I’m testing a theory here. Civil War Interactive reviews Civil War blogs every Wednesday and Thursday; you can read them by clicking here. There are quite a few Civil War blogs out there, and this is a big and pretty much thankless job, so I don’t want to sound critical. The last few reviews of my site seem to imply that I’m hardly posting at all, and I admit that there have been other things going on during the past month that have slowed me down. But I posted three articles in November that were not mentioned at all in the reviews, and two of them are among my favorites (the three posts are The House of Meade, Governor Sprague’s Arm Candy and Why McDowell?).
My site is reviewed every Wednesday (with the exception of holiday weeks). The old auditor in me looked for a likely explanation as to why these three posts were overlooked. The first (and admittedly most likely) possibility is that the articles suck and aren’t noteworthy. Barring that, the only other thing I can see is that they were each posted on a Thursday. So, I’m putting up this post on Thursday to see if it gets mentioned in the review. If it doesn’t, maybe I’m onto something. Maybe the reviewer hates Thursdays.
Now, aren’t you glad you read this? That’s 60 seconds of your life you can never get back (not counting the video, because that clip could never be considered a waste of time, regardless of how many times you’ve seen it). But if you also missed these three Thursday posts, click the links above and I’ll try to make it up to you!
You know, there are a lot of similarities between the blogosphere and a phone book. Writing a blog is similarly important as being listed in the phone book, one needs to be similarly qualified for either, and we should be similarly excited about our presence in either.
Harry Smeltzer
Bull Runnings 
Harry,
Might it be that Thursdays are bad because she’s reviewing the rest of the blog list that day? I’m on the second half of the list and I’ve noticed that sometimes my Friday and Saturday entries aren’t mentioned if I’ve had a productive week on the blog.
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Don,
I suspect the reviewer finsihes up the reviews on Thursday, and the next Wednesday checks the sites for posts made since the previous Friday, thus Thursday posts fall through the cracks for the Wednesday group. But let’s not forget the very real possiblity that the posts of mine that were “missed” were just not any good. I liked ’em though, and that’s what’s really important to a blogger!
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No, I doubt it. 1. They were good posts, very good in some cases. 2. She’s mentioned some of mine that weren’t so great if it was a slow week, both shorter and of less substance than the ones of yours that you mentioned.
Or is this an attempt to find out what it is that hath no fury like a Laurie scorned? 8^) Sounds like she was pretty fired up over missing this week’s reviews.
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Well, she didn’t miss them, she lost them in a site malfunction. I read the reviews on Wednesday and thought I wsa going nuts today when I checked back and they were all gone. That’s got to drive a person nuts. It’s never happened to me, though. Knock on wood.
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Harry,
I can promise you there are no conspiracy theories being carried out with TWIB. Laurie does the best she can to pique the interest of our readers, and hopefully get them to click through to the blogs themselves. There is no other purpose for TWIB. However, yoou have to understand that it’s impossible to comment on each and every blog post. What she may do is pick the top one or two posts that she thinks she can make a good “tease” out of. I can also assure you that no particular days of the week are ignored. It’s just that the number of blogs she has to review on each day – at 6 hrs. per day – limits how much detail she can supply. She does not consider whether she thinks a post is “good” or “worthwhile”. The only posts we deliberatly ignore are non-Civil War posts. So rest assured we try to treat all fairly, and try not to slight anyone.
J. Avalon – CWi
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Joe,
And not for a moment to take away from what Laurie does, I couldn’t do it.Unfortunately for me, her reviews are sometimes more entertaining than the posts they’re commenting on. 8^)
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As I said, “it’s a big job, so I don’t want to sound critical.” I don’t think I was treated unfairly, nor do I feel slighted. It was just curious when, upon anaylysis, a pattern was detected. The mere existence of a pattern is not necessarily indicative of causality. But most important, this gave me a chance to post the YouTube clip, feature two posts that I wanted more folks to read, and tie the phone book and the blogosphere together. TWIB was just the view-blocking SOB of a typical random b**t**d that got caught in the crossfire!
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