If you want to get your web page noticed but don’t want to spend a lot of money on text ads, 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 based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. The problem is that there are a lot of web pages out there with overlapping keywords. Another problem is that this system is easy to game by loading your pages with invisible text repeating the keywords over and over. Google attempts to rank its search results in the order of their usefulness. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to your page. If more people link to a web site, presumably it’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 inbound links. The question is, how do you get people to link to you?
Sample-based music isn’t stealing. It’s valuable and important. It shows the way toward a future for recorded music that’s more in continuity with music’s past. Recordings are cool and everything, but they encourage passivity. If I buy a recording, I can listen to it or dance to it, both fine activities, but what if I want to go further? What if I want to engage with it, converse with it, customize it or adapt it to my own needs? According to the law, I can’t. This flies in the face of the uncountable centuries of music practice that predate the invention of recordings. Before recordings, if you wanted to hear music, someone needed to play or sing it. To learn how to play or sing, you have to learn and interpret a ton of music by other people. The normal method for passing music along for nearly all of human history was by oral tradition, and a lot of adaptation and reinterpretation was an inevitable part of this transmission process.
In the modern world, most of the music you encounter is in recorded form. Adapting or customizing music is going to continue as it has for uncountable centuries. To adapt or customize a recording usually requires sampling. As it stands, the law is in the way. We need open-source music like we need open-source software.
Whenever somebody comes to me and wants a web site, this is what I tell them. Many of my friends who are internet professionals or general hipsters are already sneering at this and saying something like, “Blogging is so five minutes ago.” Maybe at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, that’s true. But I deal in my freelance and personal life with plenty of people who are resistant to blogs, Twitter and what have you, and it’s my job to help get these folks on board.
If you have a web presence of any kind for any reason, you need to be able to update it yourself, easily and frequently. Unless you know what HTML and FTP are, you can’t do that with a traditional site. However, you can easily learn to update your blog yourself, even if you’re a relative novice. You can do it from any computer in the world, and for the major blog platforms, you can even do it from a cell phone.
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on how people could use the web for production, not just sharing completed tracks. Then I got home and discovered the iNudge in my Delicious network feed:
Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.
As part of the research for my book, I’ve been making sample maps, diagrams showing what songs include samples of what other songs. I’m a big sample geek. I like knowing where my music comes from the same way I like knowing where my food comes from. This map shows many, probably not nearly all, of the songs that sample Michael Jackson’s solo work. Click to see it bigger.
MJ is in the middle, with his songs in the first ring out. The next ring shows songs that sampled MJ. The outer ring shows the artist who did the sampling. Most of the information comes from the Rap Sample FAQ and wikipedia. I included MJ quoting “Soul Makossa” and Björk quoting “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” even they aren’t technically samples, but I figured, musically and legally it’s the same thing. (more…)
So the other night my friend Jesse played at the Shorty Awards with his Tin Pan Blues Band. Because it was an awards ceremony dedicated to the best of Twitter, they were projecting people’s tweets about the event itself onto a screen in real time. Some of those tweets were comments about the band. The musicians, in turn, were reading and responding during the performance. (more…)
When you delve behind the scenes with the internet, you immediately come face-to-face with a lot of threatening computer gibberish. The most menacing codes are the ones that stand for colors, random-seeming strings of letters and numbers like #99CC66 or #4F102A. Sometimes you see colors described verbally: “black”, “white”, “blue”, etc. That’s fine for simple colors, but no good if you want exact hues. The web system for describing colors is daunting at first, but once you find out what the codes mean, they reveal themselves to be elegantly compact. If you’re willing to follow me through a little math and physics, you might find some geeky fun here. (more…)
Ethanhein.com has had 465,689 hits so far, mostly distributed among my blogs and mp3 pages. A single blog post about Family Guy generates a disproportionately large percentage of that traffic. October 2008 represents a typical month, with 40,611 hits total. That’s around 1,310 a day, 54 an hour. A large percentage of those are from robots, but still, neato. These numbers don’t include hits on my Flickr photos. My various sets have had 228,155 views so far, with anywhere between 500 and 1,500 hits a day.
I love everything about Flickr except its name. First of all, creative misspelling is so five minutes ago. Second of all, the word ‘flicker’ has no conceptual connection to a photo-sharing social network that I can think of, except, I guess, in the very literal sense that a computer image flickers thirty times a second to produce the illusion of motion. And there my griping ends. Once you’re past the name, Flickr is everything you could want in an image site and more.
As I develop my book, I gather a lot of images. I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one. (more…)
The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. Even more useful is the way it stores, reorganizes and reflects your own thoughts back to you. Delicious feels less like a web site I look at and more like a new module of my brain. It’s also like a slow-paced but highly absorbing text-based computer game, a loosely organized internet scavenger hunt. (more…)
