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 …

Open-source music

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 …

The web browser as a musical instrument

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 …

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 …

Robot counting for humans

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 …

Fun facts from the usage logs

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 …

Visual outlining with Flickr

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.

Social bookmarking is delicious

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. …