Junk Page Views: blogg.tk and Others

A while ago Google introduced Google Stats on Blogger. Very interesting it is as well. I have recently ascended to the giddy heights of roughly ten page views a day - which can be more than I get e-mails at work - and I would like to think that those are all real people brought here by a search on Google or the "Next Blog" button on Blogger.

Then I saw that a site called blogg.tk was a top provider for a few days. Never having heard of it, I went to have a look. What a nasty site. It seems to be offering software to set up a whole bunch of random blogs from which you can, allegedly, make money. Because if it was that easy, why don't they do it themselves and cut out the middleman?

I had noticed other odd-looking sites before. alphainventions.com was one, remroom.ru another and postring.tk, pu.gg. www.jobsforsmartpeople.com, pingywebedition.somee.com yet others. Many of them are based in, oh!, look!, Russia. I am willing to believe that someone might have been browsing from what looks like a Russian furniture store, but then I trust everything from Russia, from the blondes to the billionaires.

I'm assuming the scam is to spam sad and lonely bloggers like me with views so that we go to their site, where they will infect us with viruses or try to sell us some bogus software that will make us rich or popular or attractive to women. Maybe they will hi-jack the blog. I don't know.

This is never going to be a popular blog. It's too text-heavy, the entries are often long, the tone is personal and the photographs don't feature Abbey Lee or Lily Cole on a regular basis. (I don't know how many page views Terence Tao gets - in a sensible world, it should be thousands - but I bet it's not as many as Rumi Neely gets.) I'm not writing about things people care about, like fashion, music, mathematics and cooking. Nor is it chirpy in tone and garishly colorful in design, which also seems to help.

I would like to know that the page views I get are real. Occasionally someone leaves a comment, which just makes my week. (I've never left one, which I know makes me a Bad Blogging Citizen, but I can never think of anything to say other than "Interesting post" that wouldn't take half an evening to compose. I would feel frustrated if I read "interesting post" because I would want to know why.)

Google know about these junk page views, but doing anything about them isn't on their list.  Best advice seems to be: don't click on the link. Just like you don't "unsubscribe" from spam e-mails.

The Art of Non-Conformity (3): Lucie's Laws

Hold back the sophomore comment about "there can't be ways to be a non-conformist, because then you'd be conforming to the rules of being a non-conformist". I can conform to the rules I choose, and I can choose your rules or their rules, and it doesn't matter, because tomorrow or in the next instant I can change my mind. The point is not to conform to their rules because you can't think of anything better to do, or because you want to be accepted by them.

I'm going to cheat and quote myself, because this is the best way I've put this, though I wasn't thinking about it at the time. This is Lucie and Adam's second date, and Lucie is explaining the Laws she and a friend mentioned as an aside when Lucie and Adam first met.

LUCIE     One: do not watch television and only read foreign newspapers...

ADAM     I can read the FT?

LUCIE     I do. Saturdays. Vanessa Freidman, Jackie Wullschlager, Peter Aspden. Sometimes even to make sure they've kept their promises.

ADAM     Oh. You really do know everyone.

LUCIE     Or I'd have a day job. Rule Two?

ADAM     Okay.

LUCIE     A light suntan and good muscle tone are not optional...

ADAM     Damn straight.

LUCIE     Three: outside the home, even casual clothes should be classy.

ADAM     That's what I was trying to say...

LUCIE     You were. Four: shopping is not...

ADAM     ...a destination activity...

LUCIE     ...so buy your food and washing-up liquid on your way to somewhere else...

ADAM     Aha.

LUCIE     Aha indeed. Five: drinks begin with a w - whiskey, wine and water...

ADAM     You just took that from me.

LUCIE     Well, you might think so. But actually I didn't. Six?

ADAM     Six.

LUCIE     If you can see a crowd, you're in the wrong place...

ADAM     So true.

LUCIE     Seven: butter, coffee and toilet paper, however poor you are, never scrimp on those three things...

ADAM     That sounds familiar, but I shouldn't let on I know it's India Knight, should I?

LUCIE     No. People will think you read your girlfriends' books.

ADAM     And we wouldn't want that. Eight?

LUCIE     Eight: argue with your dentist and your doctor, but not with your petrol gauge or your first impressions.

ADAM     My petrol gauge is as reliable as my first impressions?

LUCIE     Which are way more reliable than your doctor.

(05:20 In The Morning - un-produced theatre script)

Lucie's Laws are about keeping the crap out of your life so you have time, energy and money to enjoy the good stuff. Do what you want except consume junk culture, junk food and the poisonous air of the English media. Rules two and three mean you're going to dress well and you will be going to the gym or playing sports a couple of times a week at least (because being an overweight slob in sloppy clothes is so desirable). Rule four keeps you away from the High Street at the weekends, and from having a family, because you can't shop for a family on an ad-hoc basis. Rules five and seven tell you to aim for simplicity in taste and quality in essentials, not quantity or novelty (that's where most people fall on their faces). Rule eight tells you not to accept so-called experts at face value: many doctors and dentists have ulterior motives, whereas your petrol gauge doesn't (some phone battery indicators do, I read somewhere). Rule six reminds you that the last time the crowd was right was in the mid-Sixties about the Beatles and the Stones. Since then, what's interesting and quality has diverged further and further from what's popular.

You can do whatever else you want. Adam he is an accountant and Lucie she is a PR. You can have a day job or a career. You can like your sex vanilla or kink, you can be a vegetarian who believes in global warming or a carnivore who doesn't, you can have ink or clear skin, you can dig Mozart or Ornette Coleman - as long as you dig someone. You can be well-balanced or you can be a screw-up. You just can't be so messed-up you so things because you think other people think that's what you should do. You can be as dogmatic as you like in the instant, as long as you drop your dogma when it gets in the way of doing what you need to get done.

Sunday Stroll Along The Canal in Utrecht

Once or twice a year I stay with a friend who lives in Utrecht. The more I go over to the Netherlands, the more I like it. Just walking through the streets is restful. Even when it seems, that the Dutch had started their Christmas shopping that weekend.

Friday Afternoon Around Culemborg

Culemborg is a Utrecht dormitory about fifteen minutes south by train from Utrecht. It dates back to the 1300's, with a market square, a church, a very fancy town gate (bottom photo), a modern railway bridge over the river, but no road bridge, so there's a the ferry that runs from about six in the morning to ten-thirty at night. 70 cents the single trip for foot passengers. We had lunch in a cafe - there are quite a few decent-looking restaurants and cafes there - and crossed the river, where the wind was cold, but the cottages picturesque, then returned to the town, stopping at the shop with the marzipan pig to buy some marzipan sweets for desert that evening.

The Art of Non-Conformity (2): What Non-Conformity Isn't

So we were talking about non-conformity, and how it has nothing whatsoever to do with being prepared to sit around ramshackle airports in poor countries waiting for the pilot of the held-together-by-duct-tape DC3 to sober up and fly the plane, while eating vegetarian tacos and re-coding your client's website. It may sound exotic, and it narrowly beats commuting in suburban London, but it's not non-conformity. Non-conformity in those circumstances would be finding a doctor to give the pilot a vitamin B shot to help him sober up.

Non-conformity isn't about not following rules or not doing what everyone else does. To do anything that resembles an organised activity, from playing chess to driving (even in Naples), requires you to follow some rules. This is one of those points philosophers don't make enough of: to "do" anything that other people can recognise as our doing X means that we have to follow the rules they have for doing X. If we start moving chess pieces around at random, nobody will think we're playing chess. They will either think we're bonkers, or being silly. Even Mornington Crescent has rules - it's just that the rules aren't about what you think they're about.

Conformity is about following the rules when you have forgotten why, or never knew why or just because you like to follow the rules. Bridge clubs are full of old people tut-tutting at the newbies who don't know that a bid of three clubs is never followed by four hearts except when your partner has bid one no trumps and it's the third Thursday after Lent. Professional players will tell you that these "rules" are guidelines: you use them, don't use them, according to your judgement of the situation. Pros always say stuff like that, no matter what the subject. The point for them is to go home with a shed-load of money. But the point for the amateurs is to take part in a ceremony that confirms them as being insiders, members of the club and good social team players. Process is more important than results. (Which is why even now I recoil inwardly when I hear people talking about "process" in business: the point of business is to make a product people want at a price they can afford that leaves you with a profit. Not following a "process" that like as not has no positive effect on profit. But that makes me a non-conformist.)


Non-conformity is not about being random or ignoring common social conventions. If you have the opportunity to bathe on a regular basis and don't, that doesn't make you a non-conformist: it makes you smelly and anti-social. If you don't return things you borrow, that doesn't mean you are questioning notions of personal possession, it makes you a thief. If you do things without thinking the consequences through, that makes you impulsive at best and a dangerous and irresponsible twerp at worst. Some rules and conventions are there to enable co-operation and the smooth passage of business and human affairs. Mess with those when it matters and you're just an a..hole.

Non-conformity is about following the spirit of the law and focusing on the results, not the letter of the law and the ceremonial trappings. Non-conformists treat everything as a guideline, each rule applicable in perhaps many circumstances, but not in all. On a clear road with turns you can see round, why not have fun using the full width of the road? In heavy traffic, stick to your side. As for ceremony and process: those are regarded as optional, content-free and to be performed only if it will result in getting what they need. To a non-conformist, "process", "convention", "the way we do things" are not real. Reality is creation, getting results and making things happen. If there's one thing that most non-conformists do, it's jay-walk.

A conformist gets a large chunk of their identity from following the rules and taking part in the ceremonies. A conformist goes to Church because they like the routine, the feeling of being with other people, and of being in the place. The non-conformist goes because they need the religion: if they wanted to be surrounded by people, they would sit in a cafe. When they don't need the religion, they don't go. The non-conformist is not defined by what they do, and that's scary, if not actually a contradiction, to most people. After all, isn't "you'll do anything to (insert objective speaker doesn't share), won't you" one of the standard junk-drama put-downs?

The downside of non-conformity is steep and deep. I am never going to one of the gang, because being one of the gang means committed, unquestioning acceptance of their rules. Ain't going to happen. There will be something in my body language and facial expression that suggests I'm deciding or otherwise judging for myself. I'm not supposed to do that. Other people want to know that when they do X, I will automatically approve, and when one of the Other do Y, I will automatically disapprove. That way they don't have to worry about being judged they because they know just what to do. I mess all that up, because I insist on starting from scratch every time. And people don't like people who are motivated by results: they prefer ceremony. The merchant middle class that emerged across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries upset both the aristocracy and the workers exactly because it was focussed on results, on profits and on political change.

The benefits of non-conformity? I can't think of one, to be honest. It's something that you're born with, or start doing very early in your life. At some point you find yourself choosing to be where the crowd is not. And when I think of it, that's the main benefit. And if you understand what I meant by that, you too are similarly cursed.

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Around The Brunswick Centre

Some Sundays are nearly perfect. The Sunday I took these pictures, I drove in to central London in thirty minutes, ran two miles in 16:50, swam the fastest I've ever swam, saw Mademoiselle Chambon at the Renoir, and had these blue skies to walk under.

The Renoir Cinema has been underneath the Brunswick Centre for as long as I've been watching movies. It used to be one large auditorium with the seats arranged in curves, and was split into two screens a long while ago. It's part of the Curzon art-house chain.

Back in the 1970's the Brunwsick Centre was a concrete wasteland with the little hut of the Renoir box-office in the middle. If you were blindfolded and dropped there, you might think you were in Soviet Russia or a northern council estate. Which you were: a Camden council estate, that is. I visited the Renoir a few times in the early 2000's when I was working over in a City telco, and it was still pretty dire. The Giraffe cafe was there. I think.

Then someone refurbished it and brought in the shops and cafes. When I started working at The Bank in 2007, I went to see a movie there, and was amazed. Because it looks like this...

When I came out from the lunchtime show, it was even more busy. But then, the whole area has changed. It used to be deserted, but at almost any time there are people walking around, even if they are tourists going to Heathrow via Russell Square tube. I've written about the Goodenough College before, so here's a view of Marchmont Street on the other side of the centre. London did not look like this in the 1970's. And I know which I prefer.

The idea of a health store with a pavement cafe being open on Sunday in Camden on Marchmont street, or the Italian on the corner of Marchmont and Tavistock being open, in 1970? It would have been un-thought of, it would in fact have been impossible to think. Philosophers would have given you elegant explanations of the idea of the logically impossible and used "pavement cafe in Camden" as an example of the logically impossible.

And yet here it is. With two Americans talking about "pro soccer" over their cappucinos. Which is something that would have been equally impossible to think in 1970.

The Art of Non-Conformity (1): The Review

Recently I read a book called The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebreau. You know how that happens. You're browsing, you pick up a book, it seems to have things to say on the pages you turn to, presto! Another pop-culture slip.

I grew up in an era when "conformity" was a grey, grey word to colour parents, teachers and people with clerical jobs. (Oddly, manual workers were neither conformist nor non-conformist: they were "the workers" and as such outside cultural judgement.) Back then we knew what it was people were conforming to: marriage, children, job-for-life working for a bank or one of the nationalised industries or in government, washing the car on Sunday and middle-brow culture. It meant fitting in with what other people said they expected you to do and believe.

An updated version of this is roughly what Chris Guillebreau means by "conformity". I think he makes two mistakes. The first is that post-modern capitalist economies don't want you to conform, except to your employers' dress and IT codes. Expecting you to conform to anything else would mean setting standards and training people and generally making commitments, and post-modern capitalism needs to be able to dump it, outsource it, price it out of your salary range and generally melt it into air at any time with minimum disruption and expense. The second mistake is that conforming is not about product choice and how we make the rent, and many of the choices we make are constrained by the numbers. Most of us have to work 9-5 because most jobs are 9-5, not freelance. Most of us have to work at what we're good at rather than at what we love, because what we're good at pays and what we love doesn't. Following your bliss is viable if it so happens that your bliss pays enough, or you are prepared to live very cheap.

Indeed, the book's title should be "Live Cheap and You Need Never Go Into The Office". He's a web developer and seemingly one of the few who are good enough to find enough clients prepared to let him work off-site, which not many clients are prepared to do. He only needs some telephony to do his job - sometimes, I'm gathering, sat phones so he can dial in to a client conference call in the middle of Africa. (That strikes him as cool, but I think it's a little... disjointed.) He travels a lot - not in a Tyler Brule style. He's not going to Biarritz for dinner at Restaurant Phillipe, but to Azerbaijan, Syria, Turkey and other Poor Countries. His idea of fine dining at lunchtime is Chipolte and he's a vegetarian, which keeps the costs down. He's also prepared to sit around airports for a day waiting for connecting flights, delays and the like, on cut-price airlines. Going to poor countries makes your income last a lot longer, and provides months of comparing your material circumstances with Poor People, which makes you feel a lot better about yourself than a few weeks in Manhattan or Kensington.

If I said that books like this were actually commissioned by corporations and western governments to convince you that it's your fault you're a wage-slave tied to a soul-crushing commute and job, which given your skill-set you can only change for a different soul-crushing commute and job, you would mutter something about "Corporations and governments aren't that smart". He may not know it, but he's blaming the victim, the favourite tactic of the oppressor and his lackeys. If only we had the gumption to Do What We Love And Find Someone To Pay Us For Doing It, we would be happy and unafraid of being replaced by someone in Mumbai. Good thing Chris likes web development, which he can do from a rooftop cafe in Syria, and not Java enterprise systems, which would mean he would have to be on-site right up to the day they at-will terminated him.

I felt cheated, because a book with this title should be about more than working freelance, which is a way of life that takes a particular character and mind-set that most of don't have - which is why we don't do it. Non-conformity is about just a lot more than how you make your pay-cheque and where you go on vacation, and there are moments he addresses that stuff, but not for long enough.

There are three posts in this series. The next one is the philosopher's analysis of the idea of non-conformity.