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 …

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. …

The Michael Jackson sample map goes viral

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 …

Twitter, jazz and moving music forward into the stone age

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 …