Borrowing an advertising slogan from Camel cigarettes, I introduce this research article about the Orly Taitz web site. I have never fully trusted poll numbers on birthers because a poll respondent does not necessarily tell the truth, nor do polls measure birther enthusiasm. One other source for information comes from the public participation on birther blogs.
I have published site statistics from this blog covering the past 3 years, and at the present time interest measured in page views on this blog is on the decline. What about birther sites? Generally birther web sites do not publish their activity statistics. Orly Taitz has a page hit counter2 of dubious value, and as of last month, verified numbers from her site are available at Alexa.com, but there is no historical data.
One way to value site engagement is to look at comments1, and while it is tedious to do, it is possible to count comments on a WordPress blog by crawling the entire site, and this is what I have done for Orly’s blog. Here’s the result from March of 2010 to the present:
The high point is January of 2013, the month Barack Obama began his second term as president. Of course any measure of comments at the Taitz site is affected by her moderation policy and the fact that she deletes comments and articles. Also this doesn’t account for any technical errors in my data-gathering software, or historical data loss.
Just for comparison, here are the comment numbers for my site added for the same period:
Given statistics that suggest Taitz has twice the number of page views than here, the relatively small number of comments is really striking.
1Most blog visitors do not comment, so comment numbers don’t equal visits, but comment numbers can be studied over time. One thing of note is that visitors here have more to say about the articles than they do at Orly’s site. While the average article here has about 65 comments, the number there is around 4. Of course Taitz has many times the number of articles that I do.
2The Taitz hit counter first appeared in November of 2011 with an initial value around 22,518,751. Here is a chart roughly showing monthly values over the prior month using historical values from the Wayback Machine:
While her comment totals are tapering off the past few months, her hit counter seems to be trending up.
In looking at the overall trend in comments on Taitz’s malware infested blog, there appears to be a small upward trend. Even though birtherism is definitely on the decline, this trend doesn’t surprise me. Like the comments on Birther Report, most of the comments on Taitz’s blog have nothing to do with the topic of the post. They are just random nutjob screeds.
I enjoy blog slumming less. Birther Report is now 100% personal attacks on Obots, and birthers who aren’t as nuts as Falcon. That’s just damned boring. Orly’s house of crazy is just a lot of background noise about immigration and what not. LDS’s story about Obama has run it’s course.
Watching birtherism collapse has become about as exciting as watching someone play Microsoft’s newest edition of “Watching Paint Dry Simulator”, with the Acrylic Undercoat DLC.
Orly’s website is more insane asylum than blog. It’s existence probably keeps her out of real trouble.
I think the same of Cody Robert Judy.
That guy went so far off the deep end, that you feel like your reading something, written by someone whose mind is not on this Earth.
My websites are down because my hosting company is doing scheduled maintenance. “If all goes well” they should be back up within 15 minutes or so. The time now is 5:26 a.m. Eastern time.
Back online now.
Yeah, Taitz seems to have found a new obsession as an anti-immigration activist, tying it to her birtherism.
I find it ironic that both Orly, and Ted Cruz seem to be so anti-immigration.
It is, but it is a common pattern. Just like freshly converted followers of a religion always seem to be the most orthodox ones.
A German expression of the general phenomenon (that new members of a group tend to be most orthodox and most unfriendly towards allowing other new members in) translates to “being more papal than the pope”.
I finished up my new web crawler software last night and crawled one of my other blogs successfully. This version isn’t customized for any particular site. The Taitz site should be easier to crawl because it doesn’t have tags and categories.
Update: EXCEPT it keeps begging for cookies.
out of curiosity, i decided to tally up one of the new threads and see what content it actually had in it’s posts. it had 229 posts at the time.
on topic – 6
gay references – 17 (mostly from bird-boy)
accusations between the posters of being obots – 8
off topic – 79
9/11 – 3
corrections by obots – 5
birthers tired of gay rants and dumb pics – 3
obots having fun poking birthers – 5
a lot of posts fill more than one category, but are rarely on topic
i got halfway down the page and found my brains starting to ooze out of my ears, and a voice in my head telling me to slam my genitals repetedly in the door of my car, so for the sake of my sanity i quit counting.
it’s become a disturbing place to visit
Making their bones.
Earning their street cred.
Making up for lost time 😉
I’m tweeting more and enjoying it more. 😀
With apologies to Francis Ford Coppola: Just when I thought we were done with the Birthers, Dr. Taitz pulled me back in. She has apparently sued the government in Texas over the immigration mess. Of course, as soon as I tried to read further, I got this message:
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Apache Server at orlytaitzesq.com Port 80
How dare Orly Taitz actually use that communistic software Apache…
Imagine, a software given for free, for anybody to use. That’s Socialism!…
So will Orly accuse you of DDOS’ing her blog or will she take it as proof that “millions are waking up to the deception now”?
Ummmm …. what? She find some pats client from Texas? Or is this a Federal lawsuit, claiming Texas is wasting her Federal tax dollars or something???
Nuts.
The code has a delay timer so it doesn’t stress the server.
The bandwidth message seems to have cleared up. As for the lawsuit, this layman would wonder how she has standing.
Just for reference, this site and my other co-hosted low-traffic sites share a 250 GB monthly bandwidth limit. I’ve used about 33 GB as of today (the 15th).
To answer the original questions……No. Yes.