This is just a quick update. I'm writing a blog post using Siri on my iPhone as I drive to the society for California Archaeology meeting in Visalia, California.
During the conference I'll be sending out as many tweets as possible and hopefully I'll grab a few good interviews for the CRM Archaeology podcast. If you want to take a look at the program for the conference and make any requests for tweets let me know.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you at a conference!
The first post of the blogging collective is up! I've linked to it below. If you're interested in sharing your experiences and wisdom in CRM Archaeology, please contact me and we'll get you set up. There are very few rules and no schedule. Just have fun!
Here is the first post by Ashley Morton.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the field!
Resistance is Futile.
The recent blogging carnival hosted over at Doug's Archaeology has caused a few neurons to fire in my brain generating synaptic impulses that, inevitably, formed ideas. I can't help it – it's biology.
Here's the idea. On my little website I have the ability to add any number of users and contributors. After seeing the high number of bloggers from the first month that said they stopped blogging, or at least slowed down for one reason or another, I thought a sort of blogging collective was in order. Maintaining a website is time consuming and can sometimes actually cost you money. I say close that page, and all it's hassles, and come blog about CRM-related topics with me.
If you're interested, send me your name. When I collect enough names I'll send you coordinates to an abandoned mine in central Nevada. After multiple grueling rounds of Settlers of Catan we'll know who gets to join the blogging collective! I'm just kidding – the losers will also be thrown down a mine shaft.
So, who's interested in a fun blogging collective? Blog when you want about whatever you want. There are virtually no restrictions on what you can talk about, as long as it's about CRM, doesn't slam a company (as much as we'd like to sometimes), a client, or a fellow tech. That's what Twitter is for.
Comment on this post, send me a message with the form to the right, tweet me @archeowebby, or email me at archeowebby@gmail.com.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the field!
We’re moving forward with Doug’s Archaeology Carnival and this is my January post. I like to wait until the end of the month so I can wait for everyone else to post. That way I can see what they do that I like, what I don’t like, and take all the good parts and call them my own. Sort of like Apple does with technology. And, like Apple, I make take those ideas and make them iAwesome! Right.
I figured a post that essentially boils down to a popularity contest should start with a little bombastic ego boosting. Feel free to comment your ass off so this can be the post I talk about next year.
Metrics
It can be difficult to measure the “worth” of a particular post. Some posts receive comments, some don’t . Some get a lot of “page views” and some don’t. Then there are the unique views. Those are supposedly the views that count only once per person visit. That means you get counted only once even if you use the same device to check out a post several times in one day. Many bloggers say the unique views are the ones that count. Apparently the bots the troll the internet, such as Google Search, hit sites multiple times which inflates your page view count. I don’t know whether that’s true, and frankly, I don’t care much.
I don’t have any hard numbers on comments, views, or unique views because I switched from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6 last March. When I did that I lost my metrics for Squarespace 5 which accounted for my first 115 or so blog posts. I can tell you, however, which posts were more popular.
By far, my most popular post was the one I made about getting fired for blogging. It happend soon after I started my blog and I’m pretty sure I had over 600 unique views on that post in just a couple days. I keep getting hits on it so I’m sure it’s over several thousand by now.
My most popular series is my “Shovelbums Guide”. It seems that people like this stuff. I named the posts so they are highly searchable as well, so, I think a lot of non-archaeologists end up finding them on Google. The posts were so popular, in fact, that I decided to make an eBook out of them. I happened to have a rough draft of the book on my iPad at the SAAs in Hawai’i last year when I stopped by the Left Coast Press booth. My plan was to ask one of the editors, Caryn Berg, if she thought it would make a good book. I had no intention of publishing it traditionally. She told me that it was a great idea and encouraged me to put in a proposal. I did…the book will be out in April, just in time for a book signing at the SAAs in Austin!
Right now I get between 2500 and 3500 unique hits per month on my blog. It’s pretty steady, even though I don’t blog on a strict schedule. I think I’ve created enough content that I get a lot of hits from people just searching terms on search engines.
I hope to expand on the blog in the future. What I really want is to have a community of CRM bloggers that blog for the DIGTECH CRM Archaeology Blogging Network. That sounds ambitious, I know, but some many people blog so infrequently that they never get exposure. I’d love to see a number of bloggers blogging on here about CRM topics so there is always something good and no one feels pressured by a schedule. What do you think? If you want to joint me and blog on the Random Acts of Science blog, let me know!
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the field!
Northwestern Nevada.
I’m reading an article in the recent issue of Nevada Archaeologist (available to a select number of people and therefore virtually invisible) by a former professor of mine and it made me think of a few things I want to discuss here.
Leach, Melinda, William Swearson, Amber Summers-Graham, and Katie Graham
2013 “Good Luck in Making Unexpected and Fortunate Discoveries”: Teaching and Learning at Serendipity Shelter. Nevada Archaeologist 26:85-103.
The article is generally about the excavations that have taken place at the prehistoric site, Serendipity Shelter, over the past several decades. Serendipity Shelter is located in the northwestern corner of Nevada in a very remote, and difficult to get to, area.
Much of the article is dedicated to explaining how volunteers have contributed to the excavations and analysis at the site. Volunteers from a number of agencies, and from the Surprise Valley community, have excavated there over the years. Students at the University of North Dakota (UND) did much of the sorting and analysis of the artifacts recovered during the excavations. As part of the article, several of these students discussed their experiences with Serendipity Shelter and described their first trip out there after working for countless hours in the lab.
It’s with the student narratives that I take issue and want to discuss.
Lithic Landscape: Obsidian in Northwestern Nevada.
All three of the students that relayed their experiences in the article worked on the artifact collection in the lab at UND. At least one worked on the collection for four years! Throughout that time they saw virtually every artifact, including tools, lithic debitage, flakes, some pottery, and faunal bone. Presumably, they were discussing with Dr. Leach the setting at Serendipity Shelter and had possibly even seen pictures of the site. Still, though, all three said that there was no substitute for actually being on the site. Without that experience, they couldn’t properly place the artifacts in context and see them in relation to the people that created them and lived, or at least stayed, there. Really?
To me, this is one of the reasons we have looting and inappropriate site visitations. It’s the reason people go to sites, instead of being content to read about them. I would say that most, verging on all, archaeological sites are not talked about in a publicly accessible forum. Only a handful are managed by an agency or private interest that allows people to visit. Fewer still are written about in popular archaeology books. Even fewer are shown, usually not very well, on television during specials on esteemed networks like Discovery and the History Channel (#sarcasm).
Even if a site makes it to a publicly accessible medium, what are the chances it was written about in a way that satisfies the curiosity of the reader? Even after four years of working on the artifacts from Serendipity Shelter and after four years of talking about the site, the students in the article were unable to comprehend the site without a visit. What does that say about how we talk about and describe sites? I understand that visiting a site is a truly immersive and inspiring experience, but, it shouldn’t be a requirement.
I guess what I’m saying is that we need more areas where the public can access information and description about archaeological sites so they won’t be tempted to visit them and possibly take something from them. If blog posts were written so the title came up in a Google search about a site, then perhaps an inquisitive person would read the post and be satisfied by the description. Perhaps not. I don’t know.
Really, I just want to start a conversation about descriptive site information and about getting that out to the public in a way that doesn’t damage the site or the wishes of the people who’s ancestors lived at the site. I’ve seen some great blog posts with awesome descriptions and pictures of sites. They were so good that I felt I was actually there, in some cases. If more companies and agencies would let their people blog about sites then maybe the public would be satisfied enough to not want to go find the site and potentially damage it.
What do you think? Am I way off base here? This question is part of what I’ll talk about in my presentation during the Blogging Archaeology session at the 2014 SAAs in Austin. Don’t forget to stop by Saturday morning!
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the field!
This is one amazing battery back and it’s something no field tech, and no field vehicle, should be without. Cobra is known for making car radar detectors, but, they have an electronics division that does so much more.
The Cobra JumPack is a small, hand-sized power pack. It sports a 7,500mAh (that means it can charge something for a really long time) battery, an LED flashlight, and surprisingly, it will jumpstart the battery in your car not once, but, several times. That is simply, amazing. On top of all that, the JumPack takes only a few hours to charge.
The JumPack will be available in April (just in time for my birthday!) for $129.95. I’ve owned similar power packs that I paid about $100 for. It’s worth the extra $30 for a flashlight and car jump starter.
Would you use this? Would you recommend your company buy them for the field vehicles? If you have a large, clunky, battery charger for jumpstarts in your field vehicle, would you switch to this? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the field!
The day passed virtually unnoticed for me, but, yesterday, my company officially turned one. I’m basing that on when I got my Nevada State Business license. There are other ways to measure it, but this seemed appropriate. So, what did I do over the last year?
Well, I
And most importantly,
Thanks for reading and I’ll hopefully be hiring you soon!
