'Ipse dixit.'
'Pardon?'
It's Latin. Cicero coined it, I'm pretty sure. It's a phrase that used to be used by lawyers. You would find the concept of 'Ipsedixitism' interesting, I think.
Now if I could just find that googletwat link someone posted. :-)
Hmm, the first bit of the Wikipedian def...
Ipsedixitism is the pejorative term for an unsupported rhetorical assertion; it is a term in logic for a missing argument.
An ipsedixitism is not explicitly defined as an axiom, and certainly not as a premise, but often appears as such in a syllogism like: "The economy needs more scientists, so expansion of science education will boost the future economy". The proposition rests on an ipsedixitism unless reasons are given that the "economy needs more scientists".
Flip me giblets, Ew! :/
pe
ps
oid
What is "the art of tea"?
And what does an "odd courgette" look like?
Which basically means :
'because I said so.'
Cicero used ipse dixit when talking about Pythagoras, alleging his students claimed whatever must be true because he said it. Hence, Ipsedixitism.
However, the Latin just means 'he himself has said it', and lawyers often used it in the past, not to refer to a missing argument or syllogism, but to indicate that someone had condemned themselves out of their own mouths.
I wonder if Gwillam is reading this?
regards Ewan
There are issues with alexa stats for sure, but personally i would trust their indicative status over the word of a someone who bullshits for a living.
There are not 15k members of ABC and i think we all know that and traffic is probably down since the highs of 2003.
It is disingenuous of Tony to highlight the '15k members' stat, as well he knows. I'm sure ABC is doing as well as can be expected in the circumstances, but he is a "PR man' and I would trust his word only marginally more than that of Max Clifford.
If alexa is all rubbish, than i'm sure Tony will not mind posting the relevant stats for the last few years to prove the point.
"doing as well as can be expected in the circumstances" - what circumstances?
Not that I care, personally. This site is a great place for writing to go. I'm very pleased my friend showed it to me. So 15,000 members or not, congrats on a great site which, I understand, has been running for many years :)
AnneAdcock you're a Badcock.
Never mind Alexa, the true test of a website, as far as I am concerned, is page rank. And ABCtales has a page rank profile that many webmasters would die for.
To prove my point try searching for one of the comments you make on this forum. Within a couple of days of posting it (sometimes less) you will be able to find it on Google, often quite high up page one of the results page.
For some sites you can wait weeks for this to happen and even then you consider yourself lucky if you get a listing on page 9 of the results. Many other sites never get indexed by Google at all, or get stuck in the notorious sandbox.
I work on two websites and would happily swap page rank with Tony any day he cares to do so.
So what's with all this ABCtales and Tony Cook bashing? This is a fantastic site and Tony's achievement in setting it up and creating what is in effect a Web 2.0 phenomenon years before anyone had even heard of Web 2.0 is a remarkable coup.
I've got to say Broosh (even though I barely grasped some of what you said) that you are absolutely right. If I type Ewan + Poetry in Google the comments come up on page one - 4th on the list. So that's quite something when an Amazon entry for a quite different Ewan who actually is a published poet comes up 6th, isn't it!
Well done, Tony Cook.
come on crones! It's the witching season! :P
In wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish, but enivrez-vous! The art is to be absolutely yourself -Charles Baudelaire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmhEMPN7y1I
~It's a maze for rats to try, it's a race for rats to die.~
Being pig ignorant about all things cyber, I had no idea we would be listed on Google. So I typed in Margharita + story and I came up first! Why the hell anyone else would type in Margharita + story I've no idea, but it gave me a thrill.
Well done, Tony, and everyone else who works so hard on the site.
Er, I think the point being made is that no one works (on the site) anymore let alone hard.
ABC has always featured high on google mainly due to the high traffic in its early years.
Just for fun, I typed "pepsoid cunt" into google and only got 3 results. The first two were of me calling him a cunt (natch) but the third seems to involve him with watersports!
www.topsexyclips.com/global.aspx?q=Pissing+Ladies
Actually, don't go there. It's an obscure link to abc but I still have this image of fatboy pepsoid with da ladies.
*Shudders*
As one does after a wee.
I wonder what brought the old deniers out of the closet! It's interesting that those who make the most noise - i.e. Gwillam - have not given their email address so cannot be contacted.
We do have that many members - but clearly not all are active. Many people 'join' a website and never revisit it. Others come along for a while and then disappear. I can ascertain the active website figures from google analytics and they are in the 5,000 range over a year. Those who are 'very active' - i.e. visit at least once a week are around 1500. What is most impressive the is the number of unique visitors - I published the figures for 2006 and this year's are slightly up on that so far. Our Page views and the 'stickiness' of the site are also very impressive.
I do work pretty much full time on ABCtales - and we do have excellent technical support from Mike Dixon and the Computerminds team. The volunteer Editors do a magnificent job. It is true that we are seeking further funding for this site and Booktribes together in order to take them both up a gear or six and I have no doubt that the naysayers will be back in numbers to slag us off whenever we get any success - what impresses me is that they care enough to keep on coming back!
Hmm... well you could easily see who the 'naysayers' are Tony. Just have a look at the details.
The 15k members thing intrigues me though. When people delete an account, do the figures go down by one/two/etc. They don't do they? I think that's why it was questioned.
I still think the Alexa stats are interesting though. Not so long ago you were encouraging people to put the alexa toolbar on (ffs), so you must think they are pretty accurate?
I don't think (though clearly not an expert) that google bringing abc up at the top of a search means anything... I have a blog and regularly get first hit on google when people search phrases I may have used.
Don't think the blog gets *that* many hits.
I don't know why I still visit abc. It's a mystery to me too.
Happy Halloween, Liana :)
In wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish, but enivrez-vous! The art is to be absolutely yourself -Charles Baudelaire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmhEMPN7y1I
~It's a maze for rats to try, it's a race for rats to die.~
Happy Halloween, Liana :)
Tee hee... ;)
I don't know why I still visit abc. It's a mystery to me too.
But you do...
Everybody say "Cheeeeeese"!!! :)))
pe
ps
oid
What is "the art of tea"?
And what does an "odd courgette" look like?
Liana - yes, an account disappearing does take down the numbers by one. They are accurate figures!
I asked people to put up the alexa toolbar in 2001! A number of you kindly did so and we shot up the rankings - but we then discovered that it was pretty intrusive in terms of logging your activity so we took them off and told others of the iniquity of the system - which resulted in a rapid decrease in our alexa ranking. C'est la vie.
As for people coming and going - what's remarkable about this site is just how long people do stay with us. Most sites get a flurry of activity for a month at most and then a rapid decrease. Our users stick around for years and that says something about the nature of the site and the care and love that we try to put into it, I hope.
www.lorrainemace.com
Most people only continue with a site if it is giving them something in return. I think the fact so many of your members keep returning must mean you're doing something right.
Sorry, I'm a new member and most probably shouldn't add to this thread at all.
Brilliant Tony, in this country you know you're doing a stand-up job when the naysayers come out of the woods. I'm incredibly grateful to ABC for giving me a start, and if it wasn't for ABC Jude wouldn't have joined and after her many hours of hard work, and by crikey I'm hard work, I finally have a blog running that's doing well. Thank you Tony and ABC and the fragrant Poet Jude. Or should that be flagrant?
I won't hear any criticism of this site. It's great - live with it. That's final.
I haven't found any other free-to-enter writing site with this standard contributor.
You should all feel honoured to be a member.
Thankyou for those kind words - and camilla, useage has dropped from the high point of 2001 of which Liana speaks - but we had three full time staff in those days and very little competition. Over the past year there has been a small increase in user numbers and page impressions - around 4% - but far more users would be good and that's why we are trying to re-structure the business, get in a number of key partners and kick start the big boost. But it's not so bad as it is, is it?
ABCtales is a whole hello of a lot better than writing something to gather dust on a shelf. I have written more fiction in the last three months than I have in years and that is in large part due to having ABCtales to put it on; it gets me writing and has helped me - rightly or wrongly - to think more ambitiously about the long term future of my writing.
Hurrah! That's the whole point of it - and to establish a friendly and caring community of fellow writers who will help and assist you with constructive criticism. those 'read by' totals are not made up - you do get hundreds of reads from all sorts of people on here and that makes you think as you write - and therefore you write better.
Eds My brother visiting from overseas writes.I said sign up for abctales.we tried.We tried on two computers ,but could not do it.The security picture will not display.We have emailed about this.Just strikes me as a disincentive to new members who may just give up.
"camilla, useage has dropped from the high point of 2001 of which Liana speaks"
Um... I didnt speak of anything of the sort Tony - please don't put words in my mouth! The alexa thing I find interesting though (as I did say)... mainly because of the terribly low stat figures for this year. I know that the forums arent any indication of the popularity of the site (thank god for that as three people with banal twenty five line sigs talking about toe stubbing wouldnt encourage more members). I was just marvelling at the 15,000 members thing, when there are so terribly few people actively involved.
To pick up on a point you made earlier Liana, the search engines appear to treat blogs differently. You may well get a high ranking from your blog entry, but try creating a web page with the exact same text and it's quite a different story.
That's why I maintain that page rank is one of the better indicators of a website's success.
ABCtales also benefits from having over 60,000 pages indexed by Google. Not many sites in the world can claim that.
Er I don't think so Peaceful. Do the maths.
You say "millions" of sites have "way more than 60,000 google indexed pages"
Let's be generous and say that by "millions" you meant three million. Let's also be generous and say that by "way more than 60,000" you meant an average of 70,000.
OK what you're saying is that Google has indexed three million times 70,000 pages. That's 210 billion pages Google has indexed. And that doesn't include the remaining 177 million sites (according to you) many of which will have had pages indexed by Google.
Last time I checked Google had indexed only about 12 billion pages which is . . . how can I put it . . . a bit less than 210 billion.
Perhaps you'd care to rephrase your last post.
ABCTales is a good site.
Last night I went to see Fish's film at the Leicester Short Film Festival, I am currently reading Enzo's NaNoWriMo blog (and have previously bought his book), I have just read three of Mark Brown's stories on the Facebook Review, I can't wait to read Spack's book being published in Feb next year, and earlier in the summer I was reading Purplehaze's blogs over on Frontline books. All of these people I met through ABC.
And I still think of d beswetherick's writing, and Andrew Pack's and Fergal's.
And my own Down By Law stories, which first appeared on this site are going to be published by Cape next year.
Sure people come and go. It doesn't matter. It sets out what it aims to do. It is a place for people to post their writing, get better at it, gain confidence, meet people.
Drew
http://www.frontlinebooks.co.uk/frontline/viewBlog.asp?blogID=1425
I can never resist the ABC - where is it now? - debates.
I think what Drew says is right.
I got a lot of early ABC - confidence, chances to perform at some quite good live events, routes into the poetry world.
Whether ABC is successful depends on what you're judging it against.
It's not a successful business but I don't think many writing websites are successful businesses.
here here to the last two comments!
And camilla - I have not received your emails - send them to me at tcook@abctales.com and I'll try and sort out the problem.
Cheers all!
The 15,000th member is called Rachel Mbulwa Mangeli and she works in a Children's Library in Mombassa, Kenya. Isn't that wonderful? The internationalism of the internet always astounds and pleases me.
You can read her first children's story here:
http://www.abctales.com/story/rachel-mbulwa-mangeli/python-and-his-broke...
The All New Pepsoid the Second!
Author Page at the 'Zon
The All New Pepsoid the Second!
Author Page at the 'Zon
The All New Pepsoid the Second!
Author Page at the 'Zon
Author Page at the 'Zon
~It's a maze for rats to try, it's a race for rats to die.~
~It's a maze for rats to try, it's a race for rats to die.~
The All New Pepsoid the Second!
www.lorrainemace.com