….philosophical and other notes….
As it is Sunday, I guess I can make a post without content…
1. A Brood Comb has made it to the 400000 views today
2. Thanks to Modern Historian for giving me a Butterfly award for cool blog.
3. I intend to do few posts discussing few things involving physics, God and evolution next – hope I don’t offend anyone.
INTP – The Thinkers , according to Typealyzer (ht: Mormon Metaphysics)
And here is a diagram to prove it:
Yesterday A Brood Comb had it’s second birthday.
I guess little statistics is in order then. In those two years I’ve written 349 posts and got 866 comments (technically, probably half of those I got, and half of those I wrote). I would like more comments of course, I would be probably be satisfied with 10000 comments…. Maybe.
As of now, it says 235,559 visits (not visitors), and most of them have come for few posts actually. 66,400 visits are to the page with philosophy videos (I think there is around 50-100 visits a day I think to it these days). 62,790 visits are to a post that doesn’t have anything to do with philosophy – but is about how to extract a song from YouTube. And then, another part of the blog with significant amount of visitors is the Power Blogroll aggregator which had 20,558 visitors. The rest of the posts have insignificant numbers in relation to these, and together have around 90,000 visits. For example the Philosophers’ Carnival I hosted has all in all 2,668 visits, Comprehending 1=0.99(9) has 1,523 visits, and Why a neural network can’t be conscious has 1,112, Simple Explanation of Hegelian Dialectic has 1,083, and so on….
56 blogs linked to A Brood Comb in the past six months according to Technorati. And there is around 80 people that read this blog through feed readers, according to the reported numbers at Googgle Reader (62) and Bloglines (18).
So, thanks everyone for visiting and special thanks for people who have been so nice to leave a comment on the posts.
I hope I’m not becoming boring to everyone with this ‘consciousness is nothing but being such and such system’, but I keep thinking about it and thinking what follows from it.
I mentioned in the previous post, that the physicalist will say that the ‘problematic’ features of consciousness like the qualitative aspect, the subjectivity and the unity of consciousness can’t be found in the description, as the description is a predicate, and those things are nothing but the being of such system to which the predicate can be given.
Based on this, (if needed) the reductive physicalist can give an answer why for example there won’t be consciousness when we are doing calculations on paper of what will happen with some brain system. That is, in the process of calculating what will happen with certain system, by e.g. taking the state of the system at some time, and then figuring out what will happen with the system in the time after that, there is no actual system with actual being, what we are doing is merely calculating the predicates. The predicates are usually not predicates of the system which calculates the predicates. In usual case the predicates are represented in this calculating system, and are not really predicates of that calculating system. Symbols mean predicates, and are not predicates.
Of course, there is another option open. There possibly can be predicates which are predicates of the system which calculates the predicates of another system. If we predicate implementation of some computation to the original system, by building another system which calculates the predicates of that system, we would end up with a system which also has the predicates that certain computation. IF the brain’s BEING (assuming again consciousness as being idea) is related to implementing some computation, that is IF the ontology of the universe is somehow related to ‘implementing certain computation’, then we might expect that doing calculations on paper might BE, and hence be conscious. Or, which is similar, having a computer which will do the calculations, in that case might have being (and consciousness).
If we think of what ‘implementing a computation’ might mean, we will probably go into the discussion of physical systems with parts, that have specific causal structure, something like Chalmer’s “A physical system implements a given computation when the causal structure of the physical system mirrors the formal structure of the computation.” (here). For sure, we don’t want to take a disconnected systems all over the universe, each of which might happen to perform some part of the whole computation, and say that there is some kind of being there. (for some discussion of those issues see my previous posts Can we digitize the brain and retain consciousness and Consciousness and Special Relativity). There are certainly lot of questions, if one goes that way.
I’m more inclined to think that there is some other metaphysical criteria for being (which would answer the question, which of the things we think of as being are actually being?). Saying that calculating what will happen in some brain, will be being on its own, sounds, well… weird to me. I’m more inclined to go with saying that similarly to how when a computer calculates what will happen with a drop of rain the computer will not be a rain, if it calculates what happens with a brain, it will not BE brain (nor have consciousness). The whole idea seems to me to remove the distinction between reality (what is) and fiction.
Related posts:
Consciousness And Being
Disappearing Being (and Consciousness)
Consciousness as Being and Binding Problems
Sometimes you might forget where did you left your comments, and miss response to that comment. Or you are just interested what people will say in the comments of certain post. One way to do this is to subscribe to the ‘comment feed’ through some feed reader. As I’m not using feed readers (I’ve covered my need to track what is happening in the philosophy blogs through power-blogroll page), I checked what was the way to track comments.
Seems that there are two most popular online comment tracking systems. One is co.mments and the other is coComment. After reading what they provide, coComment seemed as a better choice. Because…
a)it provides a plug-in (extension) for Firefox which catches the cases when you add a comment, so it automatically starts to track that conversation where you added comments (there is also options to add comment without tracking, or to track without adding comments and to add tags to the conversation). On another side co.mments doesn’t provide that. It gives you just a bookmark (which you drag to your bookmarks, or to your bookmarks toolbar), so you need to click to say ‘I want to track comments to this conversation’ (BTW coComment also gives such option)
b)there are some advanced social features in coComment, such that you can make your comments public, people can follow where you comment, you can follow other people, and so on…
Anyway, given those things, I decided to install coComment. Alas, it would be good if it worked in first place. I added several conversations, but the comments were not shown. Or, 5 comments were shown, and there were for example 10 comments. So, I removed coComment, and went to try co.mments. And it worked. And it is simple. After trying it, I don’t even think I need all those bells and whistles from coComment. When you want to track the comments to some post, you just open the post and click the bookmark on your toolbar. When you go to your page, you see something like this. You mark some conversations as read if you want (‘Clear’ button), or remove them altogether.
And as a good thing you have a public RSS feed in the form – http://co.mments.com/people/tgjorgoski;feed (where tgjorgoski is my username), which you can add to your blog if you have one, so that other people can see where you commented also. If you want to check, I added the RSS widget for that feed to this blog in the left-side column of my blog.
For WordPress, you go to to your Presentation options, then to the Widgets, drag/drop RSS widget to your side bar, click on the ‘configure’ part of that button, and add the RSS url there.
For Blogger, in the Template , click ‘add a page element’ in the side bar, choose the Feed element, and then set the feed URL.
If you leave lot of comments, and want a way to track them, I think you should try co.mments.
Technorati Tags: co.mments, coComment, tracking comments, comment feeds
Those holidays are hard. With all the celebrating I don’t feel like writing anything philosophical.
All the energy I have is just enough for the professional work. And few distractions I found recently don’t help.
First, I downloaded the first season of Heroes from net (the series is not yet broadcasted here) , and so with the family we are watching two-three episodes per day.
Second thing is the online text RPG – The Kingdom of Loathing (if you have spare time check it out, and for help on your tasks check this wiki). Good thing about this is that number of “moves” is limited per day, so you can’t loose too much time on it per day – probably I’m wasting half and hour per day (though I haven’t really checked, maybe it is more).
The third thing is Miro. It is a torrent-based movie player. There is a list of around 3000 video podcasts (‘channels’) to which one can subscribe. I tried few of the channels, but liked the best the gamers channel 1UP.com , and Cranky Geeks channel. One more addictive thing to deal with.
Oh, and my wife both a Sony Ericsson K550i cellphone (Actually our first cellphone! I still don’t have one, I try not to use techmology much, which is kind of an silly statement, considering the content of this post! Call me Rainbow Jeremy!)
It is not all bleak though. One addiction I’m trying to do away with are cigarettes, and I’m doing fine for a week or so. Which I guess is much worse addiction than those previously mentioned.
Anyway, I think I will need a couple of weeks to fill my energy cells and get back into mood for philosophy. I am planning to go with the family to a nearby village starting from Saturday for a week, and hopefully there will be snow there. Physical activities are like defragmenters for the brain.
Happy New 2008!
I just added a new page to the blog called ‘Quickies‘, in which I put links to collection of few quick and dirty proofs that I posted on this blog at one time or another.
BTW, the word ‘quickies’ on that page is created by using different pictures of letters available on flickr, and is created by this Spell with flickr tool.
If you haven’t noticed, for past week or so there is a a small new feature in the Power-Blogroll aggregator.
In the top right part, now there is a list of philosophers that were born or died on the specific date. If you visit today (19th August) you will find for example that Gilbert Ryle was born on this date in 1900, and that Blaise Pascal died on this date in 1662.
How it is done…
Along with the normal pages, Wikipedia has pages for every date. Check for example the page for August 19th. On that page you will find “Births” and “Deaths” section. So, what the aggregator does is fetch the page for the particular date, and in those sections check for “philosopher” string. The information is then extracted about the name of philosopher, the year, and the link to the wikipedia page for that philosopher, and this info is added to the aggregator. Hope you like it.
Yesterday, A Brood Comb got its 100,000 page view. Which is cool, I guess, for some reason.
Not sure how this maps to a number of unique visitors, which seems to me as more important stat, but which WordPress.com doesn’t give. So, a request to WordPress.com stuff…
The Request
Please add unique visitor stats, and to make it the greatest stats in the world, give also distribution of percentage of the unique visitors per number of their returns. So, for example it would say that 40% visited once, 20% visited twice, etc… And that, in a period which we can choose, for example – last week, last month, or some given number of days.
End of The Request
Few other stats: 220 posts (I’m not a very regular poster, and often need some time to fill the batteries, or time for my work), 445 comments (those are the thingies that make me happy), and 6,000 out of those 100,000 are for the power-blogroll aggregator page. BTW, the Technorati Stats page is now generated once every day, so you can see how the blogs which are aggregated are ranked by Technorati. The Technorati ranks blogs by number of links they received from other blogs in last 6 months. So, it is a dynamic thing – a blog ranking can go up and down.
As for the ranking the least philosophical blog – Cognitive Daily is currently on the top with 999 blogs linking to it (this will make it 1,000). And one of my favorite blogs – Mixing Memory is second with 340 blogs linking to it. Third is Leiter Reports with 317, followed by Philosophy, et cetera (154), Maverick Philosopher (153), etc…
It’s been one year from the opening of A Brood Comb. Many thanks to the readers and all helpful comments and emails in the last year.
The blogging will be light in future on this blog. I feel that I need to think more on some issues before posting further, and that will take lot of time, lot of reading, learning and thinking. Also, I have some professional projects that I need to spend more time on (Which in past few years consisted mostly of developing of the LCMS system in Xyleme).
In this post let me just recapitulate some of the views I hold in general.
1.The notions of physics are incommensurable with the everyday notions of color, sounds, intentionality (“thinking of”, “seeing X”, “fearing X”, etc…), emotions, and so on. The project of reducing the second to the first seems to me as impossible as the project of the Pythagoreans of reducing everything to a math notions. And it seems to me also as analogous one, number being one abstraction, and physics adding new ones like mass, position, time, momentum, energy, and so on.
2.Dualism in general is accepting this given position, but instead of taking that the problem is in the impossibility to reduce the world to a set of abstract notions used in physics, it takes the assumption of “physical world as ground” as given, and tries to place those other notions in the realm of mental, which is seen as separate. The problem of interaction and the lack of it (in epiphenomenalism) instead of solving, produces a lot of new issues.
3.So, instead of these views, I think that the more plausible view is where we accept a richer world as a ground instead of that one described by physics. What is meant by richer is open for discussion. At least, it should be as rich as the world of naive realism and include the notions of which we are directly aware as mentioned in the point 1. Then we talk about physical description of that world, without reducing it to merely physical world.
4.In relation to 3., an account of the relation is needed between the world and its physical description. In simplest form this relation is understandable as one of abstraction – any measurement of physical quantity being abstraction (in sense that one ignores lot of things, and attends just to one specific aspect). More specifically measurements are connected to the “ideal measurement apparatus” – what constitutes a measurement of time, what constitutes a measurement of length, of speed, and so on. I take seriously the possibility that if one understands exactly those measurements, and the symmetries that appear as a result of the nature of those measurements – that lot of what we call “physical laws” will be merely a consequence of the nature of the concepts of physics (connected to the the ideal measurements concepts). If that is so, those “physical laws” will tell us about the world just as much as the mathematical theorems tells us.
5.As an abstract description, the physical can’t describe fully the world. I think that that phenomena as quantum mechanical uncertainty is related to this thing. In describing the richness of the world through abstract categories, necessarily there will be a missing information. In connection to the nature of measurements mentioned in 4, I hope it to be possible for this to be understood more clearly, by appeal to the nature of the physical measurements and their relations.
6.In relation to 4 – instead of the mystical relations of dualism, in this picture we have a possibility of relation between the world and its physical description (or any other abstract description), and we are expecting in this picture for whatever is happening in the world, to be also visible at the abstract levels. So, even the physical laws might be just on level of mathematical theorems (i.e. tell us nothing about the world), whatever is happening in the world will be visible on physical level, and more than that the physical laws will hold (for the description given on that level). However, as mentioned in 5, some things are lost, and thus we can talk about two things… “Abstractifacts”… things whose functioning is connected merely to some abstract categories – and the human made machines would fall in this category (also the procedures like those for multiplying two decimal numbers on paper would fall here). And real things whose functioning is not reducible to those abstract categories. The humans and animals would fall in this category, namely are not abstractifacts, as the possibility of their to access the non-abstract notions can’t be analyzed in terms of abstract notions. A consequence of this would be for example that zombies are impossible, because they can’t be created based on abstract models.
7.It is possible for the subject to become aware of the world and the relations of the notions used to describe it (including the metaphysical, epistemological and other notions), and only as far this is possible, the philosophy is possible. In such way, I’m inclined towards idealism and seeing the world as a reasonable place. As, in this view the “problematic” things aren’t pushed under the carpet of the mental, nor are (wrongly) equated with physical abstractions, but are in the world, and are accessible to the subjects in that world, the issue of other minds is also handled not by appeal to everyone having theories about the intentional behavior and mental processes of the other, but by learning about real phenomena in the (unreduced) world – phenomena which can be noticed.
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Even there will not be lot of posts, I will check and maintain the blog including the list of philosophy lecture videos, which gets 50-100 hits every day, and the blog aggregator that gets around 20-30 visitors every day. You are welcome to submit a link to a new video, or link to a new philosophy blog to be added to the aggregator (or maybe some other feature/change you would like to see there)…
Just when I thought that the problems with the aggregator page are finished, general problem with all the pages appeared on wordpress.com – the pages don’t show up.
The staff is notified by a bunch of people in wordpress users forums, so I hope that they will handle the problem soon.
I liked the Richard’s, Clark’s and Jeff’s webs, so here is my continuation of the meme.
I might went to far with the linking to previous posts, but anyway it appears it is good way to give a better overview of my ideas to the reader, and can act as an index to what I have wrote about. So here we go…
Philosophy Grounded In Being-In-The-World and Abstractions
To my thinking, the philosophy has to take as starting point the being-in-the-world. We start philosophical thinking as a being-in-the-world – a whole which contains both the subject and the world, but not as some components from which being-in-the-world is constituted, but from which both subject and the world can be abstracted.
And, in general, any notion we have is an abstraction from this being-in-the-world. That our thinking is within this being-in-the-world, I argued in the post Closure of Phenomenal World.
On the very start of this blog, I wrote a series of posts, in which I tried to explain what I mean by Abstraction, and how it relates to Attention, Determining and the relations between Given and Attention, Given and Determining and Determining and Nothing, etc…
I take that what is called “universals” are abstractions which appear as intentional content of our intentional acts, and that particulars fall under abstractions when we are able to abstract the universal from the particular. I talked about the relation between the universals and particulars, and how the universals can’t be seen neither as some “construction” based on multiplicity of particulars, nor as something grounded in our minds, and not in the world (Kantian approach) in other series of posts… Defending Metaphysics 1, 2 and 3.
Comprehension
In connection to previous, I wrote about my belief that philosophy is about the comprehension of the relations between those abstractions, and that can’t be anything else in the post What I take to be the grounds of Philosophy.
I further argued that there is no need for justification of such comprehensions in the post Metaphysics Manifesto.
Words And Their Meanings
I spent a lot of posts on issues connected to words and their meanings. Basically, my belief is that the the original baptizer give can give name only to something that appears as content of his/her intentional acts, and the transcendence of the meanings of the words (there, I accept anti-psychologism of Frege and Husserl) is grounded in the transcendence of the intentional content.
I talked about the need for accepting the transcendence of intentional content in lot of posts, but I think the first one was Intra-Subjective vs. Inter-Subjective Transcendence, and I wrote about my beliefs that properly this transcendence can be grounded in being-in-the-world, in the posts Noticing The People Notice Things We Notice, Transcendence, Strawberries and Mindless Robots, Grounding the Inter-Subjective Transcendence, and Few Explanatory Notes on the previous post.
I believe that one of the most usual way of learning the words is the ostensive teaching, in which the learner of the words learns no just the word, but in which the crucial moment is the requirement from the learner to notice the thing (or universal) to which the teacher is pointing. I discussed those issues in more detail in Can Reports Of How Things Seem To Us Be False? and Look, and Ostensive Teaching
In connection to the problem of non-existents, in few posts I argued that it can be given proper account if we base the meaning of the words to the intentional content as it appears in different types of psychological acts. I gave sketch of such account of names in the post Intentional Account of Names. As how this account connects to the issue of existence, I wrote the posts Existence and Transcendence, Three Ways in Which a Name Can Refer To A Non-Existent, Does God Exists?, and in two posts I connected the issue of existence to more general Hegelian take on existence in The Balls That Didn’t Exist and Further Thoughts on Non-Existence, etc…
Mind
My stance toward the issues from philosophy of Mind is tightly connected to my general stance towards philosophy as given in the previous sections. Taking physical world as abstraction from being-in-the-world, where the physical world is abstracted in the terms of the notions of physics, I believe that physical picture is leaving behind (or abstract from) lot of things from this being-in-the-world, including but not limited to the being itself, the wholeness of our being in the world, intentionality, and in general all those qualities which don’t present themselves as easily quantifiable, and which are usually put under the term of ‘qualia’. In such way, my believes are incompatible with physicalism. I wrote about this in the posts Qualia as Metaphysical Issue, Holism, Reductionism and Consciousness, and also presented argument against a possibility for artificial neural networks to be conscious through Record/Replay thought experiment.
My believes are incompatible with dualism either, and to my thinking it is a failed response to physicalism. As one I believe that it wrongly reifies lot of categories, like that of consciousness, qualia, mind. I talked about that in some of the mentioned posts, but also in Is “Mind” Phenomenal or Theoretical Concept, and Phenomenal Fishiness.
Math
Math is one of the places where I believe we can get a hold on our abstractions in very clear way, and that we can easily comprehend those relations. In connection to this, I tried to explain my grasp on the simple mathematical relation 1+1=2, in the post Familiar Faces, Gestalts and A Priori Truths. In connection to this, I also had another post Is 1+1=2 Intuited?, though I must say, I don’t really believe that the argument holds any strength, and even I do believe that 1+1=2 is intuited, the approach in the previously mentioned post is more to my liking, in inline with rest of my web of beliefs. Also I believe (in line with Hegel’s argument) that the number should be properly taken as a ratio (instead of aggregate), and that if we take it in such sense, we can easily comprehend the equations between two sides in which on the one of the sides some kind of “infinity” appears. I wrote about this in the posts – Comprehending 1=0.999… and Hegel and Infinite Series.
Time
As I said, I believe that being-in-the-world as a starting whole in which any notion will appear as abstraction. In such way the being-in-the-world is not something that somehow exists in time, but as any other abstraction, time will be abstraction within that whole. I discussed this issue in the posts: Mental States vs. Stream of Consciousness, Time As Abstraction, Hegel, Change and Contradiction
Part Of My Web Of Beliefs That I Didn’t Blog About
I consider that it is just once that the most abstract is understood, that it is smart to move to less abstract things. And that’s why I have ignored lot of my beliefs that have to do with less-abstract things.
In such way, I did lot of posts connected to the most simple relations of words and their meanings, even though I don’t think that the language itself can be reduced to this relation. In my opinion the language as it is in our being-in-the-world, can’t be comprehended as notion properly without connecting it to its practice in the spirit of Wittgenstein and Austin, from which those clear-cut abstract relation between words and meanings must be seen just as a specific abstraction. I touched on this issue, that there is more to meaning of sentences then combination of meaning of words, in the post Wink, Wink – Do You Understand What I Mean?
In same way, when it comes to notions (or concepts), I ignored the less abstract notions and issues which appear with those less abstract (and which some might call “vague”) concepts, which to my current thinking are best addressed by theory theory of concepts to some extent, while full account it would seem might be impossible without comprehending concepts as part of the language as practice. Instead, I kept my attention just on very abstract notions (with a short excursion into those less abstract issues maybe in the post Are Hedgehogs small spiny animals?) , which present themselves as clearest to the mind, and whose relations among themselves (among those abstract concepts) are easiest to understand.
While talking a lot about holistic account of things, and arguing that physical notions are abstraction, I also didn’t get into more precise defining of the nature of those abstractions (physical), except few side-notes in the philosophy of math posts, and very short recent post Lifeless Laws.
Shawn has post over at Words and Other Things, asking for philosophical books to be available as searchable .pdfs. That made me think, and I came up with the following scenario that I would like to be true. It might not be possible in the year of James Bond, but few years in the future… maybe.
In the scenario we all have e-paper devices (something like this, this, this, or eventually something that looks like being actually made after 1990) with access to Internet. The device connects to a book provider, to which we pay e.g. $10 a month.
Using that device we are able to search and choose books, papers, to click through the references to get to other books, etc… and the pages of the books/papers will be then streamed (not fully downloaded) to this reader device.
The amount of money we pay, is then divided per time we spend reading each of the books. If half of the month I spend reading some book, it gets $5. If I read just few pages, but find out it is not for me, it gets just few cents.
If such system exist, even bloggers might be able to fit in! – the provider might not just provide philosophy books, but also serve philosophy blogs, and bloggers could be payed for providing content, that other people read through such service (according to the time spent). As a reader I would be glad if part of my money goes to those bloggers whose posts I spend lot of time reading.
Of course, this kind of service doesn’t have to be limited to philosophy books. It can be for books in general, but there is one problem for this kind of generalizing… Some books are very specialized, and doesn’t have as much readership as others, and thus might not provide return of investment if the $10 are divided to all kind of books. It seems more plausible for the system to work if people pay separately for different types of books (e.g. I will pay $10 monthly for access to philosophy books, and then separate $5 if I want access to fiction).
Maybe the price per category can be even calculated by some formula, so that more readership some category of books has, the less money the reader should pay for the service.
The aggregator page is now tracking 109 114 117 blogs, and it used to get crowded with posts sometimes. Because of that I did two changes:
Also you will notice that at the bottom of the page there is link to the aggregation archives for previous days.
I plan in future also to add tracking of the comments for those blogs that offer comment feeds, but can’t give concrete dates.
I don’t have information about how much (if at all) the aggregator is used, but if you use it, and have some requirements or ideas please leave a comment here.
I’m also interested about your opinion about some other groups that would be useful (currently there is just a Mind&Cog.Sci group, which might be little artificial), recommendations for other blogs to track on that page, etc…
UPDATE (Dec.09):
A little more tweaking…
UPDATE(Dec.10):
UPDATE(Dec.12):
My previous post was 100rd one, so probably nice time for little statistics and meta-blogging:
7 months blogging
over 110 comments
over 22000 page views
over 60 blogs linking hereover 50 around 15 readers through RSS. I knew it was too good to be true. WordPress announced that it was overestimated the number of feeds because of some glitch in the algorithm. If one more bug comes out I will be from “over 50 readers” to 5
Thanks to all the readers, especially to ones who left their comments (not many :) ).
Thanks to Chris from Mixing Memory for having posts of such quality, and also for being the first from the philosophy blogosphere to add me to his blogroll.
Thanks to Clark from Mormon Metaphysics (also a blog of great quality) for linking to different posts several times from his left-side column, and Richard from Philosophy, et cetera for organizing the Philosophers’ Carnival, and the hosts of those carnivals for accepting few of my posts on the carnivals so far.
Thanks to Pete from Brain Hammer and Eric from Splintered Mind, for giving lot of food for thought on issues from Philosophy Of Mind, and to all other blogs on my blog list.
Also thanks to all those who have added links to my blog since it started.
As for the number of page views, I guess it will be interesting to add little clarification:
The number of visits thus far is over 22000 page views, and if it seems high for this blog, you are right. It is not that my posts in general that has attracted so much attention. The number is actually primarily so high because of the post with links to video lectures. It has alone over 13000 page views.
The significant number of hits came from links to that post from Leiter Reports (around 800 in two days when the link was posted) and Metafilter (I think between 1000 and 2000 in two days after the linking). But the most hits had come fro del.icio.us and StumbleUpon services. I guess most of you have heard about del.icio.us. It is a social bookmarking service, where the users add bookmarks to their accounts, and further assign tags and descriptions to them. Then other users can search through tags/descriptions, to check for the bookmarks of other users under those tags. Users can also add bookmarks of others to their own bookmarks. It also contains a page where most recent bookmarks are displayed, and a page for recently most bookmarked pages.
The link at Metafilter had another effect, it seems that lot of people frequenting Metafilter are also users of del.icio.us, and they added the url to their del.icio.us bookmarks. The more people bookmark your page, the higher it ranks, so eventually it was in the top bookmarked pages for the video tag. That started bringing new users of del.icio.us, and more bookmarks, which have also bookmarked their page, so that eventually the link was put on the “Hot” page, which brought new hits. The total of that day was around 3000 page views. The other day it was 1400.. It eventually “cooled off” in few days, but there are still people who are coming to the video lecture post through their del.iciou.us bookmarks. The other big part of the visitors of that page come from the StumbleUpon service. It is also kind of bookmarking service, with the difference that it also has a toolbar which is added to the browser. When you register, you say what kind of topics you are interested in. After that you can press the “stumble upon” button, which presents you with a page from those category that other users have added and voted as cool. You can then use the voting buttons yourself, to vote that page as good,or bad, which in turns affects the overall voting and the possibility of that page to be shown to other people. I have quite a lot of hits from StumbleUpon, actually for few days it was limited to 20-30 hits, but then suddenly for two days bursted to around 400 hits each day. After that, it again lowered to the previous levels, and is still bringing new people to that page.
Anyway, it is good that so many people have found that list of links useful, though I would like it more of course if they find something interesting in the other posts I actually write :).
Cheers!
A brood comb 