make it’s headlines available to be grabbed by any other compliant site. For example, My.Netscape.com let’s you add these channels as custom news on your home page. Headlines from any site that that creates an RSS channel can be added to your my.netscape.com home page.

The people at My.Netscape.com seem to expect those with an RSS channel to include this graphic on their site. Clicking on this graphic will add aov headlines to your My.Netscape.com page. That is if you can bear the buggy and irritating signup process. Seems more like viral marketing for Netscape than an open news standard. The graphic will not be displayed on aov permanently (only in this post).

The format is cool though. An example of a good implementation can be found at Peter Rukavina’s Reinvented.net (which has been nicely redesigned). The News page at Reinvented.net uses RSS to grab headlines from Slashdot.org, The PEI Government website, and (drumroll please) Acts of Volition.


* acronyms are stupid.
 

snide remarks in your inbox on an irregular schedule

aov updateSign up for the new aov update email newsletter. We’ll flog you with occasional updates on subjects such as:

  • major site updates
  • new aov features (such as the upcoming interview with Mike Lecky)
  • particularly encouraging/discouraging news & commentary

The frequency of mailings will vary but you needn’t worry about span. We’ll be selective and you shouldn’t receive more than a few emails a week (probably closer to 1 or 2 emails a month).

Sign up, god damn it.

Oh, and our privacy policy is: We wont do anything with your email address we wouldn’t want done with our own (and we are really picky about that).

 

aov 2.0 (or maybe just aov 1.004b)

new features on acts of volition:

  • aov archive – weekly archives of all the brilliant posts every made on aov.

    note to websters:
    this also means you can now link to indivudual aov posts. just find the post on the archive page and copy the link. for example, the address of this post is: https://www.actsofvolition.com/index.cfm?week=11/5/00#113

  • new bio pages – check out our ugly mugs, email us, and see aov posts by the aov author you detest the least

look for full keyword searching in the next update.

thanks for mastah programmah nick for all the help.

 

keywords indeed

according to our logs, folks have been lead to actsofvolition.com after entering the following interesting keywords into popular search engines:

  • volitity
  • volition
  • incoherent
  • machina near friends near
  • +nologo +klein
  • exacomm

and by far the winner:

  • +“joanne malar” +“picture”