Archaeolog to Return! Hurrah!

Michael Shanks’s Archaeolog is set to return. The recent upsurge in comment spam threatened to shut it down. Over on the right you can see the Spam Karma box which keeps an eye on my problem. It’s caught over 500 comments in the first week, which is well over an hour of human editing time.

He notes that he plans to set up a collective blog. I’ll wait and see if that works. Sometimes it does. Savage Minds is frequently interesting and updated regularly. But Michael Shanks is a philosophically divisive fellow. I wonder if he co-exist on the same writing team as the Trireme Veterans for Truth for instance.

One of the benefits of inter-operable blogging software is that you can have have an inter-connected conversation yet still have autonomy for the writers. For instance some people just hate reading coloured text on black backgrounds, particularly when they’re colour-blind. Sorry, but I simply have bad eyes. All the colour here is usually worked out mathematically (I’m not even certain what colour the far background here is).

I do welcome his return to archaeological commentary as well as reportage and I do think there could be benefits of opening his log to a collective. Hopefully it will lead to others like Cornelius Holtorf making insightful comments, even if I don’t always agree with them.

However it seems odd for him to advertise participation as being motivated by power: “If you are interested in joining us – get in touch. Archaeolog receives 60k hits and about 15 thousand visitors a month.” I would have thought Michael Shanks would have embraced a diverse and dispersed community of weblogs as an expression of polyvocality. I like visiting a variety of sites like Troels Myrup’s blog to try and see differing interests. I don’t always succeed in Troels’s case, because my Danish is terrible, but I make the effort.

I can’t see the attraction of a BIG readership. I could be missing something. I’ve recently deactivated the referrals tracker, the list was getting to long. To replace it I’ve added the sitemeter box to the bottom of the page to keep track on referrals. I do like to know where people are visiting from. But I may scrap that too as it counts the page views. I really don’t want to know how many people read this. I’m more interested in trying to work out what I’m thinking and making notes of places with interesting stuff. If I was interested in getting a wide readership I’d be blogging about female celebrities, gossiping about Angela Rippon’s nude scene in the “The News: Uncensored” or speculating on the what Debbie McGee is up to next. If you want fame, the last thing you’d write about is ancient history or archaeology.