One million words
Posted on
December 11, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?
For perspective:
The 670-page White Paper: 170,000 words
All seven Harry Potter books combined: 1,084,170 words
The Bible: 774,746 words
War And Peace: 587,287 words
The longest novel ever written: 1,267,069 words
(3,031 pages in seven volumes)
If you just got here recently, you’ve got some catching up to do.
The NO campaign – feck all!
Well done Rev Stu and thank you.
These are not words of fiction but words of truth.
Keep up the good work.
Amazing amount of work Stu!
wow.. that’s just awesome… you’ll need to get a bigger keyboard 😛
Oh, link to wingsoverscotland.com is now showing as 404…
Tomorrows headlines today
“YES Campaigner compares himself with the Bible…is this the sort of person you think you can trust?” – Scottish Daily Mail
“Yes Campaigner states Harry Potter bigger than Jesus” – The Telegraph
“Johann Lamont calls for Word Discussion” – Daily Record
Stu,
Just out of curiosity, does the word cloud column under the facebook logo reflect the ‘all time’ most used words, or is it reset every so often ?
“Just out of curiosity, does the word cloud column under the facebook logo reflect the ‘all time’ most used words, or is it reset every so often ?”
Haven’t a Scooby.
It resets after 1 year.
So the ‘most read’ posts are all under 1 yr old
Which is kinda good or it would be choc full of Rangers tax case posts…
Next September, we just need one word, but hopefully it’ll be repeated much more than a million times – YES!
Sorry… see you meant the Tag Cloud…
Er…. “Haven’t a scooby”
@Doug
Forget about one word… I’ll settle for one letter…
X
as long as its in the right place… 🙂
Ah, but the big problem with the referendum campaign is the lack of information.
Clearly!
Congrats Rev Stu. If words were steps we have circumnavigated the globe already. The road to independence is an even longer one than we ever imagined when we took the first step.
Only several million more steps to take.
My ‘X’ is always in the right place Scott 😉 and it sticks.
Thanks Scott ! Interesting to note that the larger font words are predominately of negative connotation, and I wonder when we start to see polar opposite if anything can be read into it ?
( I read somewhere yonks ago that google can predict trends ( eg flu epidemics) based on word usage. I’m curious to know if the data from the WoS word cloud can reveal anything..or maybe I just need to stay off the salmon and banana sandwiches ? 🙂
I think I’ve been talking pesh here… is the TAG CLOUD showing how popular specific blogs have been viewed, as opposed to most common words generated by readers comments ? If so, sorry for being a ricardo here… exit keyboard left.
@kendomacaroonbar
I believe the Tag Cloud lets you know how many post have been tagged with those terms, the bigger the word, the more posts there are.
Thanks Horace
I was tired of listening to the doom merchants,when i searched for a more positive message,i ended up here.Well done Rev,keep up the good work.
As a comparatively new reader and contributor may I also say well done Rev and all your positive contributors, who brighten my day.
WOW! Kudos, Rev. Stu!!! And your contributors
@Horace,
That’s right. If you hover over individual words in the tag cloud, you can see how many topics carry that tag. Click, and you get a list of the relevant articles.
The problem is that the Rev’s eccentric tagging methods don’t actually tell us much about the content of such articles. So you need to be something of a devotee of this site before you get an inkling of what ‘lizards’ ‘hatstand’ or ‘qft’ are likely to bring up. His category allocation ain’t much better….:(
Luckily, the search engine web crawlers like this site because so many people link to it. So if you google ‘wings over scotland currency’ you get a good list of articles where the word appears. But you have to know about the site first. ‘Scottish Independence currency’ has Wings nowhere. That’s because Stu’s categories don’t use it, and if he ever tags an article with it, it’s too infrequently. So the search engines don’t pick it up. But google ‘Scottish politics lizards’ (category & tag that Stu uses a lot) and Wings is number 3. ‘Scottish politics analysis’ (ditto) has wings at 4 & 5. But that’s not exactly hugely helpful to undecided voters!
It’s obviously impossible for the Rev to go back over his million words and re-do all his categories and tags, but maybe a wee New Year’s resolution should be to read a couple of articles on search engine optimisation (tedious bore though that it) and then re-think how he does categories & tags in future posts….. 🙂
“The problem is that the Rev’s eccentric tagging methods don’t actually tell us much about the content of such articles. So you need to be something of a devotee of this site before you get an inkling of what ‘lizards’ ‘hatstand’ or ‘qft’ are likely to bring up. His category allocation ain’t much better….:(“
It’s something I’ve fretted about occasionally – I really should have an “economy” tag, for example – but the fact is that the Search function here is really good. There’s no point in me adding, say, a “Margaret Curran” tag to dozens of articles when searching for “Margaret Curran” in the search box will do just as good a job.
There’s also no way of “nesting” tags, so if you want to find articles where, say, Margaret Curran talked about currency, you wouldn’t be able to use tags to search for both of those things at once. In that case, the best thing to do is a Google search for
“Margaret Curran” currency wingsoverscotland
I’m almost never unable to find old pieces I’m looking for using those two basic methods, and if I do have trouble I add extra tags or keywords so I’ll be able to locate them in future.
Congratulations Rev and all the other contributors and commenters. A million words, wow! And far more powerful ones than anything J K R has written. D’you think that, after a YES vote in September, Scottish Labour will be advertising a “casual vacancy”? 😉
@rev
It’s not so much the internal search function that matters, it’s getting Wings higher up on Google search results. As I demonstrated above, search engine crawlers pay a lot of attention to categories and tags, and because the site is popular, they will be visiting it frequently. If you just categorised relevant articles with ‘Scottish Independence’ and then a further one word category for the subject matter’, you would see results fairly fast I think.
kininvie, i know nothing about IT, but is there anything we can do to help the Rev get higher up the ratings?
add in all the pictures which say a thousand words and you are way past Harry Potter and still accelerating 🙂
@Horace
I believe the Tag Cloud lets you know how many post have been tagged with those terms, the bigger the word, the more posts there are.
Do you know, I had no idea what that bit was for – thought it was just some kind of graphic design. Every day’s a school day right enough!
“but the fact is that the Search function here is really good”
Unfortunately you have to already be here to use it. While most people are using google/bing , think about the undecided, especially in the last few months when they are thinking “oh, better start thinking about this”
It would certainly push up the undecided visitors, which is really what’s needed, if everything was tagged with the words they are most likely to search for. (from now on)
such as
Scottish independence referendum information
Right now wings doesn’t appear in the first 10 pages (as far as I looked) using bing, bbc and huff post are on page 1 (more than once)
It really is worth the small extra effort
“Unfortunately you have to already be here to use it.”
Fair point. We’ve made a few SEO changes in the last few days, hopefully those will boost visibility a bit.
PS on the bright side, BT don’t turn up either.
Congratulations Rev! What are a million words between friends?
I’ve been collating some of the info about the online side of the Independence debate for an essay and what’s been achieved really is something to be proud of.
National, Bella, yourself, Business for Scotland, Labour for Indy, BBC Scotlandshire and now The Common Weal. The controversies, the fundraisers, the polls and now we even have a film in the works which will tackle the referendum thanks to Jack Foster and Co and its funded by the people.
We should all be damned chuffed! 🙂
Shaun Milne says:
“We should all be damned chuffed!”
Aye Shaun, but I’ll be more chuffed when we gain our independence. Then we’ll really have something to be proud of.
what the hell is a tag-cloud
thanks for nothing found it
gedboy, gonnie show me, please?
tree of liberty
top of the page right hand side
just under twitter and facebook youll see tags i think thats it if not its been moved when i wasnt looking hover over all the very big words o please let me be right if not you dont know me ok
sorry scroll down to twitter and facebook
Happy to add some more words to the pages. It has always been known that Scots could talk the hind legs of a donkey given a good subject to debate. So lets keep talking with conviction to bring home the Yes vote on Referendum Day. wee smiley thingy.
“Happy to add some more words to the pages.”
Heh. The million doesn’t even include comments. Add those and it’s WAY more 🙂
stu
any chance of a floorplan for idiots all these words
go here go there do this dont do that it gets to much for a wee bald eagle
im only a young wosser that needs all the help i can get
“any chance of a floorplan for idiots all these words”
Well, the “Reference” page (see top bar) is a good starting point.
elizabeth sutherland
leave the donkeys alone look wit happened to the donkey nicola spoke too
donkeys are not just for christmas
come on the donkeys
gedboy, every day is a school day, thanks.
thanks stu
top bar left or right
kidding thanks again
@rev
We’ve made a few SEO changes in the last few days,
It’s really just the posts that directly give the counter-argument to the scare stories that matter. Those are what the undecided need to find. All your ravings ( 🙂 ) about Magrit & Davidson are just an extra luxury. It may be worth drawing up a list of what you would search for if you were undecided and had been listening to the media:
oil
currency
border posts
foreigners
etc. It’s not that long a list (because there are not that many scares). Then just two categories ‘Scottish Independence’ and ‘Subject’ Google gets very pissed off if you confuse it with too many categories. Even doing a quick whip through the archive on that basis may not be too time consuming.
The point of splitting into subjects is that you are then competing for a spot on the front page on a number of different issues.
@ Tree of Liberty
The best way to help is to link to this site (a permanent link if possible) from any blog, facebook page, etc. that you or your family/friends run. Search engines count such links very highly in their scoring system.
Given how popular this site is, it shouldn’t take long before it’s on the front page of search results.
“Akismet has protected your site from 1,709,384 spam coments already.”
Bloody hell, 1,709,384… !
“There are 28,751comments in your spam queue right now.”… !!
Remember now, go through them all one by one just in case one of them isn’t really spam… LOL!
Strangely enough, I don’t see ‘Racist’ in the tag cloud. That’s surprising as my Better Together loving cousin (when I told her that I got something off Wings) expressed her horror that I was going on ‘racist websites’.
We are no longer speaking.
kininvie
tried doing what you said to tree of liberty
about permanent link
why have i now got windows 11 on my computer
white heather lucky white heather 2 for a £1
Ah that’s what the tags link does, I must be the most incurious man in the world, see the amount of time I’ve spent looking for historic posts ,doh