I’ve been wondering about this in the background for several years now. Is my website too fat?
At 7,597 posts and 27,170 comments, would there be some practical (or other) benefit to eliminating say… half, two thirds or ninety percent of the data stored under my timboucher.com domain?
Is there any method to test the practical effects of such a radical elimination of web data, and are there any extant examples of anyone else who has undertaken such a project elsewhere online?
My two starting points of measurement, I guess, would be daily unique visitors and monthly advertising income. Ideally, I’d like to have both of those figures go up – and I’d also like to figure out how to transition a significant portion of my incoming visitors to sources other than Google.
In real life, I routinely eliminate physical objects which have come into my possession, and just about as soon as I “release them into the wild” I forget about them and feel a great psychological space open up for newness to enter into. Why would or wouldn’t this work online?
Thoughts? Comments?
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT BY TIM BOUCHER (Auto-Generated)
- Flowing Data
- Laptop Suicide
- Three Gypsy Women Traders Dream
- Esoteric-Shamanic Data Recovery & Knowledge Extraction Services
- Are SEO’s fighting an AI?
31 Comments
Is it somehow better, short-term or long-term, to hang onto this massive set of data? What are the benefits or drawbacks to myself and other users of the information which I have farmed?
I’ve always fantasized that one day, in the not-too-distant future, a tool for sifting massive data sets will be able to come in after the fact and somehow “make sense of” all this stuff I’ve compiled. I have glimmers and glimpses of how it all would work. I see it functioning somehow similarly to the “related posts” plugin used above, but on a much more micro-level. Like it would take individual words, phrases, images and show them floating in a sea of related informatiion, the peaks of which are information from this domain, and the valleys of which, the distant bits, filled in by information from allied sources, etc.
It’s like Gmail, I guess. I don’t need to save every fucking dumb email I’ve ever sent. Nor should I cling to every little electronic utterance made here in a more public/official capacity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruning
Goddamn, there sure is a lot of bullshit “this is my opinion” writing on my website…
Ah, this might be a good addition to my arsenal…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-expirator/
seems foolhardy to me. You never what a treasure trove your work will be to future spam-bots.
keep your head in the game kid. just keep moving forward!
Maybe this is moving forward!
I’ve managed, over an hour and a half to weed it down to 7,465 posts and have full intentions to continue the datapocalypse as time permits. At first, I went through randomly and sliced out things that seemed extraneous. Then I followed particular easily-identifiable themes and extracted around those to the best of my ability. Then I went and started at the beginning and started trimming the fat. There’s so much fat… not every stupid thing I posted when I was drunk or bored over the course of seven years need be saved for all futurity!
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1282093
I have a general rule of thumb with real-world objects: if there’s a box of stuff sitting somewhere for x amount of time and I don’t actually remember what’s in that box, then I no longer ‘need’ it….
It’s kinda like that “17 things” thing I think you and I pondered with one another back in the day.
Get rid of 17 things every day. If you feel any hesitation about an object, get rid of it.
The thing that blows my mind, is that there are places in the world that are plugged into the electrical grid that just shepherd your bits and bytes only to be mined in some form or another in the info grid. Wtf is information? Is it electricity?
Because all it comes down to, is magnetism, electricity and laser light. That is the whole of data. Those three elements literally peer into the human soul that only seeks to innocently (stupidly) feed the goliath.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/w...-have-message-from-another-world.html
We have a message from another world
In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as ‘counting codes’. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, ‘The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another’.
Cos, when you think about it, what truly are thoughts? If the universe is timeless and bounded on all “sides” by timeless dimensions, we are only channeling “thoughts” that have always existed. That’s where it gets messy though, when it comes to the human ego.
We all want this towering stack of “accomplishment” on which we can stand and point out to our neighboring separate egos (you and me and him and her) and *experience* them being *impressed* with ourselves. Where does this desire originate from? I say it is from the separateness of the whole in which we seek to once again unify with.
Jesus, what am I writing here? A new and improved VALIS?
# One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.
# The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.
# He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.
# Matter is plastic in the face of mind.
# One by one he draws us out of the world.
# The Empire never ended.
Perhaps the “first contact” as relayed by Tesla, was THE contact? After that, the contact, the “data cable” was laid by that very act and we have been in contact ever since?
Perhaps there is too much feedback in the line, thus our modern, “post modern” pain? We have too many lines in and it is screeching within our ears as an audio amplifier does.
But perhaps not. He merely discovered once again, that same, all enveloping data transfer flow that many before him knew was there. He merely devised a device that could detect the hum of cosmic intelligence and thus ushered in the technological age by being able to offer up proof of this great data transferring mechanism. The will, the yearning, for humans to communicate over great distances. We just lack the terms. Hence the invention of the written word far before it.
Perhaps humans LITERALLY require energy of the sort that is causing “global warming” in order to reach the next spiritual stage??? I just don’t know. Perhaps we are a mere process in a cosmic computer program? And perhaps we are malfunctioning. But perhaps we are not we only perceive it as though we are.
Perhaps the “global consciousness” is merely seeking to bond once again with the slower, but vastly more wise consciousness of the plant world? Perhaps the other animals are here to warn us, to teach us and even protect us, through their wordless sacrifices. Ugh, I just don’t know.
This is not to say that I subscribe to the belief that all is here for MAN’s benefit. But, in through the back door on that very belief. Perhaps living creatures are here for that reason. Again, through the “back door” on that one.
I hope to take this up further. . .
I think I’m paraphrasing this probably from somebody like Steiner – who I never understood “until it happened to me”, but I think thoughts are like smells, sounds, sights. The ‘mind’ on a certain level is actually a sensory organ: that is, a biological ‘chamber’ of some sort, an organ which reflects and organizes perceptual data…
I’ve had dreams where entire neighborhoods took all the shitty pointless products which were foisted on them and used them to build barricades to prevent police/military vehicles from entering…
But that, of course, was just a dream.
I’ve had dreams where entire neighborhoods took all the shitty pointless products which were foisted on them and used them to build barricades to prevent police/military vehicles from entering…
Yeah, people, family, etc, do not get the will to have no objects in life. Fine. I have a fucking TV, a PS3 a computer and a VW camper. Oh and three pairs of awesome Carhartts. I will never wear another pair or brand of pants again. But that is all I need and all I want. And all of which are not that necessary. But adding to that would just confuse me.
Shit, I have a cellphone too. And a beer and cigarette addiction. Ah well.
When I used to be an atheist, I would argue when people would ask “aren’t you afraid where you’re going to go when you die”? I would answer, “are you afraid of where you were before you were born?”
I still believe that. Thus it is all entropy. Time only looks like it exists.
The Trash Stratum. Always remember the Trash Stratum.
That and Jack Palance!
That’s actually a basic tenant of Buddhism, though it doesn’t get talked about that much…
And for JK, a couple of relevant Terrence McKenna quotes I came across recently.
Going back through articles from six years ago… I am thinking about the internet, about writing very differently now – what this is all for!
Down to 7,335. Going chronologically forward from the beginning of the blog, cutting out huge swaths of trash – feels very good. In a sense, its exactly the same sort of personal high achieved by spewing out a lot of this writing in the first place!
The mind is also a sense organ in the ’sense’ that you can direct it towards a specific perceptual direction: like you can look at a flower very close up, smell it and think about it…
We edit our perceptions every day.
PS. Thank you JK – I have been trying to locate this infobit about Tesla ever since fifth grade!!!
The way the story was told to me, I believe, was that he also had some copper gun (I may be combining tales) which he then pointed at a planet, fired some pulses and initiated the
‘first’ interplanetary war…
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/5a47/
A lot of it provides value in terms of other sites/objects linking back to your old content.
Just the same, purging is good…and since you already started…why not continue?
I’m not sure what my role is on the web anymore – content provider, organizing principle? I end up authoring information across so many media outlets, how does it all hang together? Does it need to?
Also, after years of looking through search referrals, I have a pretty good sense of which are the most popular posts on my site. I would say that its probably a very small percentage of my articles that draw the most visitors. Like they do in certain businesses, aren’t you supposed to weed out your under-performing end to make room for upward growth?
I’m especially eliminating posts that all they do is summarize or point to content on another website. Don’t see much value in that anymore
http://humantheatre.ca/tag/holy-theatre/
http://www.newworlddisorder.ca/issuethree/interviews/pinchbeck.html
not the first time ive thought this, i suppose
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2003/09/05/the-record-of-my-dismantling/
If we didn’t edit them, would they even be perceptions?
Not trying to spout BS here, a serious question…
Down to 6,997 – mostly culled so far items from the first six months of this website’s life…
Interesting point…
Not much time left here for a discussion, I admit, but I am finding more and more that when I perceive, or become aware of something, it’s a negating act. That is, I push everything else away, in order to bring that one “thing” into perception.
So, what happens if I don’t push anything way? Is perception even possible at that point? I am looking into it, but no results yet…
Figure out which posts get the most traffic, keep those (and fill with ads) and then archive the rest as text docs.
Seriously, a lot of this shit does not need to be held onto as a text doc or anything else.