Not a Rant

I had a different post scheduled for today, until I realised that it would constitute a political rant and I've already had my permitted single such rant for this week. So instead, I thought that I'd talk a bit about what's going on with The Sleaze and Sleaze Diary. As I've just renewed the domain name for The Sleaze again, it looks as if it will be around, in some form or other, for a couple more years at least. This is despite Google's ongoing efforts to turn the web into one big shopping mall by warping their search results to favour either big brand names or their own products. I'm not going to launch into another rant about the evils of Google but, in a nutshell, its algorithm currently seems to rank web pages on the basis of all manner of off-page criteria, rather than on the basis of their actual content and its relevance to the searcher. Add to that the fact that they've 'devalued' 'long tail' (ie older) pages, and you have the current situation where many perfectly good non-commerce sites are being starved of traffic, despite their quality, (Google seems to have a different concept of 'quality' to everyone else - basically they don't seem to place any value on pages that don't have making money as their primary motivation).

Getting back to my plans, I'm still working on a new, radically restyled, Sleazecast. What's proving time-consuming is the production of new non-monologue segments (which will punctuate the stretches of me talking). The raw material for these is currently coming from archive.org. Whilst sourcing the stuff can be time-consuming, the editing and remixing is taking even longer. That said, the end results, so far, have been pretty promising. I've so far completed two of these segments and I'm editing a third. The final two should be fairly straightforward (famous last words). Of course, further delays are being incurred because of the necessity of periodically putting the project on the back burner for days at a time so that I can write new material for The Sleaze. However, I think that wait will be worth it when the new format Sleazecast finally emerges. If nothing else, it will feature a fine roster of guest stars, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. So, stay tuned!