Community

Membership at culturekitchen has its privileges. One of them is being a member of a blog that, as someone told me recently, "scares people because it's so brainy".

Yah.

We are the thinking woman's (and man's) blog. Welcome to the thinkidrome.

Heh.

I owe the blogs hard thinkitude to my sluttish attraction to good writing. I have always made it a point to drag into this here blog the bloggers I love to read elsewhere.

Call it blogmiscuity, but it works.

Slowly but surely I am updating the editorial and style guidelines. This section on style is still in progress, but please take a look at it.

When you write a comment, start a forum topic or submit an article at culturekitchen, you are not just contributing your writing. You are also taking part in the publishing process.

In this book you will find the dos and donts of prettifying your work.

Current events update.

The speech of John McCain at Liberty University. Great words and sentiment, especially considering the locale. Thanks to Coyote Gulch for the heads up.

(Spring 2006)

Lynchburg, Virginia. ¬– Today, U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) delivered the commencement address to the graduates at Liberty University. The following is the text of his address:

Quote: Link to source

Thank you, Dr. Falwell. Thank you, faculty, families and friends, and thank you Liberty University Class of 2006 for your welcome and for your kind invitation to give this year's commencement address. I want to join in the chorus of congratulations to the Class of 2006. This is a day to bask in praise. You've earned it. You have succeeded in a demanding course of instruction. Life seems full of promise as is always the case when a passage in life is marked by significant accomplishment. Today, it might seem as if the world attends you.
From aspiring President want to be John McCain:

- and -

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It's a pity that there wasn't a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Just a heads up that interesting stuff is happening at the forums. I want to direct your attention to two new member contributions :

Dropping Only One Rock at a Time: Two Years after NY's Rockefeller Drug Law Reform Act | by Shreya Mandal

Outsourcing Bonanza: Vietnam Trade Normalization by unlawflcombatnt

Great work indeed. Go read them. Also, a big shout out to our new members. The list after the jump!

We have a lot of activity happening in the forums! We need you there so you can not only read what's going on there and participate but also vote to the front page your favorite posts.

Yes people. You have the power. Use it.

Where ever you see a post with a star rating system at the bottom, that system is there for you to use to recommend posts to the front page. Any post with 20 votes and an average of 8 stars will be promoted by the editors after a quick editorial review.

What does this mean to you?

(1) Invite your friends to become registered users of culturekitchen. Only registered users can vote to promote posts to the front page.

(2) Keep a mailing list of your hommies and use the "send to a friend" link at the bottom of posts to invite them to vote for your post.

Too shy to get to the front page but craving for attention? The have your friends comment on your entries. That will at least get you to the Live Discssions side bar. The more active a thread is, the higher on the bar your post will stay, now matter how long the thread stays open.

Wow! The forums are starting to get h-o-t. Check out what's happening over there, will ya!

It's Sunday morning. Imagine you are in the church of culturekitchen. Now imagine this is our collection plate.

Let's talk about money.

Believe it or not but we don't make more money with more traffic. We make more money with more people going into the advertisers sites through our ads.

I have been tracking for the past few months how Google handles the CTR (click-through rate) for this site. Unfortunately, with Google I have no control over what I can charge for advertisng. They impose the click-thru rate on the site. How do I know they are pricing click-thrus on our site? I have a widget running on Firefox that allows me to track the CTR for Adsense.

I have noticed that we get penalized for getting more traffic but not more click-thrus. Yup. If traffic goes up, then Google reduces the amount per click we get. So for example, we were doing more than $1/click last month. We have 50% more traffic this month, so they've downgraded our CTR to $.060.

Now, you have to understand : I am not asking you to endlessly click through their ads. I will actually get thrown out of the Google Adsense program if I request that from you. It is explicitly state in their Terms Of Service agreement.

What I am asking you to do is something a bit different; especially since, if traffic does increase, I can charge more money through our BlogAds.

At BlogAds, we set the price. The more traffic one of my sites gets, the more I can charge for advertising.

Do you get the conundrum? On the one hand, more traffic but less clicks looses us money from Google Adsense. Yet more traffic translates into higher adspace pricing through BlogAds.

So what I am asking you to do? Help us increase the quality of the traffic to our site.

There's been a bumper crop of angry democrats rushing to publish their thoughts about what is wrong either with the Republican party, the Democrats or the country itself.

Check out the growing list of people who believe they can change the world with one book at a time.