Blogging about blogging

I started posting writing online long before I had any academic ambitions. I wrote for self-promotion, self-expression, and because I wasn’t sure what else to do with myself. I did a lot of what I would now call a reflexive and reciprocal process for research into music and related topics. As it turns out, this was a good habit to have when I went to grad school. I have posted most of my masters and doctoral level writing assignments, notes, papers, and research materials on the web. In the process, I have met an incredible lot of people who I would not have met otherwise.

XKCD on blogging

For a while I was only posting about innocuous music and technology-related topics: theory, production, general appreciation. But as I go deeper into the intersection of music education and hip-hop, my posts have been getting more political. This material attracts supporters and allies, which is gratifying, but also heated criticism, and, since the dawn of the Trump era, a growing volume of hate speech. The constructive feedback comes in the form of affirmation, social contacts, corrections, arguments, tips, and directions for further inquiry. Some of these interactions are direct, in the form of comments or replies on social media, but I also get plenty of indirect feedback via my Google alerts. Research and writing are lonely undertakings, and feeling myself connected to a lively conversation at all times has been an invaluable motivator.

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The Disquiet Junto

Update: see extensive documentation of one of my Junto projects.

A significant chunk of the music I’ve made in the past year has been prompted by a blogger and journalist named Marc Weidenbaum, proprietor of the fine electronic music web zine Disquiet. This is funny, because while I’ve had a number of online exchanges with Marc, we’ve never actually met face to face. Nevertheless, in the age of the internet, this is no obstacle to a creative relationship.

My first contact with Marc came when he wrote up some of my sample genealogies. I started following his blog, which has put me in touch with a lot of new music and musicians. While I’m less interested in the avant-garde than Marc is, he’s a fine advocate for it, and he writes about “normal” music too.

Rather than just commenting on the experimental electronic music scene, Marc has recently taken it upon himself to spur the creation of new work. Continue reading

WordPress is why I love the internet

If anyone comes to me wanting a personal web site, I try to convince them they should have a blog, specifically, a WordPress blog. I’m doing several web sites for clients that use WordPress. The more I work with this platform, the more I come to love it. WordPress is free, hacker-friendly and supported by an enthusiastic community. It represents everything good about the web right now.

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How to get web traffic from Google

If you want to get your web page noticed but don’t want to spend a lot of money on advertising, your best bet is search engine optimization, or SEO. As of this writing, that mostly means understanding how Google ranks search hits, and adapting your web presence accordingly.

Historically, search engine results were ranked based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. But as the web grows, there are tons and tons of pages out there with the same or similar keywords. Any Google search on any remotely mainstream topic is going to return thousands and thousands of hits, most of which are useless to you. Another problem is that the keyword system is easy to game. Unscrupulous web designers can load up a page with invisible keywords repeated over and over, by putting them in the same color as the background off to the side of the page.

To make its results more useful, Google tries to rank its keyword-based search results in the order of their relevance. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank, the real heart of their search engine. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to a page. If more people link to your site, presumably that’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.

So the key to a higher Google rank is getting other pages to link to you. The question is, how do you get those precious inbound links?

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Blogging is a real-time strategy game

One night, Anna was watching me Twitter over my shoulder. After a while, she announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is effectively a real-world immersive internet game. The scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. Like any good iPhone game, Twitter even has a built-in global leaderboard.

Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

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Why I love Gawker

I’m a jazz guy. I like improvising in front of an audience. I like publishing a post while it’s still only a third finished. It keeps the fire lit under me to get the rest written. I was looking for a blog platform congenial to this method of working. Then I read a PC Magazine article, Succeed At Blogging The Gawker Way. Like a Gawker article, it’s funny, frank and packs maximum useful information into a minimum number of words:

“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”

The article gives Gawker writer Nick Douglas’ reasons for using WordPress as their platform. He’s right, WP is the bomb.

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