I can sympathize with your feeling that being right is not a substitute for being popular. But I also agree that "it had a somewhat greater impact than the raw numbers would indicate."

Nice Guardian piece. I linked it.

I always wonder about that. Why do editors write the headlines rather than the author? Can you suggest headlines to them, or choose among several they suggest?

My guess is its a carryover from print media, where headlines have to be a certain size.

Patterico : Thank you.

Travis: I can suggest, but they don't have to listen. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't bother. I think the idea is the headline-writer is an expert on what will draw a reader's eye.

'Wasteful bad habit' my arse. I'm lucky when I get 50 clicks a day, and yet I am proud of my blog, and happy that it has had its fifteen minutes (that one piece that's been around the internet and back).

I liked the Guardian piece. It's good to see a non-tech-illiterate journalist writing about tech for the layman. I'm stunned that anyone thinks that looking up a directory is 'breaking in', and that anyone thinks that the public aren't going to do that if they want to see what you're hosting. (Not least because it's a primitive but still in-use means of music sharing. Many people have a few favourite songs in their directory, or a few hundred...)

[My favourite security-by-obscurity story is the one about the legal status of garden poppies in the USA: legal, but only if you don't know that it's dead easy to derive opium from any one of them. Rather than outlaw this common garden/culinary plant, the law relies on people simply not knowing it's the same plant as the famous narcotic.]

Thanks. Note I'm actually a programmer by trade.