Letter to a Young Artist: Popularity and Commerce Must Not Matter

I’m always disappointed when I talk to Artists and the first thing they start telling me is their resume, how many blog hits they have, how many tickets they’ve sold and how many social media followers they have.  I’m dismayed not by their success, but by the business metrics they’re using to calculate what will always be only a fleeting, and diminishing, rate of return.  Art must not be commerce. Creation must not be commercial.  The Arts must never belong to the business school. The only thing of value you have as an Artist — and can control forever — is your belief in what you know is true and how that knowledge affects the quality of the work you produce falling into the long game beyond the grave.

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Federally Regulated Search Engine Privacy

Do you believe when you use a search engine online your privacy should be protected when it comes to knowing what you wanted to know?

Do you own your search results or does the search engine “own” your thoughts typed as characters on a screen?

There’s an interesting move afoot to federally regulate and control search engine privacy:

Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets.

Now the question becomes: “Who do you trust more to protect your private search queries?”

Google?  Microsoft?  Ask?  Yahoo!?

Or the federal government?

Google Web History Knows Your Wants

We all know Google knows everything about us.

How do you feel about that fact?

If you are logged into your Google account, do you know you can have Google show you a Web History of all your Google searches?

It’s a little creepy. It tells you a lot. Google Web History is a newish feature that isn’t getting a lot of play yet.

Google can remember all your web searches and provide context and analysis of who you are and what you needed. Google Web History can provide a scary look back in time over the course of who you are and what your searches want. You need to be logged into your Google account in order for your Web History to be recorded.

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Titties in the Top Spot, Titties All the Time!

Don’t let anyone tell you a blog post titled “Man Titties” won’t bring you great Google search return results! Behold below the latest Google Analytics click through report for this blog:

 Titties in the Top Spot

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Google Sitemaps Returns

If you aren’t using Google Sitemaps to manage the search details of your blogs and websites then you are missing out on a free way to find out what Google search terms bring people to your site. Having that knowledge at hand lets you keep your readers’ interest in your pocket.

Google Sitemaps

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Why Google Loves You

There are days when you may not feel up to writing a blog entry or updating a web page, but you must create something anyway.
You publish not for yourself or for your readers.
You publish for Google.
Google is waiting.

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Building Blog Explosion Traffic

I joined the blog promotion portal Blog Explosion one month ago today. Blog Explosion is a place where you can promote your blog, meet new people, and get some good tips on how to improve your blog.
I had no idea how many visitors I would have after a month. I hoped for 1,000 and, as you can see in the image of my account below, my hope was more than doubled with 2,084 visitors and those numbers reflect only Blog Explosion visitors.

Blog Explosion Blog Stats as of July 1, 2005

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