The Calico Cat

An "Instalaunch" is when Glenn Reynolds links to your blog, causing a massive spike in traffic, and perhaps getting your unknown blog noticed for the first time.

This post by the blogger dadahead, where he refers to Glenn Reynolds as the "Insta****face" and the "Insta******" is probably a good example of how not to get an Instalaunch.

It should be noted that it's doubtful that Glenn Reynolds has ever read my blog. That's why I gave up on writing serious posts (although I had a minor relapse with that last post about Lawrence Summers) and now just write about irreverant goings on in the blogosphere and nerdy topics like digital cameras.

Lawrence Summers is the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and is now the president of Harvard University.

I can’t help but notice that the two most emailed news stories from the NY Times are articles about his remarks at an academic conference in which he suggested that men might be innately better at math than women.

This was not a slip of the tongue. Sometimes dumb people like pro athletes or Hollywood movie stars make gaffes, but a guy like Summers who has been appointed to high level positions knows how to talk the politically correct talk. He wouldn’t have said what he said unless he wanted to say it.

You will also notice that he is trying to spin his remarks as meaning “I don’t really know if innate differences cause men to be better at math, but I’m just saying that it should be investigated.” However, he knows that it’s a politically incorrect statement, he would never have said unless he really was already convinced.

My conclusion is that Lawrence Summers is personally familiar with research studies in this area, and he has drawn his own conclusion that they prove that there are innate differences between men and women related to mathematical ability.

A few days ago I linked to the blog The Bad Date Club, a group blog where young women write about how awful their dates are. I’d hate to be one of their dates and then find out I was publicly humiliated on their blog.

Yesterday at Libertarian Girl, which is also a blog I recently linked to, the blogger is taking a lot of heat for posting intimate details about her date . She also wrote a followup post responding to some of the comments.

People hoping for detailed voyeuristic descriptions of the sexual tryst will be sorely disappointed; the post is mostly about how she felt about the man. Nevertheless, some of the comments she received have been downright mean, even going as far as calling her a “slut.” I think that one commenter on her blog correctly pinpointed the source of the animosity:

Is Libertarian Girl the next Jessica Cutler? Like Jessica Cutler, Libertarian Girl lives in Washington, DC and her sexual partner is a staffer for a congressman described as “conservative ‘pro-life’ ‘family values’ Christian.” But the similarity seems to end there. Jessica Cutler wrote about having sex with six partners over a two week period, including middle aged men who paid her for sex, one of whom was the Chief of Staff of a government agency, appointed by Bush.

In comparison, all that Libertarian Girl did was have sex with one person, for free, who is approximately her own age. This doesn’t really seem like the stuff of scandals, although if bloggers are bored enough they can turn it into one. Perhaps the big story here is the fact that people are trying to make this into a big story.

Some liberal blogs, like skippy the bush kangaroo and TBogg have picked up on the post on account of what they perceive as the hyprocrisy based on the description of the politics of the congressman that the sexual partner works for.

Meanwhile, David tried to give her some fatherly advice, which I’m not sure she really needs.

People are still trying to figure out what's appropriate to post to one's blog and what should be out of bounds. Certainly other women have posted a lot more details about their personal lives than what I read in Libertarian Girl's blog. But Libertarian Girl has gotten a lot of publicity for a relatively mundane post on account of her blog getting a previously respectable amount of traffic. And some of her previously loyal readers were apparantly imagining that she had virginal qualities that she actually never possessed.

David Smith from Sitemeter left the following comment in my post about the Sitemeter outage:

I think that the whole blogosphere owes David a word of support for his great service in keeping Sitemeter up and running. There is really no better free stat counter for blogs, and Sitemeter is the stat counter endorsed by Glenn Reynolds and used by the Ecosystem traffic ranking page.