Another gem found on my colleague Aaron Draplin's site.
A rather thorough interactive breakdown of music that was sampled, when it was used, and by who. Supa cool!
http://jessekriss.com/projects/samplinghistory/
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Playing live in front of the people once again.
This Saturday the 23rd of August marks the first time in several years I've played live in front of an audience. Super stoked to be doing so, and quite proud to be in the company of such bad-asses for bandmates. Mighty Unicorn is what we're calling the band - and in addition to my bass playing (for those who don't know - I used to bass for Aggro Batch and The Julian Snow Index), our band features Hans Wagner (aka Schvoontz), who's drumming resume includes: Mr. Bungle, Sweaty Nipples, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Village Idiot and Herkemer; Pat Demartino on the gee-tar, who's past and current shredding includes Village Idiot and Last Empire; Kevin Ellis on keyboards, formerly of Village Idiot, Hungry Mob and The Film fame; and our current, though temporary, singer Brad Mowen, who was an early member of Portland's Sweaty Nipples, then moved to Seattle where he fronted the incredible band Mommy, and now sings for The Accused and is also involved with the bands ASVA and The Master Musicians of Bukkake.
Ash Street Saloon's hard rock hideaway is the venue. Approximately 10:45pm is the start time for the Mighty Unicorn. Opening the gig will be Portland's Western Family featuring Brett Snyder on drums - who's "dayjob" is drumming for that famous band Everclear... oh yeah... he used to be a Village Idiot drummer too.
Bring your earplugs!
Ash Street Saloon's hard rock hideaway is the venue. Approximately 10:45pm is the start time for the Mighty Unicorn. Opening the gig will be Portland's Western Family featuring Brett Snyder on drums - who's "dayjob" is drumming for that famous band Everclear... oh yeah... he used to be a Village Idiot drummer too.
Bring your earplugs!
Both Hands and Both Feet - A drummer's Blog
A recent friend of mine and fellow musician, Matt Farina, has been posting this cool blog about drumming and music. Matt and I got together for a few sessions via the mighty Craigslist Musician ads earlier this year. Great guy. Fantastic drummer. Fun blog.
Go here now:
http://2handsand2feet.blogspot.com/
Go here now:
http://2handsand2feet.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
SEO for Video Online - or - "How to get people to watch your videos"
As video content on the web continues to proliferate, getting your videos to stand out amidst the crowd is becoming an increasingly challenging task. One of the most important recent subjects of discussion regarding video online, is figuring out how to maximize your company’s placement in search engine results and rankings. To those readers new to search engine marketing terms and acronyms, the letters SEO stand for “search engine optimization” and the SEM equates to “search engine marketing”. You’ll commonly see and hear these terms thrown around quite a bit as companies clamor to find their way into viewer’s web browsers.
Here at Test Drive Videos we quickly learned that is isn’t as easy as posting your videos online, then telling people to go watch them. There is a myriad of essential steps you need to take to start the SEO and SEM process. I’m going to list the three basic steps we’ve learned are mandatory and effective in getting the ball rolling. I will also highlight some additional things you can do that are both free and highly effective.
1. Use Descriptive Naming of Your Video Source File. When you’re creating your video file and getting ready to deploy it to your site, e-newsletter or uploading to a web video sharing site, always name the file in a very exact and descriptive manner. For example: in the early stages of our company, we might have named a test drive video we produced “Ferrari_tdv_08.mov”. Where our internal naming convention might have made sense to us for easily managing files – to the outside world it means nothing and is more easily lost in the space. Therefore, a more useful title might be: “2008 Ferrari GT430 Test Drive Video.mov”. This acts as kind of a surface level “tag” that will help search engines find your video.
2. Inserting HTML Tags on Your Site. Inserting HTML meta tags and head tags within each page that describe each video has long been the most important and basic task associated with web development and making your site visible and searchable online. Additionally, it is recommended that you let each video live on it’s own page of HTML and insert tags that describe what is in the video. One video per URL. It is also important to surround your video with relevant text about that video. Doesn’t hurt to tell viewers what they are about to see, and further helps the SEO initiative.
3. Initial Search Engine Submissions. Take the time to visit each of the top search engines and go through their process of submitting your website to be crawled, indexed, spidered, etc. Some are easier than others, but this is a crucial step in making sure you get found. Because Google more or less dominates the search engine arena (with approximately 60% of the traffic), and including the other top thre (Yahoo, MSN and AOL), they encompass about 94% of the search engines traffic altogether. Plus, these major search engine directories are shared by many other smaller search engines, including Lycos, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Excite, Go, Search, AOL, and many others. Once the major search engines have indexed your website, regular search engine submissions are no longer required. We also recommend a one-time manual application submission to dmoz.org. (DMOZ is The Open Directory Project - the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.)
4. Bonus Tip! – Using Web Video Sharing as Free Advertising! Just because you’ve posted your video on your site doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t post that same video elsewhere. By taking advantage of one or more of the many free video sharing websites out there like YouTube, you can help spread your message and your video out across the web. Most of these sites have very robust description and tagging sections when you upload your video which will yield top results and can in return, be linked back to your site. We have had tremendous success in getting higher search results for some of our video content through the videos we’ve uploaded at these sharing and social networking sites. The top 5 video sharing sites that will except most any user-generated content for upload are: YouTube, GoogleVideo, Metacafe, AOLvideo and Revver. There are certainly dozens more, and every indication is that this market is going to continue to grow rapidly as the demand for video on the web continues to flourish.
These are just a few things you can do immediately after deploying your video for an online audience. They are by no means the complete answer, as this new media world is changing with new web video search technologies on the horizon. Technologies that scan the audio and video content to detect if what the descriptors say is in the video, is actually in the video are one example. We'll discuss more as we learn. Thanks for reading and good luck! -ETK
Here at Test Drive Videos we quickly learned that is isn’t as easy as posting your videos online, then telling people to go watch them. There is a myriad of essential steps you need to take to start the SEO and SEM process. I’m going to list the three basic steps we’ve learned are mandatory and effective in getting the ball rolling. I will also highlight some additional things you can do that are both free and highly effective.
1. Use Descriptive Naming of Your Video Source File. When you’re creating your video file and getting ready to deploy it to your site, e-newsletter or uploading to a web video sharing site, always name the file in a very exact and descriptive manner. For example: in the early stages of our company, we might have named a test drive video we produced “Ferrari_tdv_08.mov”. Where our internal naming convention might have made sense to us for easily managing files – to the outside world it means nothing and is more easily lost in the space. Therefore, a more useful title might be: “2008 Ferrari GT430 Test Drive Video.mov”. This acts as kind of a surface level “tag” that will help search engines find your video.
2. Inserting HTML Tags on Your Site. Inserting HTML meta tags and head tags within each page that describe each video has long been the most important and basic task associated with web development and making your site visible and searchable online. Additionally, it is recommended that you let each video live on it’s own page of HTML and insert tags that describe what is in the video. One video per URL. It is also important to surround your video with relevant text about that video. Doesn’t hurt to tell viewers what they are about to see, and further helps the SEO initiative.
3. Initial Search Engine Submissions. Take the time to visit each of the top search engines and go through their process of submitting your website to be crawled, indexed, spidered, etc. Some are easier than others, but this is a crucial step in making sure you get found. Because Google more or less dominates the search engine arena (with approximately 60% of the traffic), and including the other top thre (Yahoo, MSN and AOL), they encompass about 94% of the search engines traffic altogether. Plus, these major search engine directories are shared by many other smaller search engines, including Lycos, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Excite, Go, Search, AOL, and many others. Once the major search engines have indexed your website, regular search engine submissions are no longer required. We also recommend a one-time manual application submission to dmoz.org. (DMOZ is The Open Directory Project - the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.)
4. Bonus Tip! – Using Web Video Sharing as Free Advertising! Just because you’ve posted your video on your site doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t post that same video elsewhere. By taking advantage of one or more of the many free video sharing websites out there like YouTube, you can help spread your message and your video out across the web. Most of these sites have very robust description and tagging sections when you upload your video which will yield top results and can in return, be linked back to your site. We have had tremendous success in getting higher search results for some of our video content through the videos we’ve uploaded at these sharing and social networking sites. The top 5 video sharing sites that will except most any user-generated content for upload are: YouTube, GoogleVideo, Metacafe, AOLvideo and Revver. There are certainly dozens more, and every indication is that this market is going to continue to grow rapidly as the demand for video on the web continues to flourish.
These are just a few things you can do immediately after deploying your video for an online audience. They are by no means the complete answer, as this new media world is changing with new web video search technologies on the horizon. Technologies that scan the audio and video content to detect if what the descriptors say is in the video, is actually in the video are one example. We'll discuss more as we learn. Thanks for reading and good luck! -ETK
Time will fly.
Somehow between dayjobbing for Test Drive Videos, playing bass in Mighty Unicorn, and squeezing in the occasional trip to the wilderness - many moons have passed once again. I have managed to start throwing a few video bits and pieces up on the wacky YouTube. I've also began pre-production on a new indie TV production based here in Portland, as well as started shooting a fun short film. Neat stuff - but there never seems to be enough hours in the day. Cursed sleep! What did Edgar Allan Poe say? "Sleep, those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them." Ok... not that I agree so much... but I like the quote. I guess I loathe the little slices more because they steal away time I could be productive or out soaking up adventure. Sigh.
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