10 Search Engines That Access The Invisible Web

I'm not sure how this directly applies to music but it sure is fascinating. We think of the Web as everything that Google can find, but did you know that there's a huge amount of data that's not indexed or searchable?

It's estimated that the size of the searchable Web is 167 terabytes (a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes) while the so-called "Invisible Web" or "Deep Web" is 91,000 terabytes!! Wow, that's a lot of data that can't be easily found.

Why isn't this data available via Google? Google sends out spiders to regularly index websites, but there are some that require a password that just won't allow that kind of access. These include private networks and library sties, which have huge amounts of information.

There are a number of ways to access the data of the "invisible web" though, and here are 10 search engines that are expert in just such a task, thanks to a great article on MakeUseOf. I'll give you a brief overview here, but see the entire article for more detail.

1) Infomine has been built by a pool of libraries in the United States. Some of them are University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, and the University of Detroit. Infomine ‘mines’ information from databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other resources.

2) The WWW Virtual Library is considered to be the oldest catalog on the web and was started by started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web. So, isn’t it strange that it finds a place in the list of Invisible Web resources? Maybe, but the WWW Virtual Library lists quite a lot of relevant resources on quite a lot of subjects. You can go vertically into the categories or use the search bar. The screenshot shows the alphabetical arrangement of subjects covered at the site.

3) Intute is UK centric, but it has some of the most esteemed universities of the region providing the resources for study and research. You can browse by subject or do a keyword search for academic topics like agriculture to veterinary medicine. The online service has subject specialists who review and index other websites that cater to the topics for study and research.

4) Complete Planet calls itself the ‘front door to the Deep Web’. This free and well designed directory resource makes it easy to access the mass of dynamic databases that are cloaked from a general purpose search. The databases indexed by Complete Planet number around 70,000 and range from Agriculture to Weather. Also thrown in are databases like Food & Drink and Military.

5) Infoplease is an information portal with a host of features. Using the site, you can tap into a good number of encyclopedias, almanacs, an atlas, and biographies. Infoplease also has a few nice offshoots like Factmonster.com for kids and Biosearch, a search engine just for biographies.

6) DeepPeep aims to enter the Invisible Web through forms that query databases and web services for information. Typed queries open up dynamic but short lived results which cannot be indexed by normal search engines. By indexing databases, DeepPeep hopes to track 45,000 forms across 7 domains.

7) IncyWincy is an Invisible Web search engine and it behaves as a meta-search engine by tapping into other search engines and filtering the results. It searches the web, directory, forms, and images.

8) DeepWebTech gives you five search engines (and browser plugins) for specific topics. The search engines cover science, medicine, and business. Using these topic specific search engines, you can query the underlying databases in the Deep Web.

9) Scirus has a pure scientific focus. It is a far reaching research engine that can scour journals, scientists’ homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional intranets.

10) TechXtra concentrates on engineering, mathematics and computing. It gives you industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, teaching and learning resources along with articles and relevant website information.

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10 Creative Rules Of Thumb

Here's another blast from the past. Sorry if you've seen this before (you probably haven't if you're a recent reader), but I thought it was a good time for a repeat.
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Here are some great tips on how to stay creative from the Marketing Essentials International blog. It's a good positive way to start the new year, although it seems that everyone is already pretty positive (maybe hopeful is a better word). Even though I found this on the MEI blog, I seem to remember seeing them on Seth Godin's or Derek Sivers' as well. Regardless of who created the list, it's still pretty good advice.

Top 10 Creative Rules of Thumb:

1. The best way to get great ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

2. Create ideas that are 15 minutes ahead of their time…not light years ahead.

3. Always look for a second right answer.

4. If at first you don’t succeed, take a break.

5. Write down your ideas before you forget them.

6. If everyone says you are wrong, you’re one step ahead. If everyone laughs at you, you’re two steps ahead.

7. The answer to your problem “pre-exists.” You need to ask the right question to reveal the answer.

8. When you ask a dumb question, you get a smart answer.

9. Never solve a problem from its original perspective.

10. Visualize your problem as solved before solving it.

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Licensing A Cover Song

For many artists trying to break through, doing a cover song is the way to go. Why? A cover song and the original artist or band that did it is already familiar to particular fan base, and they might be interested in checking you out as a curiosity if you did the same song. You can potentially gain many more fans with just a single cover song in a short amount of time than you probably can your own songs in that period.

Most artists or bands already have some cover songs that they like and play anyway, so why not do a cover version? The major reason that most artists shy away is the licensing issue. You want to be able to pay the songwriter for the song as you're legally bound to, but most artists have no idea where to start.

Now comes a service from a company called Rightsflow called their "Limelight" service that will do just that. For a flat fee, Limelight will do the research to find out who the songwriter and publisher is (in case you already don't have that info), and will work out a licensing deal based on the manner that you'll release the song (CD or digital download, for instance).

Another benefit from using Limelight is the fact that you prepay the license so you don't have to worry about keeping track of sales and report back to the publisher, which can be a major pain.

Just a little aside - if you do decide to release a cover tune, make sure you get your metadata together. The reason why your doing this in the first place is so people will find you, so you have to optimize your chances by optimizing your keywords (as I discussed in many other posts) and making sure that you supply all the pertinent MP3 data as I discussed here a few days ago.

This is a quick and easy way to work out a licensing deal for a cover song, but if you have any legal questions, be sure to check with a qualified music attorney.

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Don't Believe The Half-Life

Silicon Valley Insider recently posted some figures on video viewership that, if just looked at casually, may be very misleading.

The Insider's report actually comes from the video distributor TubeMogul, who states that a typical YouTube video gets 50% of it's total views in the first 6 days. After 20 days, it's already received 75% of the total views that it will ever see.

You may think that if your video doesn't received many plays in the first week, it'll never get any but that's just not true. This study obviously applies to the DIY "novelty" videos, and not one that are meant to extend your brand. Many videos gradually gain an audience and continue to build over time, especially after a mention on a blog or social network. Just about all of the videos on my own YouTube channel are good examples. They'll have a slow first week or month or even a number of months, then they gradually pick up steam.

If you maintain a good video SEO practice (like in yesterday's post) and your video is aimed at building your brand, you'll quickly prove this study wrong.

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4 YouTube SEO Tricks

I posted this well over a year ago when I only had about 10 readers so I thought it was worth a repost. It's also an excerpt from the marketing chapter of my Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook.
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YouTube can be used as an effective marketing tool, but you must observe some search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in order to be successful. Sure, it's possible your video could be a big viral success without them, but the chances of that happening are something like winning the lottery.

In these following examples, imagine that your band is called "Emerald" and you want to post a video from a live gig at the Lone Star Club.

Before you post that video, make sure that you’ve:

• Named your video something descriptive. “Emerald at the Lone Star Club video 1/9/09” is good. “Untitled_bandvideo12.mov” is not descriptive at all so your video will never get added by the search engines and your fans won’t find it.

• Choose your keywords based on your title. In this case the keywords would be “Emerald” and “Lone Star Club.” Keep your keywords to 4 or 5 since anything more could be construed as “keyword stuffing” (using every keyword you can think of in hopes of getting ranked by a search engine) and you might get penalized as a result.

• Make sure that your description contains the same phrase as your title. For example, “This video features Emerald at the Lone Star Club on January 9, 2009” is a good description, although a bit incomplete.  Something like “Here’s our band at the Lone Star Club” wouldn’t be as effective because it omits the keyword “Emerald.” The description is critical to SEO so the more info you can add (150 to 200 words), the better.

• Be sure that you put “video” at the end of the title because sometimes people just search for videos.

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Music 3.0 Interview on Musiciancoaching.com

Check out the interview I did with Rick Goetz for his musiciancoaching.com blog. The interview covers both my How To Make Your Band Sound Great and Music 3.0 books.

You can find the interview here entitled What Is Music 3.0?

Thanks, Rick, for taking an interest in a little of what I do.

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SEO Guru Gregory Markel Interview Excerpt

When I was writing the Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook, I was lucky enough to interview search engine Marketing guru Gregory Markel. Here's an excerpt from that interview.
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One of the pioneers of search engine optimization and marketing, Gregory Markel’s Infuse Creative touts major entertainment clients such as Gibson Musical Instruments, New Line Cinema, The National Geographic Channel, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the television show 24, and many more. As a recording artist formerly signed to Warner Brothers (and a great singer too), Gregory has a deep empathy for the plight of today’s artist and provides an abundance of good advice in the following interview.

What is Search Engine Optimization exactly?
SEO these days has a broad definition. It means optimizing anything and everything that a search engine is going to return. That means a web page, a video, a newsfeed, a blog, a product, a book, an article; it’s paying attention to all those areas.

We have 3 basic types of clients. The first is a client that wants branding awareness. A good example of that is a theatrical release where they can’t measure the number of people who might have visited the website that later went on to buy tickets, but they feel that it’s something they have to do in order to get the word out.

The second is a client that does e-commerce where they sell a toaster or something with a specific fixed cost. If you can choose and effectively setup the right keywords with the right ads with the right landing pages at the right cost, then if your cost is $15 and you deliver a sale at more than that, it’s a positive outcome.

The next type of client wants lead generation, which can be extremely effective if your product has a moderate to large margin. There are companies like mine helping to generate leads to companies that need them where they can turn that into $20 to 100k per day.

Turning to music, if your music’s good there are so many opportunities with social media, free technologies and methodologies available that you can definitely get a large number of people to find you. Whether you do these things for yourself or have someone who partners with you as your designated on-line communicator and extended member of the band, there’s lots that you can do now without paying for media. Of course there are a lot of paid options which are very powerful and immediate, but they might not be cost effective for someone who has a limited budget or even none at all.

What would you suggest to a new artist that’s trying to break that wants to use SEO to get the word out?
Everybody knows to set up a MySpace page and a Facebook page. Beyond that, regardless if you’re offering your music for free or not, you want to utilize the rest of the web that doesn’t cost you anything, meaning all the Web 2.0 and social media stuff like personal profile pages, bookmarking and tagging, and an official Twitter channel. It’s figuring out a way to broadcast to your fans and affinity groups, which are groups of people that like the type of music that you play. For example, if I sound a lot like John Meyer, then I want to reach out to John Meyer fans. You can do all that simply at no cost by simply putting the time in.

Now the ones that do well with this are either going to have a webmaster as a partner or be a new type of musician. Most musicians are abstract and creative types and don’t really have an entrepreneurial or measurement oriented brain, so a new kind of musician who thinks this way, or has a webmaster, is essential.

For more of the interview, go to this section of my website.

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iTunes Still Growing

According to a new report by Billboard Magazine, iTunes's market share has actually increased in 2009 to 26.7% of all music sold in the United States (research firm NPD says it's 28%). That's up from 21.4% in 2008 and more than double the 12.7% the company had in 2007.

Of course, iTunes is the largest music retailer in the United States by far, with 2nd place Wal-Mart at 12.5% and third place Best Buy at 8.7%. The iTune's increase was no surprise since both Wal-Mart and Best Buy are decreasing the number of CD's that they sell and well as the floor space.

Amazon keeps on growing with 7.1% of total sales in 2009 (for the record, NPD also states that Amazon has now tied Wal-Mart at 12%). Surprisingly, it's online Amazon MP3 store has only 1.3% of the market, but that's still good enough for 10th place.

As you can see from the numbers, the days of the "big box" retail stores are coming to a close, at least as far as music is concerned. That's OK because the big box stores were actually one of the reasons for the independent record store decline. With the big box stores taking up so much of the market share before iTunes (mainly because of their loss-leader deals on hit CDs), the life-blood of the industry, the local record stores, were left to die on the vine. This is just another of the many mis-steps of an industry that seems hell-bent on killing itself.

What's going to happen in the future? It should be especially interesting to see what iTunes offers later in the year. Some say it'll be a cloud-based service based upon the infrastructure of Lala, which Apple purchased earlier in 2010. Will that change the dynamics of music retail? Probably no more so than the way the trend is going already.

One thing to remember is that even though mainstream retail of physical product (CD's) is declining, that doesn't mean that CDs are going away any time soon (yes, eventually they will, just not as soon as some predict). What never shows up in the sales numbers are amount that's sold at gigs, which are substantial when you add them all up.

That being said, don't look for big changes at least through the end of the year.

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Must Do MP3 Tags

I recently found this informative post from Dexter Bryant Jr. regarding the MP3 tags that you need to fill in to make sure that your song has enough information to be promoted properly.

Every MP3 released to the internet should have these ID3 fields completed. If you are an artist actively releasing and promoting your music online, make sure you’ve included the following data:

1. Artist Name – This name should be the REAL artist name or alias. One that can be found online should an interested listener want to search for more content by this artist.

2. Song Name - The song NEEDS to have a name. How can a listener email their friend and tell them about the song if it doesn’t have a name? How can fans talk about their favorite songs. Today’s music is a song culture and this is an MP3, it’s a SONG; give it a name and let it live.

3. Genre – Don’t make up some unique and strange genre for your music. As much as it pains artists to be lumped in with the mainstream genre names use a recognized ID3 genre tag. This tag gives listeners a reference of what to expect when they hear the song. If nothing else, it’s a good way of keeping your unique sound part of a collection that the listener may throw on when the mood suits.

4. Comments – Add a link to your website, or other online presence. Bonus if you add in a Creative Commons status. Beyond those 2 key items, this field is where the promotions REALLY happen. Add a unique factoid or something if you’re feeling creative.

5. Year – As much as some people don’t like having their music appear dated. Music is an evolution and has a history. Add the year the song was released. It helps give listeners a context, on when it was made.

6. Artwork – As much as music is about the song, the artwork is what we all see when we look at our MP3 player. Add something… Make it interesting and it might even become memorable to the listener.

Why ID3 tag the MP3 file? Because music and MP3 files are becoming the main currency of attention all artists have in common. Its the ideal gateway to listeners and the easiest way to convert those listeners to fans.

Even if you ignore the bulk of this post; every (artist released) MP3 file should have at minimum: Artist Name, Song Name, and A comment with the URL of their website or other online presence. Paying attention to this type of content monetization has a REAL value in raising the access and awareness an artist to fans and casual listeners. As listeners and fans collect more and more music, it is easy for a miss-tagged song to disappear into an MP3 collection. Filling out these ID3 fields allows listeners to easily search and organize the file within their own musical library.

originally posted on http://Lx7.ca

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Is Google TV The Future?

Last week Google introduced Google TV, and frankly, I can't wait. Why? Because it looks like Goggle TV will finally deliver on the promise of interactive television. If you've ever struggled with the sad attempts of your local cable company to implement interactive TV, your wait is finally over by the looks of it.

Set-tops boxes are so lame in that they're still running 1990's technology, complete with it's limitations. Doesn't it upset you that you can only get a 28 character or so description about a program? Don't you ever wish that you could find out more about the program you're watching without having to resort to going online with your computer? Don't you wish that you could watch all the video now on your computer on your big screen TV without having to be a nerd to hook everything up? Hopefully, this is what Google TV will do for us.

Watch this video explanation and then read Greg Sterling's Google TV FAQ from the Search Enginland website.

What is Google TV and when will it be available?

Google says that Google TV is an “open platform” that unites TV programming and the internet. It supports Flash and makes the “full internet” available in the living room on TVs. It will be available through set-top boxes and directly through “integrated” TV sets (the only one of which right now will be from Sony).

The search and browse capabilities, which integrate web and TV content side by side in results were impressive.

Will I have to buy a new TV?

No. Google TV is intended to work with existing TVs. Sony’s forthcoming TV doesn’t require a set-top box. However Logitech’s box will be available for existing sets.

Who are the partners involved at launch?

The initial group of companies involved in GTV include Intel (chip), Sony (TV), Logitech (set-top box), Best Buy (retailer), DISH Network (content provider with unique integration).

How will these devices be branded?

The branding of Google TV and related hardware devices will be highly analogous to the way Android handsets are presented (i.e., XX brand “with Google”). GTV is built on the Android platform (not ChromeOS).

Will it replace cable TV?

This is an interesting question to consider and one that will take time to answer. Users won’t need a cable TV subscription (though they will need WiFi in the home) to access GTV. So it’s at least possible that the web content and video, Netflix and Hulu that GTV offers via the internet could well substitute for a cable subscription.

Will Google TV “track” or collect data about me like online sites?

Google said that there will be the same privacy options (e.g., “incognito”) and controls for Google TV as there are via Chrome online (the TV browser is Chrome). But yes there will be tracking and data collection, partly for personalization and partly for ad ROI accountability and targeting.

What will it cost?

This is a critical question that Google and its partners declined to answer repeatedly.

Is it something I’ll want?

If Google TV performs and delivers as the demo, claims and screens suggest it will be a very desirable consumer product.

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The Circle Of Sales

The chart on the left comes from marketing guru Seth Godin's blog from a post entitled, The Circles. Seth relates the chart more to customer acquisition, but I want to use it as it's related to an artist's fanbase in regards to sales.

• At the bottom in white we have the "True Fans," sometimes described as "superfans," 'uber-fans,' or as Seth calls them, your "tribe." These fans love you and everything you do, and as a result, will purchase the most obscure product that is of no interest to virtually anyone else, even the artist himself.  Think rehearsal recordings, studio out-takes, sound check jamming and stained undershirts of the artist. The True Fan wants it and will pay for it.

• "Fans"are a bit more casual about it. They like you but don't love you. They'll buy certain items but could care less about anything obscure. They can be turned into True Fans, but it will happen either over time or the release of that one song that puts you over the edge.

We'll skip "Sneezers" and "Customers" because they don't apply to our model and go right to "Listeners."

• "Listeners" are the next down the totem pole of sales. These are people who have heard of you and maybe even heard some of your songs. They neither like nor dislike you. They may turn into fans at some point, but just as likely might not.

• Next comes "Friends." Notice how low in influence circles that your friends are at. Don't ever rely on them for sales or spreading the word. They're your friends. Like know you and hopefully like you, but it doesn't mean they like your music. In fact, most of them probably don't but will still support you because of your friendship. You probably don't have enough of them to make any significant sales impact anyway.

• Last comes "Strangers." They've never heard of you before. Maybe they like your kind of music, must most likely not. They are blissfully unaware of your existence as an artist.

Here's what we can gain from this chart:

1) Don't waste your time trying to convert friends to fans. It's such a long shot that it's not worth the time or effort, and can even be detrimental to keeping your True Fans happy.

2) Don't waste time on your friends. You don't have enough of them to worry about, and they're probably only being polite anyway.

3) Be aware of your listeners, but don't try to convert them to fans. The chances are it won't happen.

4) Fans are important. They already like you and have told you so, probably by buying product, signing up to your email list or friending you on a social media site. They can be turned into True fans, but at this point, you can't count on it so you can't spend a lot of effort trying.

5) Your True Fans love you. They will walk to the ends of the earth to tell others about you. They are your evangelists and will covert others into Fans and True Fans for you. They are to be embraced, coddled and cultivated because they are your future.

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The Myth Of "Distribution Is King"

Up until about the year 2000, it was pretty much a given that anyone who owned, controlled, or created content had the world at their feet. Without the movie, song, CD, DVD, television show, piece of art, book, poem or any other creative endeavor, what else was there to sell?

Somewhere in the last decade this concept has been twisted to where it's now popularly believed that content is not longer the essential part of commerce, but distribution is. I suspect that this idea has been perpetrated by marketers and the distributors themselves in an effort to increase their importance and obtain a bigger slice of the pie as a result.

Is distribution important? You bet it is. You can have a great product, but if you can't make it available to buy, then you won't have as many sales. But distributors overestimate their importance, and they're beginning to believe their own hype. If you have something that's really great, people will find their way to it, more so now than ever.

But the distributors will have you believe that you can have a great piece of content like a song, and it won't blow up (sell a lot) unless it has distribution. Or will it?

In the old days of Music 1.0 through 2.5 when the record label was essential to an artist's success and the fan only purchased physical product like vinyl records and CDs at a record store, distribution was a lot more important. There was only a single distribution channel and you had to abide by the system in order to get in it. But now that we're in Music 3.0 where the artist can communicate directly with the fan, I'd venture to say that distribution is LESS important than ever.

You want to distribute your songs online? There are at least a dozen online distributors besides iTunes that will do that for you, and if you don't want to use them you can go directly to your fans via email, social networking and your website.

You want radio airplay? Traditional broadcast radio that requires the big machine for placement is dying and turning to talk-radio, so you won't be played anyway. Plus it's now irrelevant because it's influence is at an all-time low and going lower. But there are hundreds of online radio stations that will gladly play your songs if they like them and they fit their formats, and there are dozens of streaming sites where you can list your music by yourself.

You want to distribute your product physically? You probably can't get it into most record stores, but so what? There are fewer and fewer of those every month anyway. But you can sell CDs and merch at gigs and personal appearances, which can amount to some big $$$ if you have the fanbase and visibility.

If anything, the viral nature of the Internet proves the point. Content is still king! People don't buy distribution, they buy content.

So don't believe the myth. After all, without content, what is there to distribute?

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