Five Great Visual Arts Blogs

An artist friend was asking me where she could find some good blogs to add to her feed reader, so I thought I’d start rounding a few up here every so often.

One of my favorite things in the blog world has been the explosion of great sites concerned with visual arts, design and photography. Some expose the readers to new artists they might never might have found. Others gather discovered items that would otherwise be rotting away somewhere, never to be seen again. And a few add in great analysis of what we’re seeing.

I recommend you check these out if you enjoy having your eyes and brain stimulated. I’ll link to particular posts that I think are outstanding, or are good examples of what the sites are about. If you like one, go to their main pages for more.

And with that, a small supermarket sampling of some great visual arts blogs:

 BAGnewsNotes- great photography analysis from Michael Shaw and company. Also, shockingly for a blog, thoughtful comments from the readers. There’s a lot being communicated in a “news” photo that we might not consciously perceive, and these people can pick apart an AP wire photo like no one else. 

 ISO50 Blog – The Blog of Scott Hansen - aside from showing his own work, Hansen shares inspiration from everywhere. This particular post on audio cassette inserts is stunning. His tastes are wide-ranging, but more than likely you’ll find something that makes your jaw drop.

 Movie Title Screens - not a blog as such, but an immense collection of movie title screens (starting in 1901!) that will keep you exploring for hours. Some are art, some are commerce, but many straddle the two (and isn’t that where the fun is)?

 Design Observer - plenty of writing on design aimed at those working in the field, but also loads of tasty images for the rest of us. It’s also a slick, magazine-style site which bears repeated viewing. Also loads of links and resources, so it acts as a great jumping-off point.

 Waxin’ & Milkin’: A Visual Mixtape - Mark Malazarte is obsessed images, and he posts lots of them on his Tumblr blog. Sometimes it’s hard to know why, because there’s no commentary (a promo shot of Ray Parker Jr.?), but that’s actually part of the fun. His random image link is guaranteed to turn up something that will get you thinking, confuse you, or both.

Enjoy these five, there will be more to come. Please feel free to let me know your favorites.

Google Keywords Part 5: Finalizing

Class is back in session – please take your seats.

After the last part of our Google keywords series, you should now have a spreadsheet of possible keywords for your site, sorted by “keyword difficulty”, with your best targets marked in bold. What these represent are your best opportunities to appear in high positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for these keywords. When a user searches on your chosen keyword, you want to appear as high in the results as possible.

What we’ve done so far is narrow down your possible Google keywords to the ones with the best ratio of competitive pages to search traffic. Lots of search traffic and few competing pages = big, fat target.

The next few steps take a bit of work and some creative thinking, but they’re worth it.

Keyword Relevance

Now we want to take the possible Google keywords we’ve identified, and find the ones that will work well with your site. Look at the bolded keywords in your spreadsheet – are any of them already prominent in your site? Is one in the title? Is one the subject of many pages/posts? Is one a synonym for something you write about frequently? Answer these questions for each of the top keywords in your spreadsheet, and mark the ones most relevant to your site’s content in red. Now we’ll check the answers more scientifically.

Current Site Indexing

Before we proceed, we need to make sure your site has been indexed by Google, especially if it is relatively new. You can check by following this link, and then substituting the URL of your actual site for “yoursite.com”:

Google search: site:http://yoursite.com

If there are no results for your site, you haven’t yet been indexed. If that is the case, take these two steps:

1. Go to Add Your URL to Google’s Index and add your URL. You’ll have to wait a while for it to show up, so the sooner the better.
2. If you have FTP access to your site’s files, make sure you have a file called robots.txt in your root folder. If you want your entire site indexed, its contents should read only as follows:
   

   User-Agent: *
   Allow: /

   If you don’t have access, don’t worry – this is generally set by default anyway.

If there are results for your site in the above search, you have already been indexed, which means we can now check the Google keywords you’ve marked in red.

Current Keyword Indexing

Return to the site-specific search, site:http://yoursite.com, and add your first keyword phrase (in quotation marks) to the front of the search query. For example, if the first red keyword in your spreadsheet is “merchant services”, search Google for “merchant services” site:http://yoursite.com.

If the results are accompanied by a message that “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed,” click the link to ”repeat the search with the omitted results included”.

Note the number of results. Near the top of the page, look for a line like this: “Results 1 - 6 of 6 from yoursite.com for “merchant services“. Create a new column in your spreadsheet, and type in the number of results next to your keyword. Repeat this process with all of those you’ve marked in red.

Now you know exactly how many times you’re indexed for each of these possible Google keywords. If you’re already indexed many more times for one or two, these are natural targets, since you’re mentioning them frequently already. If this happens, put a box around these in your spreadsheet to mark them.

The Dirty Work

If no natural targets emerge, start breaking up your keyword phrases, and repeating the search on the most important word. In the example above, you’d try just “merchant”. If you get more results, consider whether the references to “merchant” in your site could be tweaked to use the keyword “merchant services” instead or in addition.

If you’re still not coming up with results, look at your red targets, and try to think if you’ve used any synonyms on your site. Can you replace them with the keyword version, or add the Google keywords into the same content without disrupting the flow of your writing? If this is feasible for your site, repeat the above search using these currently-used synonyms. If you get results, mark the spreadsheet appropriately, with a note next to the results column indicating what synonym you searched on.

Repeat this until you get two to three keywords marked in boxes. Rank these according to difficulty, general relevance to your site, and current indexing, and determine a top keyword, a second and possibly a third. These will be your final targets.

Next time, we will integrate the selected Google keywords seamlessly and elegantly into your content and site design.

25 Best Blogs of 2009?

Time Magazine (are we still calling it a “magazine”?) has posted “Best Blogs 2009“, their second annual list of the “best blogs in the world”. A few notes before we dig in to their choices:

• It is currently mid-February. It might be a good idea to wait until December is a bit closer before making our “best of” lists.
• By various counts, there are at least 200 million blogs in the world. Either Time spent an incredible amount of time and effort on this, or…well, they didn’t. The fact that most of their choices can be found on Technorati’s list of the most popular blogs would suggest the latter.
• Though a list of 25 items could easily fit on one page, Time puts each and very entry on a separate page. This is designed to get 25 clicks and 25 page-views from every reader, inflating Time’s perceived popularity. It’s actually pretty smart, but also rather annoying to the reader.
• This is basically their version of linkbait – the method used by bloggers to get others to link to their posts (as I did above), increasing their rankings in Google. Lists are the most common form of this technique – anytime you see a blog post starting with a number (“25 best ____”, 5 Ways To ____”, “10 New ____”), you’re looking at linkbait. Including when I do it.
• Time’s post also incorporates two other well-known forms of linkbait: the “useful” post, and the “controversial” post. Casual readers will be attracted to it as a useful list, tech-savvy types will be complaining all day about it on their blogs – as I am doing now. See how it works?

As a kicker, in case they didn’t generate enough controversy, there’s a list of the 5 Most Overrated Blogs, sure to get a few more people ticked off, and generate five more page-views per reader.

Oddly enough, Gawker.com went from last year’s “best” to this year’s “most overrated”. Apparently in 2008 “Gawker’s relentlessly critical, headache-inducing cynicism” was a good thing, but in 2009 “the economic downturn and the near-collapse of Wall Street has made Gawker’s snarky worldview seem not only cruel but pointless.”

Oh, Time. The zeitgeist is getting sore from you having your finger on it.

As a service to you the reader, and because my annoyance knows no bounds, I present here Time’s lists on one page. The only value Time adds for your clicks is a screenshot of each, and a short paragraph seemingly written by someone on the way to work.

Time’s 25 Best Blogs 2009:

1. Talking Points Memo
2. The Huffington Post (down from #1 last year. Perhaps it was that little plagiarism problem.)
3. Lifehacker
4. Metafilter
5. The Daily Dish
6. Freakonomics
7. BoingBoing
8. Got2BeGreen
9. Zen Habits
10. The Conscience of a Liberal: Paul Krugman
11. Crooks and Liars
12. Generación Y
13. Mashable
14. Slashfood (“Slashfood is food for thought”…ugh. Didn’t they teach you about lazy writing in journalism school?)
15. Official Google Blog
16. synthesis (the choices are getting a bit better – this is a pretty thoughtful, interesting one)
17. bleat (a “pop culture ephemera” blog – not bad, but much like 100,000 others)
18. /Film
    
19. Seth Godin’s Blog (bleh. Self-important aphorisms daily from a self-proclaimed web guru, followed by slobbering fanboy comments. No thanks.)
    
20. Deadspin: Sports News
    
21. Dooce (riding out her micro-fame. I don’t care about your OB-GYN visit, really.)
    
22. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman (they had blogs on the frontier?)
    
23. Said the Gramophone (how did they choose one mp3 blog?)
24. Detention Slip (something about education apparently)
25. Bad Astronomy

Hey Time, what was your mission again?