The Lost Blog

I’ve just upgraded The Lost Blog to the latest version of our publishing platform. While the site was updating things looked a bit strange but now everything should be back to normal.

You might notice some small changes here and there but there are no major changes. I will continue working on the site throughout the day.

If you are unable to post comments or stumble upon some other error, please let me know by sending a mail to the e-mail at the top of the sidebar. Carry on, nothing to see here!

Update: Bonnie got in touch with me and explained that it’s just a coincidence. About.com are also linking to my original article so the issue has been resolved.

I spend way too much time maintaining this site, doing research and writing articles. On an average day I’m happy if I make four bucks from the advertising. I think it’s needless to say that my major motivation to run The Lost Blog is my passion for reading and writing great ideas about Lost. That’s why it makes me really sad to see another site re-write one of my articles without even mentioning this site.

Alright, let’s be fair, Bonnie Covel’s article at lost.about.com entitled “You’re Wrong About Lost” isn’t an exact copy of my recent post “The Critics are Wrong“, but the fact that her article was published the day after I published mine and that her article contains and even seems to be based on the arguments in my article is what I would call a bit unethical.

Let’s examine the evidence

I wrote:

To address the first part about Lost needing to answer more questions and mysteries, any fan of the show knows that questions are being answered and the producers have promised to answer even more questions.

Bonnie wrote:

Complaint 1 - Lost Doesn’t Answer Enough Questions
Uh, if all the questions were answered there wouldn’t be a show. Lost has a nice way of answering one question while creating a whole slew of others (pun intended). For example, we found out what was in the hatch, a man, a computer, living quarters. But we didn’t know why there was a man, what the computer really meant, and why there were living quarters.

Why is Locke in a wheelchair? We’ll find out this season.
What do Jack’s tattoos mean? We’ll find out this season.
Why is Juliet on the island? We’ll find out in tomorrow’s episode.

No, we haven’t gotten the answers to all of our questions, but that’s what makes the show so good.

I wrote:

To address the second issue with critics assuming that they speak for all of us when they write things like “Lost fans have gotten tired of the show”, they seem to be forgetting that Lost is still one of the most popular shows on television. When you have more viewers than the population of several European countries (and let’s not forget, Lost is very popular in the entire world, not just in the states) I don’t really think it’s justified to complain about a lack of viewer interest.

The fact is that Lost is very popular, but I don’t think anyone really thought that Lost would be THE cool show forever. At the moment Heroes gets all the free champagne and VIP-passes, but like with anything else, fame doesn’t last forever. Next year another show will be new and amazing but Heroes, like Lost, will still be a great show.

Bonnie wrote:

While it’s true that Lost has lost some of it’s audience, it just means that it’s not the number one show anymore. So what? It’s still in the top ten. Heroes is currently doing great, and next season another show will be in the top spot. That’s the way it goes, but it doesn’t mean that Lost has lost it’s popularity. In fact, the die-hard fans are going to remain die-hard fans until the end.

I’m not saying that my ideas are the most original in the world, and sure, it might be a coincidence, but the day after and using the same arguments?

I’m glad that people enjoy the things I write, but just like we always attribute our sources and quote them, it would be nice if other sites wrote that they had found a cool article and linked to us instead of just using my ideas.

I got a number of e-mails today from Lost Blog readers who were suddenly unable to read the articles because their brand new version of Internet Explorer messed up our design.

Well, good news boys and girls, I took a look at it and quickly found the source of the problem.

For some unknown reason I had set a fixed height on one of the elements that make up the top part of the layout. I simply removed the height attribute and now everything should be working great in both Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and the other major browsers.

If anyone is still having problems with the site send me a mail on info at lostblog.net or leave a comment.

Nominations for the Seventh Annual Weblog Awards are now open.
The Weblog Awards is a non-profit project created to award the best blogs.

If you feel like nominating The Lost Blog, I would suggest nominating the site as “best entertainment weblog”.

The way it works is that you enter the name of the blog under Nominee (The Lost Blog) and URL should be http://www.lostblog.net, provided that you are nominating this site. For your nominations to be valid, you need to nominate at least three different blogs in total among all the categories.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone!

I want to thank you for all the support and all the interesting Lost discussions we’ve had this year. I hope to keep seeing everyone on the site as we start discussing the second part of Lost Season 3.

Merry Christmas to the cast and crew of Lost. Hope Evangeline and her roommates have found a new place to stay and that they are able to enjoy the holidays.

I want to thank Cecilia for everything she has done for The Lost Blog throughout the year, from covering for me during the summer to writing posts and helping to organize competitions.

I will take a short break from the site, but if there is anything important related to Lost, count on us to write about it. Now I’m going to eat rice pudding, watch Donald Duck on TV, eat too much food and open presents, because that’s what we do for Christmas in Sweden.

Happy Holidays everyone!

While The Lost Blog is fairly popular and has a great bunch of regular readers, when it comes to visitor amounts we are still quite a bit behind sites like Lost-media and The Tailsection.

I’ve been thinking about it, but I really feel that we are as good, if not even better in some areas than the larger sites, but then again, since this is my site, I am a probably a bit biased.

Be honest with me. If you visit one or both of the above sites, do you prefer them to The Lost Blog? And if you do, what do they have that you miss on The Lost Blog? Any thoughts or ideas about things that you would like to see on this site, or comments about my writing style or the kind of things we write about are also welcome.

I’m not going to sell my soul and change things just for the sake of being popular, but maybe there is something that I’m overlooking.

It should maybe be clarified that I have nothing against Lost-media or The Tailsection, they are both great sites. But there is clearly potential for The Lost Blog to grow and it would be very interesting to know in which way you guys think we should grow.

I have a fairly exciting little piece of code for those of our fans who have their own websites.

It is now possible to show the headlines and summaries of our three latest posts on your own website, and best of all, it’s really easy!

Simply copy and paste the following code to your website:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/lostblogfeed?format=sigpro" type="text/javascript"></script>


You could place our news in your sidebar, on your front page, or wherever you think it would enhance your website. The list will adapt to your site’s current stylesheet and can also be styled separately.

This is how the list looks when inserted right here:

If you need any help inserting the code in your site, post a comment and I will do my best to help out!

Just wanted to let everyone know that we will not write about the “Lost Moments” clips that ABC are airing with Daybreak. You are not allowed to discuss these clips on the site either.

The clips are from future episodes and are clearly to be considered as spoilers. I know that ABC are desperate to not lose Lost viewers, but showing spoilers like this is disrespectful to the viewers and the storytellers in my opinion.

What reason do we have to watch the episodes if they reveal what will happen in them months before they air?

Like I’ve written many times before, spoilers only take away from the viewing experience. It’s like removing the wrapping on your Christmas presents to have a look at what’s inside a week before Christmas morning. Sure, it’s tempting, but once you’ve had a look you won’t be able to be surprised when you “officially” remove the wrapping. It’s cheating the storyteller’s vision.

We won’t write about episode previews anymore either. The reason is that I don’t want to spoil my own experience. If we publish posts about the previews, I have to monitor the comments since I am responsible for this site.

I hope everyone understands these decisions.

We received a lot of great submissions to the Lost Theory Competition. It’s been tough, but the three winners have been chosen.

Cecilia and I independently read and scored the theories. We then combined our scores and found the top entries, which we discussed and compared against each other to choose the best of the best.

The Winners

1st Prize: “The Numbers’ Noble Lie” by Bigmouth
2nd Prize: “Backdraft of Ben & Juliet” by Pastor2churches
3rd Prize: “Save the children, save the world” by Lesley

The winning entries will be published on the site starting today with the winning theory “The Numbers’ Noble Lie“. The second and third place theories will be published the following days.

A special mention goes out to the theory “Agenda and how the island came to be” by Jaystao, which came in at 4th place. That theory along with a few others will be published on the site next week.

Congratulations to the winners and a very big thank you to all the participants for submitting some great theories!

Read the winning theory

The deadline for our Lost Theory Competition draws near.

At the time of writing this we have received under 20 theories so there is still a good chance to win. If you haven’t submitted yet, write a theory and send it in for a chance to win books, CDs, Apollo bars and a bunch of other Lost related things!

Also, we have recently updated the competition rules to not be as restrictive as before:

We are primarily looking for new ideas. If your theory has been published before, you have to update and re-write it to make it new and exciting.

You are not allowed to publish your entry anywhere else until one months after the competition deadline. However, you are allowed to publish a short quote from your entry on other sites and forums with a link to the full theory at The Lost Blog both during and after the one month period.

When submitting your entry, you agree to giving us unlimited and indefinite rights to publish and display the submitted theory/analysis. You will be credited as the author of the entry but will not receive any royalties or monetary compensation. If The Lost Blog should ever change owner, these rights pass on to the new owner.

The competition ends 00:00 October 31, Eastern time, so you are able to submit during October 30.

Good luck to everyone!