Saamba

OK - I have a complaint.

We recently signed up to join the "Humour" and "Sarcasm" diary rings thinking that it would help us find like-minded cynical people. So we joined the rings and happily started checking out all our fellow ring-members so we could say hello and read what humorous and sarcastic things they had to shower us with. I was so excited.

So I clicked on the first diary, and got an error message.

I clicked on the second diary, and got an error message.

I clicked on the third, forth, and fifth diary.....you guessed it: No diary. WTF?

That's when I started to get annoyed. And when anal retentive people like me get annoyed, they start taking notes. Notes like this:

Of the 260 diaries which are members of the "Humour" diary ring:

130 (50%!) no longer exist. Lucky You! You've reached an Error Page, dumbass! What were you thinking? Get a life!

Of the diaries that DO exist:

15 have not updated in over a month.

28 have not updated for several months, going all the way back to last January.

2 have not updated since sometime back in 2003.

1 has not updated since the Year of Our Almighty Lord 2002 A.D.

2 have not updated since the year 2001, but that is understandable. I mean, what has really happened in the world since then that anybody would even possibly want to write about?

13 are locked diaries. That's not very humorous.

2 are empty and devoid of any actual diary, profile, dates or text. This really tends to dampen the diary reading experience.

9 are from people who have since abandoned DiaryLand to go to other internet diaries. I didn't even know that things like DiaryLand existed until a few months ago, and now you are telling me there are OTHERS?

1 is already on our favorites list (awittykitty) so that doesn't really help us out, does it?

1 is us, so that REALLY doesn't help us, unless we happen to get-off seeing our name on a list, which we do, but not this one.

So, for those of you that weren't keeping track and doing the math in your head, that leaves 56 remaining diaries which are ACTIVE and might be of some interest to us. That's only 21%. Of that 21%, we wrote down the names of about 9 diaries which looked like they may be interesting and might be worth a closer inspection. Of those, I suspect only 2 or 3 might be of long-term interest. That's not very good. What kind of diary ring is that? Actually, now that i think of it, what the fuck is a diary ring?

I have not done a similar review of the "Sarcasm" diary ring yet, but that one has 1100 members. I'll be sure to get back to you with the results on that when I finish sometime next year.

It occurred to me that if 50% of the diaries in the �Humour� diary ring don't exist any more, then this could be representational of DiaryLand overall. Think about it: half of all the diaries here may have gone the way of the Dodo, yet they are still listed. If phone books worked like that, they'd be 3 feet thick. If I worked like that, I'd currently have 30 girlfriends. No thank you � five is enough. And how freakin' long does a diary have to lay dormant before it goes bye-bye? If there are diaries which haven't been updated since 2001, then I am guessing quite a while. If that is the case, then andrew might need to update the servers just a teensy-weensie bit.

I wanted to try and figure out how many defunct diaries this could equate to, mathematically speaking, so I began to search DiaryLand for some mention of how many members it has. I checked the �What is DiaryLand� page, but it didn't mention anything there. I checked the �Take A Tour!� page, but there wasn't anything there, either. The �Sign Up!� page wasn't helpful. The �Why Should You Use DiaryLand?� had no mention of it. The �Frequently Asked Questions� page, which I was sure would have this information, did not. I even checked all the �News� articles going back over the past year and a half, expecting some mention of a new milestone, but no. Nada. This information was mentioned about as often as the word �renewable� was used in Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings.

Looks like I am going to have to figure this out on my own.

So, in a ridiculous effort to calculate how many members DLand has, I conducted the following exploratory analysis:

For starters, the members area lists the 150 most recently updated diaries per letter of the alphabet. 27 letters of the alphabet x 150 members per letter means DLand has at least 4050 members. I think this number is way too low, considering unclebob has 2253 people alone just listing him as a "favorite." That doesn't even begin to include the people listing him as "least favorite," therefore we can assume there is at least double that amount of DLand members, which would be 4506.

Another popular diarist (though he would probably punch me in the face for calling him a "diarist") is porktornado. PorkTornado has 780 people listing him as a favorite. I figured there was probably a lot of overlap between people listing UncleBob and PorkTornado as favorites, so I set about finding out exactly how many. I copied the lists of all the people who list each of them as favorites and pasted them into a spreadsheet. I then had the computer tell me how many duplicates there were, and was surprised to learn that there are only 154 people who list them both. That means 2 things: The 626 people that don't appear on both lists can be added to our total number of members; (and) I am a dork.

So now I knew there were at least 5132 members of Dland. NOW we are getting somewhere!

I then began to repeat this process with the 1453 members who list Andrew as a favorite, being careful to remove any duplicates, of course. When I was copying his list of favorites, I accidentally clicked on the link to someone's diary, and surprise! An error Page! Lucky me! Geez, the chances of that happening must be somewhere around, oh, I don't know...50%? What a....

....hey, wait a minute.

�If you're reading this and don't know what Diaryland is, it's a web community of over 1.5 million.......�

1.5 million? Holy crappers. That's a lot. I'm glad I read that because it would have taken me awhile to reach that number with my current counting approach. Then I laughed because I had just looked at that same error page over 130 times, but hadn't noticed the next sentence. Then I wondered what the hell that information was doing hidden on an error page in the first place.

Then again, with potentially 750,000 extinct diaries, it could be the most viewed page of all.

So, yeah. Maybe Andrew could to update things a bit. Or maybe he wants to leave them there. Maybe all those people pissed him off in the past and he sent the DiaryLand Police after them and killed them and erased their diaries, but kept their accounts listed as a warning to everybody else � like heads on spikes.

On the lighter side, I have found the new �Most Annoying Diary� which will have to replace the reigning champ from this earlier rant. The title now goes to 14 year old angel6890 who is a member of no less than 312 diary rings, which you have to patiently scroll through in all its eye-gouging-graphic-design-wonderment to get to her actual entry. When you are a member of that many diary rings, it apparently becomes difficult not to contradict yourself. For example, she is a member of both the �Teens For Christ� ring as well as the �I Wish I Was Jewish� ring. She is a member of both the �Anorexic,� �Thintown� & �Eating Disorder� rings as well as the �I Love Chocolate,� �I Love Ben&Jerry's� and �Weight Watchers� rings. Most disturbingly, she is a member of both the �Coke� AND the �Pepsi� rings. Sorry, honey - you can't be both.

I think this little girl has a career in politics ahead of her.

As for me, I am going to join both the �Anal Retentive� and the �I Have Nothing Better To Do Than Pick-On a 14 Year Old Girls Diary� ring. Anybody is free to join me � active account holders only.

15 wrote to say im an idiot.