Blogito, ergo sum

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Blogroll update

I added back Grant McCraken, who was removed some time ago when his website was hacked, and also added in the Grandiloquent Bloviator, which I discovered yesterday via Chris Blattman.

I dropped Jeff Miron, who gave up on blogging, and Mickey Kaus.

Feedback of a sort

Anonymous comments about the econjeff blog on econjobrumors.com.

Economics question for the day: why be anonymous if you are leaving positive comments?

In terms of the "too much time talking about porn" comment. I actually thought a bit about the right proportion of posts about the sex industry (which I think is really what the commenter has in mind) early on in the life of the blog. The decision I reached was to keep my proportion about the same as that on Marginal Revolution, a target I think I hit pretty well. Whether that proportion is optimal, or even what the correct definition of optimal might be in this context, are different questions.

Hat tip: Anonymous?

Grant McCracken's blog

A reader emailed today to note that he had gotten a warning message related to Grant McCracken's blog, which was on my blogroll. I had been getting security messages when I tried to access his blog as well but did not know that my own blog would apparently become at least partly guilty by association. In any case, I have removed, hopefully temporarily, the blog from the blogroll.

If anyone in reader-land knows more than I do about how to deal with this, I'd be happy to hear about it, either in the comments to this post or by email. In particular, do I also need to go back and try to find any posts that linked to Grant's blog?

Marginal Revolution - lanche

The fine folks at Marginal Revolution linked yesterday to my list of the 10 books that most influenced my intellectual development.

Average hits on the five days prior to the link: 150 or so
Hits on the day of the link: 1100
Hits the day after the link (so far): 800

Fame, of a sort.

I'm glad I put a fair amount of thought into the list, even pulling out my old paper file of the lists of all the books I have read in each year since 1978.

It will be interesting to see if these visits generate any additional long term readers.

A new era at ECONJEFF

The blog now has its first comment!

Can you find it?

Will you be next?

Same name, different person

I have, rather obviously, known all my life that there were other people with my same name, at least the same first and last names. In junior high, there was another "Jeff Smith"; I was once mistakenly called into the principal's office on his behalf. When I bought tickets to the Seahawks versus Dolphins AFC championship game back in the day, my excellent tickets, which required some non-trivial effort to obtain, went to some other "Jeff Smith" while I received his less excellent tickets, due to some incompetent person in the Seahawks' ticket office.

What I did not expect so much is that there would be someone else called "econjeff", but there is that too. You can see him (or her) at work in the comments section of this post. I think it is true that he always writes "EconJeff" while I always write "econjeff".

Just so you know.

Sitemeter fallout

So far I am up to around 25 unique visitors since turning on sitemeter this morning. I am not sure that I really want to have this much knowledge about who drops by. For example, I learned that one person visited the blog but did not answer my email. Presumably the entertainment value of looking at the sitemeter listings will diminish after a day or two.

A reader in Denmark sent in this page, which ranks economics blogs. To my surprise, I had never even heard of four of the top 10! A couple of those are really more about finance, so perhaps that is not so surprising. Otherwise the list is about what I would have expected.

Sitemeter

I finally got around to adding sitemeter to the blog page. In the last 90 minutes, there have been three hits. To be honest, this is more than I would have expected, though my prior over how many people actually read the blog is pretty flat. I know about 20 for sure among family, old friends from Seattle, local graduate students and colleagues at Michigan and economist friends away from Michigan but beyond that I have no idea. I was quite surprised when the blog was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and when I received an email response from the realtor listing the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ann Arbor, whose postcard I described in a post.