Matt sent me a comment today to let me know that even if I don’t always get comments on my posts to this blog, I should rest assured that people are still reading it. Thanks, Matt!
Blogs are a whole lot more fun than Web pages, because of the feedback from readers. So I have a tendency to ignore my static Web page (www.danamackenzie.com) for months at a time. I did a little bit of updating yesterday, and you are all welcome to take a look. ChessLecture subscribers, in particular, might want to look at the annotated index of all of my ChessLectures that I brought up-to-date yesterday. In fact, it’s even better than up-to-date because it includes one lecture that has been recorded but hasn’t aired yet.
Really, the best place for this information would be on the ChessLecture website, because no one is likely to find it on my website. I’ll see if I can get ChessLecture to post the index there, too. (But I wouldn’t count on it … They’ve got more important things to think about right now, such as the new iPhone capability.)
Also, I did an interesting experiment — compiling a table of my 10 most popular lectures, both by total views and by user ratings. Surprisingly, the results were completely different. The lectures with the most views are all from July 2007 and earlier. But the most popular ones in the user ratings were all from October 2008 and later!
This may seem paradoxical, but part of the reason is that the total-number-of-views statistic is biased towards older lectures. They have been on the site longer. The viewer-ratings statistic, however, is biased the opposite way. I suspect that when a lecture is shiny and new, it tends to get higher ratings just because people like things that are new. But only the lectures from 2008 and 2009 have had the benefit of that “honeymoon period,” because the viewer-rating capability was only added in 2008. Subscribers can and do rate the older lectures as well, but because those lectures never had a honeymoon period their ratings are more objective and lower.
That’s my theory, anyway. The other possibility is just that my lectures are getting better, and that’s why the more recent ones are rated higher!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I read your blog, and watch your videos on chesslecture.com. I think your lectures are great, both old and new. I recently went back into the archives and watched your “Nuke the Sicilian” videos….very interesting!!
Hi Jim! It’s good to hear from you … Also it’s quite a coincidence, because in my next post after this one, I wrote about a position from the “Learn from Your Fellow Amateurs” game that you sent to me. Hope you don’t mind my showing it on the blog as well. I think it is a great position for teaching.
Thanks Dana…no problem!! I took a lot from this game, and to this day, I try not to duplicate the same mistakes I made in this game in the French, including: not playing c5, letting my queenside pieces get jammed up, not playing f6 at the right time, and numerous tactical errors….loose pieces drop off, etc., etc…thanks again.