Woodstock CT Café

Pomfret approves their $11 million budget and a .59 increase in mil rate – a 5.69% increase in the operating budget and a 4.25% increase in the education budget.

Last weekend I spent some time looking through the most well known blog sites in the state to try to determine how the Cafe fares in activity compared to these other sites. I was surprised by how little is going on at most of these sites.  Many of the leading sites were loaded with U-Tube links rather than writing interesting opinion essays on important subjects.

One thing is certain – most visitors to these sites rarely if ever post comments while some individuals like our ‘A taxpayer’ and others submit many comments. The second certainty is that most visitors will read an article once … but will click through many times to read the new comments. So the comments are as important as the articles. No one has the time to critically review the articles, so the only objective measure of success is the number of comments posted as long as it’s understood the the commentors are a very small subset of the number of visitors.

I decided to tally up the number of articles and comments posted last week (Saturday to Sunday) for each of the sites listed in the table below and, if possible, determine the number of visitors to the sites that offered this information. Having followed CT Local Politics and My Left Nutmeg for the last two years, its easy to conclude that these sites are two of the more successful political blog sites in Connecticut. Consistency is important and the Cafe as well as CTLP and MLN definitely have consistency. Two surprises were “yourCT.com” and the “Bristol Blog” which last week out did the king (CTLP) with 210 and 179 comments, respectively. Consistency is the key though.

On average the Cafe posts 9 articles a week but last week we had only seven articles (writers’ block syndrome). Frankly, I never know what will be written or submitted next. I had no idea that Promfretite and Randy would enter the picture when I left for work this morning.

The Cafe had 71 comments posted last week which means that the Cafe has a good comment to article ratio. We are not interested in piling up the articles and when we have a special author like ‘Knowing Smile’ we give those articles some time on top.

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Both Pomfretite and Randy provided useful information on the impending oil crisis in Woodstock for next winter.

Pomfretite provides some information on the cause and possible solutions, and further below Randy provides a real life solution already acheived. 

Here’s Pomfretite’s offering:

“Because your politicians are not looking ahead, Amory Lovins is! I went to a lecture he gave a few weeks ago at Mass MoCA. He has a lot of solutions that will help you and the economy. It may not help domestic oil companies, but it could be good for domestic car manufacturing. Let’s see if they get ahead. He expects that companies will soon need to drop oil in order to remain viable businesses.

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid191.php
http://www.oilendgame.com/index.html

and

Some other things to read:

http://www.icta.org/press/release.cfm?news_id=12
http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm

The CTA press release was written in 1998, imagine what the real cost of gasoline is now. What isn’t fair about these and similar subsidies is that those who have and use public transportation and can not afford cars are paying for our gasoline.”

Here’s Randy’s offering – hopefully he will provide some more info on his unit:

“I’m glad I thought ahead. I built a passive solar house, put in a wood burning stove (I have tons of trees) and installed a solar hot water heater (cost 3K a few years ago, it’s 5K now) that pre heats the water for my heating. I don’t use oil and don’t need an outdoor furnace.

Of course, we are just catching up to the rest of the world for oil prices. Canada was always about 1-1.50 more per gallon (not liter) than us. Oh that’s right, they have nationwide healthcare to pay for.”

Here’s an example of a solar hot water heater Read the rest of this entry »