Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

Off-topic: St. Louis Cardinals are World Series bound!

Redbird Nation is happy today. Our beloved St. Louis Cardinals are off to Detroit for the World Series.

The Cards weren’t supposed to have a prayer this post-season, much less represent the NL in the World Series. Yet here we are, the day before the World Series opener. And thanks to a ninth-inning home run in Game 7 of the NLCS last night by catcher Yadier Molina (Yadi! Yadi!), it’s the miracle Cards, not the powerhouse New York Mets, who will face the Detroit Tigers.

How did this happen? The Cards were the last team to make it into the playoffs, almost blowing a 7 1/2-game lead during the final week of the regular season and backing into the post-season thanks to a Houston Astros loss to the Atlanta Braves on the last day of the season. The team’s pitching staff and bullpen has been suspect all year long, but finally showed up for the playoffs. Now, St. Louis has essentially a three-man rotation set to face the best pitching staff of the American League and a rejuvenated bullpen that has been superb during the first two post-season faceoffs against the Padres and then the Mets.

As for offense, well, there hasn’t been much during the playoffs. The two best bats on the Cardinals staff right now are those of So Taguchi, a benchwarmer outfielder who was 4-for-4 as a pinch-hitter (including two home runs), and Molina, a .216 hitter who has suddenly turned into Johnny Bench. The big gun, Albert Pujols, is ailing with a sore hamstring, center fielder Jim Edmonds is getting shots in the ball of his foot before every game so he can actually play without pain, third baseman Scott Rolen, also plagued by injury, hasn’t swung the bat well for a long time, although he looked better last night (robbed of a home run by Mets left-fielder Endy Chavez, then lining a single in the ninth inning that ended up being the winning run), and Juan Encarnacion hasn’t produced much at the plate, either.

Yet, somehow, it’s all come together. No matter what you say about Cards manager Tony LaRussa and his trusty sidekick, pitching coach Dave Duncan (and believe me, I’ve said a lot about them both this season), give them credit. They’ve pulled all the right strings this post-season. I don’t see how LaRussa could motivate anyone out of a wet paper bag, but he apparently does it. And despite the way Duncan has handled young pitchers (poorly), he’s done an amazing job with wash-up veterans like Jeff Weaver. As a commenter on Baseball Musings put it: “Jeff Weaver gets released by the Angels — not even traded for a bucket of balls — and now he’ll be starting a World Series game for the Cardinals.”

Go figure. It’s just been that kind of season. Long, frustrating, struggling, and suddenly magical. Let’s keep it going.

GO CARDS!

Hey, you kids! Get off my Internet! Or, How social media (not teenagers) is taking over the Internet

Ah, kids these days. Columnist, author and former economic advisor to the government of Macedonia, Sam Vaknin, claims in a recenty Global Politician piece that net-savvy teens have hijacked the Internet. (Hat tip: BeyondPR.) But in reality, it’s not the teenagers, but social media, that has taken over the Internet.

Vaknin lays out a good conspiracy theory that points to Google as the main culprit rather than networked kids. (Even so, his headline seems to place the blame on teens.) Vaknin points to a study that reveals “the existence of a pernicious feedback loop between Google, Wikipedia, MySpace, and Blogspot” that affects site popularity in Google.

This is Google’s policy now: Wikipedia articles regardless of their length or quality or even mere existence are placed by Google’s algorithm high up in the search results. Google even makes a Wikipedia search engine available to Webmasters for their Websites. The relationship between Google and Wikipedia is clearly intimate and mutually-reinforcing.

Google’s new algorithm, codenamed Big Daddy, still calculates the popularity of Websites by counting incoming links. … The more numerous such links – the higher the placement in Google’s search results pages. To avoid spamming and link farms, Google now rates the quality of “good and bad Internet neighborhoods”. Not all incoming links are treated equally. Some Internet properties are shunned. Links from such “bad” Websites actually contribute negatively to the overall score.

The top results in all 154 keywords I have been diligently monitoring since 1999 have changed dramatically since April 2006. The only common thread in all these upheavals is one: the more incoming links from MySpace a Website has – the higher it is placed in the search results.

From there, Vaknin starts to lay the blame on kids these days. “An unsettling pattern emerges,” he writes, pointing out that Wikipedia editors “are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults” yet gets “touted by Google as an authoritative source of information.”

“In search results,” he adds, Wikipedia entries are “placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on.”

And then there’s MySpace, “whose 110 million users are predominantly prepubescent and adolescents.” This phalanx of kiddies “now dictates what Websites will occupy the first search results in Google’s search results,” writes Vaknin.

Finally, after yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, Vaknin points the finger at Google. “Google has vested, though unofficial and unannounced and, therefore, undisclosed interests in both Wikipedia and MySpace,” he writes.

Funny, but I know several adults who have MySpace accounts and who are Wikipedia editors. I fit in both categories. Plus, the kids down own MySpace; an octogenarian named Rupert Murdoch does.

Vaknin’s issues have more to do with the democratization of social media and the fact that teens are more adept at adapting than the rest of us. He makes an interesting case, but he ought to leave the kids out of it.