My Brain Dump
Scattered thoughts collected along the road of lifeA Solution To Tracking Keyword Rankings
I cannot tell you how many years, or how many hundreds (possibly even thousands) of dollars I’ve invested in just trying to keep track of how my web sites are doing rank-wise in Google. Whether my rankings were good or terrible, it just seemed that seeing them on a daily or weekly basis was constantly a major hassle. I’ve spent a lot of money and tons and tons of hours on it, and finally threw in the towel some time back. It just wasn’t worth my time.
However, more recently, I had gotten more serious again about ranking my voiceover web site. I won’t go into all the history of voice over on the web, but where it once was a trickle, there are now a flood of people there beating down the doors for your attention. And because this is how I make my living, I need to be in the game.
I was turned on to an app a couple months back called AccuRanker. I got a terrific deal on it at the time, and after looking it over, it seemed like a steal….and it was. This thing does all the heavy lifting for me, and checks my rankings even if I don’t bother to look at them each day. I’m currently tracking something like 85 keywords/phrases just related to that one site alone. Someday, I hope to add more and track some other sites.
The app is more sophisticated than anything I’d ever need…but that’s good, because over time, I am likely to grow into it and take advantage of more of its features. Among them are keyword suggestions and all sorts of metrics that I don’t even understand. It allows you access (if you want) to multiple search platforms, and to see the difference in your rankings between desktop and mobile devices.
It also allows you to just check the site itself, or specific themed pages within the site. Very handy stuff.
For those who can catch a deal or who are more serious and sophisticated about this stuff than I am and can afford it (it’s designed for agencies and professionals), I would highly recommend checking it out!
Great New Netflix Resources
I’ve added a couple new pages to the site that might be of real interest to fans of Netflix.
1. Folks are always asking: “Hey, what’s good to watch on Netflix tonight??” And their friends will pop up with a suggestion, even though they may have no idea what kind of mood the person might be in at the time. Luckily, there are some SUPERB tools for finding a great Netflix movies. I’ve corralled several of them…along with some great recommendation lists, on this page:
Looking for a Good Movie on Netflix?
2. Also, the Netflix recommendation engine is great for what it is…but, let’s be honest…they rarely show you more than a couple dozen choices in each genre. But, what if you could see everything they have in your favorite category? Well, here’s some good news! There’s a backdoor way to see the entire contents of certain categories. And you’ll find a couple hundred links directly into those categories on this page:
Browse Specific Netflix Categories
Check these things out. You’re likely to be surprised at how helpful and interesting they are. And, if you enjoy them, please consider sharing them with your friends. En-Joy! 😉
Facebook Sharing: The Little-Known Sleaze Factor
I am what might be called an “active sharer” with my friends on Facebook. I enjoy sharing that which makes me laugh, marvel or challenges my thinking.
However, there’s a really ugly thing happening on Facebook. It’s been going on for a long time, and I just thought it was working pointing it out…so that folks of conscience might ponder whether or not they want to change their sharing behavior in some way.
The vast majority of the videos that get shared directly on Facebook (and no, we’re not talking about YouTube videos here) are actually content stolen from their original creators and reposted by the thieves on Facebook.
Why would they do this? Well, there’s half the story…which is that those who post them are too lazy and too uncreative to come up with original content of their own, so, instead, they resort to stealing. But the more interesting part of the story is that many of them are building their “brands”..garnering lots of Likes and followers who they can continue to spoon-feed content…and they don’t want people going to YouTube to watch instead of their page. Many of these pages are then used to advertise products or to redirect folks to web sites outside of Facebook. But many of them will be sold off to the highest bidder…giving marketers access to your personal info that you never intended to grant to them. This is actually a massive business…where large followings can fetch some pretty serious money…again…built on STOLEN CONTENT. You can read more about that here.
So, that’s one factor worth being aware of. Another is the strong potential for loss of income to those who created of the original video. You see, YouTube actually PAYS people to great good content through their monetization program. In other words, if a video gets a LOT of views, the creator can end up earning tens of thousands of dollars. There are a number of people who make their full-time living doing this.
So…thief does no work: MAKES MONEY. Video creator does all the work: LOSES MONEY. Anybody else see something wrong with this picture?
And, of course, Facebook does nothing to police this abuse at all…although I’m sure they have a mechanism for handling complaints if someone is aware their content has been reposted and takes the time to complain and document their ownership. Worse yet, they promote the heck out of these shares “of theirs” in our News Feeds…way moreso than the YouTube versions.
OK, but…what should you do about it?
What I do personally is try to go to YouTube to find the original video…even on YouTube, there are those who steal and re-post. And then I share that instead of the video posted to Facebook.
So…before you just click Share on a video that was posted directly to Facebook, please be aware that you are quite likely unwittingly supporting piracy, and likely discouraging further creativity from the creator of the original video.
Roby Duke’s “Bridge Divine” – The Lyrics
Very few songs have moved me in recent years like this song. I first became a fan of Roby Duke in 1982 with the release of Not The Same. The terrific songwriting, his pure blue-eyed soul vocals and some exceptional jazz-pop arrangements drew me in and haven’t let me go in the ensuing 30 years. I managed a Christian record store at the time, and sold the disc to people all across the board…from pop and rock fans to lovers of black gospel choirs. Then, in 2008, I saw this video posted on YouTube. I had heard of Roby’s passing…but didn’t realize until I double-checked that this video was recorded roughly 3 days before his death. It’s a perfect picture of the heart of a believer as they ponder both their own passing and the fate of a lost world. Every time I listen, I hear new things within this song. I went hunting for the lyrics online and could find none (though Google suggested several pages which, by all rights, *should* have had them). So, I took the time to transcribe them myself. These are the lyrics from the album version. He changed up a couple things in the live performance on the video. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! And Roby…rest in peace, brother. You left us a beautiful legacy.
When the roll is called up yonder
I believe that I’ll be there
Though I am the same man
With the same need as always
So they say
A soul is free to
Choose a path
To each his own
We’re livin’ in the same world
Under the same pale moon
Together
CHORUS
And some change would do us all some good
It’s so good for one to find
That there is no stairway to heaven
Only a Bridge Divine
You tell me change
Change is needed
To keep the world from growing old
And we all have the same dreams for our children as always
He hung the earth upon nothing
Said to a storm, “Peace, be still.”
What more could we give them
Something that would keep them safe
Forever and ever?
CHORUS
You tell me hearts are torn asunder
By the pain of moving on
We’re travelin’ on the same rails
Upon a train that’s bound for forever
I hope you know
You’re still my good friend
But when the saints go marchin’ in
I would like to turn and see your face…
CHORUS
written by Roby Duke. all appropriate credits belong to him.
Envisioning the Value of Money and Debt
I received this info in an email recently. I don’t know the source of the info or images. But it’s very sobering, and I thought you might enjoy sharing it with other in a form other than email…so I posted it here.
One Hundred Dollars
$100 – Most counterfeited money denomination in the world. Keeps the world moving.
Ten Thousand Dollars
$10,000 – Enough for a great vacation or to buy a used car. Approximately one year of work for the average human on earth.
One Million Dollars
$1,000,000 – Not as big a pile as you thought, eh? More than most humans will earn in a lifetime.
One Hundred Million Dollars
$100,000,000 – Plenty to go around for everyone. Fits nicely on an ISO/Military standard-sized pallet.
One Billion Dollars
$1,000,000,000 – Take a large truck with you when robbing the bank. Now we’re getting serious!
One Trillion Dollars
$1,000,000,000,000
When the U.S government speaks about a 1.7 trillion deficit – this is the volume of cash the U.S. Government borrowed in 2010 to run itself.
Keep in mind it is double-stacked pallets of $100 million dollars each, full of $100 dollar bills. You are going to need a lot of trucks to freight this around.
If you spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, you would have not spent $1 trillion by now…but only about $700 billion – the same amount the banks got during the bailout.
One Trillion Dollars
Comparison of $1,000,000,000,000 dollars to a standard-sized American Football field and European Football field. Say hello to the Boeing 747-400 transcontinental airliner that’s hiding on the right. Until recently, this was the biggest passenger plane in the world.
15 Trillion Dollars
$15,000,000,000,000 – One trillion less that the US national debt (credit bill) of $16 trillion surpassed in September 2012. The Statue of Liberty seems rather worried as United States national debt passes 20% of the entire world’s combined GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In 2011, the National Debt exceeded 100% of GDP, and ventured into the 100%+ debt-to-GDP ratio that the European PIIGS have (bankrupting nations).
$ 114.5 Trillion Dollars
$114,500,000,000,000 – US unfunded liabilities
To the right you can see the pillar of cold hard $100 bills that dwarfs the WTC & Empire State Building – both at one point world’s tallest buildings. If you look carefully you can see the Statue of Liberty. The 114.5 Trillion dollar super-skyscraper is the amount of money the U.S. Government knows it does not have to fully fund the Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Social Security, Military and civil servant pensions. It is the money USA knows it will not have to pay all its bills.
If you live in USA this is also your personal credit card bill; you are responsible along with everyone else to pay this back. The citizens of USA created the U.S. Government to serve them, this is what the U.S. Government has done while serving The People.
The unfunded liability is calculated on current tax and funding inputs, and future demographic shifts in US Population.
Note: On the above 114.5T image the size of the base of the money pile is half a trillion, not $1T as on 15T image. The height is double. This was done to reflect the base of Empire State and WTC more closely.
My 10 Essential Podcasts
Podcasting is “on the grow”. As someone who grew up loving radio, and worked in radio myself for several years…I was always a pretty heavy consumer of the medium. However, the growth of the internet, the explosion of portable technology, the ubiquity of the MP3 audio format and the death of terrestrial radio are reaching a nexus. I tuned out radio a year or two ago, and almost never listen anymore. I listen to a lot of podcasts (currently, I subscribe to 26 of them). Some are daily, some weekly, some sporadically.
Let me say up front that *my* essentials won’t likely be *your* essentials. Everyone’s tastes differ, and because podcasts tend to be focused on particular niches…interests may appear larger or smaller in your personal mirror. My main goal is to turn more people on to some of the podcasts that I enjoy so much on a regular basis.
In no particular order, here are 10 podcasts that I find essential at the moment:
1. The 48 Days Podcast: Dan Miller is a Franklin, Tennessee-based author, speaker and businessman. I first heard of him through “Debt-Free” Dave Ramsey, and have been listening every week for several years now. Dan has written some best-selling books, including 48 Days To The Work You Love and No More (Dreaded) Mondays. Dan was raised in Holmes County, Ohio (the same county where my Dad was born). He grew up in a hyper-conservative family…the son of a poor farmer/pastor, who has labored to reshape his view of the world into something more positive and successful. He’s a big proponent of turning one’s passion into opportunities for income. I find his podcast consistently challenging and encouraging, and have recommended it to many of my friends…especially those struggling through vocational challenges.
2. Big Pop Fun: Tom Wilson is an actor, comedian and…voiceover artist (like me, but on a much grander scale!). You’ll remember him as the bully Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future movies. On the podcast, he talks about show business and being creative. Some of the episodes are just him chatting to his listeners (including some fascinating “behind-the-showbiz-scenes” stories). On others, he interviews various creatives and celebrities…such as Mark Hammill, Stephen Hillenburg (creator of Spongebob Squarepants), Tim Siedell (@badbanana on Twitter) and Steve Oedekerk (writer/producer – Ace Ventura, Bruce and Evan Almighty, Kung Pow). I love his dry sense of humor and his tendency to grab his guitar and break into song. Want a two-minute taste of his humor? Watch The Question Song
3. The Dennis Miller Show: This is one of a few that originate from terrestrial radio. I’ve been listening to this show since the year it started. Dennis Miller is one of my favorite comedic minds ever. His show is a mix of comedy, interviews and politics. It blows me away that he is able to keep it fresh 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. I pay $50 a year to get the podcast version, since it’s no longer carried on local stations in my radio market. However, it is on over 300 radio stations nationwide.
4. This American Life: Also originating from terrestrial radio (NPR), the best show on radio, in my opinion. Ira Glass hosts this weekly podcast consisting of real-life stories. Humans are endlessly fascinating, and there’s no better resource for human stories than this show. It’s hard to describe what it is, or how good it is. You should check it out once or twice and see if it’s your cup of tea. Millions of us have been hooked for many, many years.
5. Fresh Air: Another NPR program…this show features interviews with luminaries from the worlds of entertainment, literature, music, and politics. Terry Gross is the best interviewer I’ve ever heard. Every show is a delight (even the fill-in host, Dave Davies, is superb!) and the highest compliment I can pay Terry is that she brings out the humanity in everyone…even those whom I am predisposed to dislike.
6. The Smart Passive Income Podcast: Pat Flynn is a young entrepeneur who was displaced from his career in architecture by the economic downturn a few years back. With a new wife and a baby on the way, he had to get creative about how to provide for his family. He more or less stumbled into a whole new way of life, creating an online business that pays him tens of thousands of dollars a month. Patient and methodical, he not only researches new facets of online business…he also lays them out in a way that many folks have found easy to learn and apply for themselves. He also publishes his income statement each month, to keep himself transparent to those who follow him. Pat is the real deal.
7. The Moth: More human stories. I believe this also originated on radio, although I never ran across it there. It’s somewhat like listening to standup comedy…although it’s only occasionally funny. It’s more focused around life experiences and life lessons. Sometimes the stories are told by celebrities, but more often they are just slices of life from ordinary people. Sometimes crass, often affecting and touching. The episodes are usually short…in the 15-20 minute range.
8. This Week In Tech (TWiT): Leo Laporte is the creator of the TWiT network, which is one of my favorite haunts. I’ll often call it up on my iPad or my Roku box while I’m working. They have a bunch of great shows, including excellent ones I watch frequently such as This Week in Google, iPad Today, All About Android, Triangulation (an hour-long conversation will brilliant minds), TWiT Photo and MacBreak Weekly. But the This Week in Tech show is the anchor of the network…a 2-hour live broadcast on Sundays at 6pm ET. I often listen to it live on my phone. It’s a roundtable discussion with the host and 3-4 guests (one or two sometimes connected remotely via Skype) covering the latest in tech news and possible implications/repercussions. As with all TWiT shows, it can be viewed as a TV show (a video podcast) or listened to as audio podcasts.
9. Left, Right and Center: Also from Public Radio (KCRW, to be more precise), this half-hour show covers the affairs of the week from the progressive, conservative and moderate viewpoints. It’s generally low-key and well-reasoned…and often provides surprising moments of consensus. It deserves to be an hour long, and I wish they could move back toward permanent panelists once again, but a couple of the key members were lost in the last year due to illness and commerce. It’s a dose of sanity in our current highly-polarized political environment. Definitely a highlight of the week for me.
10. Inside Musicast: Full-length interviews with great musicians…both big-names (Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross) and the incredibly-talented producers and players behind the scenes (Michael Omartian, Lee Sklar, Steve Lukather). Great stories about how music is made, the inspiration behind the songs and stories of life in the studio and on the road.
Here are some other podcasts to which I currently subscribe. You might be interested in checking some of them out as well:
- Artist Empowerment Radio
- CD Baby DIY Musician Podcast
- Mars Hill Church (Mark Driscoll)
- MasonWorld Late-Night Internet Marketing
- Music Business Radio
- The Nerdist Podcast
- RadioLab
- Redeemer Presbyterian Church (Tim Keller)
- Steve Brown, Etc
- Vineyard Columbus (Rich Nathan)
- Your Move with Andy Stanley
I use and recommend the Pocket Casts app for iOS and Android. It’s got a great search engine built into the app…so finding, subscribing to and managing your podcasts is super-easy.
Facebook’s Sharp Stick In The Eye
As of the end of 2011, there were 37 million Facebook pages (aka “fan pages”) for which 10 or more people have clicked the “Like” button. They range from major brands like Pepsi to creators of witty word graphics to indie musicians. Almost everyone knows that Facebook profits greatly from the use of the personal information of its users…but now, they have a new profit center to target: owners of Facebook pages with more than 400 fans.
As the owner of several FB pages in service of a number of my web sites, I spent a lot of time building up the fan bases over the past couple years…including spending money on Facebook ads…to get the word out to those who might be interested. As a fairly heavy Facebook user myself, I felt it made a lot of sense to connect with people as part of their daily FB activity to let them know of new postings on my sites which they might find of interest.
My 3 most active FB pages have 650, 2100 and 7100 fans respectively. To be clear, none of these involve sales of products…rather, they notify particular niche audiences about free music, stories, coloring pages and music videos, which (obviously) many people have found valuable enough to express interest.
I also have a number of friends (music artists, mostly) who started out with standard Facebook accounts…hit the 5K-friend hard cap…and were forced to try to get their fans to switch over to FB pages. These pages are, by nature, less appropriate for interaction with fans…and most of the migration efforts were marginally successful, at best. And then, FB came along and told them they really should have just had people *subscribe* to them anyway. Talk about mixed messages!
So, back to the point: After this investment of time and money to maintain and grow these pages, I am now informed (initially by a blog post from Shane Eubanks) that only a small percentage of those who thought enough of my pages to press Like ever see the posts I make on their behalf.
What percentage? Hard to say definitively…due to a bug in in the Facebook interface at the moment, I can only check one of them. But on that one page, my posts this week ranged between 1% and 7% of my 2000+ subscribers. In other words…almost no one.
As an average FB user, I have always resented being told that Facebook knows better than I do what I want to see of my friends’ activity. But, that’s a minor irritation compared to them blocking my subscribers/fans from seeing what I posted based upon their declared interest! I respect Facebook’s need to make a profit, but I consider this move on their part awkward, ill-considered and utterly unjustifiable. And yet…they do try to justify it.
First off, things *have changed about how your posts are shared. They are barely shared at all. Just because the sharing mechanism remains the same hardly excuses such a statement. And, they also don’t say that most people have a limited view of activity because Facebook controls it instead of allowing you to do so. And it’s a flat-out fabrication to say that “many of the people connected to your Page may still see it”. Not when only 5% of the subscribers ever have the chance!
So, Facebook sees a potential goldmine here. And…how do they choose to implement it? By charging page owners for every single post they make on their page (assuming that the owner wants their subscribers to actually see the post)!
I can understand Facebook seeing page owners as a potential profit center. And a small monthly or yearly charge might be reasonable for many/most active page owners, considering the potential value of connecting with an interested subscriber base.
How will fan page owners react?
- Will they be satisfied with only reaching 5% of their subscribers for free?
- Will they pay $5 per post (or whatever Facebook demands at any given time) to reach up to 70%-80% instead?
- Will they shut down the pages entirely…and attempt to drive fans back to their web sites or email subscriptions, where everyone at least has the *chance* to see everything in which they’ve expressed interest (also, thereby depriving FB of the opportunity to show display and profit from their own ads)?
Or is it possible that, as word of this gets out, that the backlash from page owners will force Facebook to relent and offer a more reasoned approach?
New Kids Music Video: Water Slide
I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest music video for kids. It’s based on the song, Water Slide, which appeared on my first Chuckleberries album, Yellowberry Jam. Enjoy!
(UPDATE: November 2018) This video was received nicely on YouTube initially, as were most of my videos. If I recall correctly, after about 5 years it had amassed some 40K views, which made me happy. But…somewhere along the line, something changed. Someone, somewhere linked to it from a high-traffic site or shared it in some large forum and it just exploded. As of this writing, it has amassed nearly 2.5 MILLION views. Thanks so much to all who have viewed and shared it over the years! 🙂
Harmony Magazine: Interview With Phil Keaggy (March 1976)
Over the Easter weekend in 1975, my friend Bill Gray and I traveled to Ithaca, New York to interview guitarist/singer/songwriter Phil Keaggy. We had actually interviewed him over the phone earlier in the week, but due to a bit of technical incompetence on my part, the quality of the phone recording was indecipherable. Bill and I were both fans of the Scott Ross radio show (which aired Sunday mornings in Central Ohio on WNCI), and we had always been curious to see the church where Scott was a leader and Phil Keaggy and Ted Sandquist were involved in the music program. So we used the occasion of my technical bumbling to head to Ithaca, to visit and interview Phil at his home…with plans to attend Easter services on Sunday, before heading home.
The interview was a wonderful experience. Phil and his new wife, Bernadette, were extremely gracious…despite the fact that I was an awkward 17 years of age at the time. After the interview, Phil pulled out his guitar and shared with Bill and I the song he had just recorded for his Love Broke Thru album…As The Ruin Falls (a C.S. Lewis poem, set to Phil’s lovely composition…still a favorite to this day). Afterward, I shared with Phil that I had recently begun to write songs as well. He handed me his guitar and asked me to play one…so I played the most complex song I’d written to that point…which was Proverbs 4:20-23 set to a contemplative melody. I was pretty proud of the song, as I had used a lot of unfamiliar chords pulled from the back page of a book on guitar lessons…but after I was done and handed the guitar back to Phil, he ran thru all the chords effortlessly. Of course, I was stunned!
The next year, in 1976, I moved to the Pittsburgh, PA area for a few months to work in radio. First, at WPLW, a small and very conservative station. That didn’t last very long, as contemporary Christian music was a real stretch for them. But then I got a call from WPIT-FM (now WORD-FM) in Pittsburgh (you KNOW a station has been there for a long time when they have the first three letters of the city’s name in their call sign!), and they wanted to talk about adding some contemporary music to their very conservative format as well. So I began playing Christian music there in the afternoons…and apparently, with a few bumps along the way, that’s still the general format of the station today…35 years later!
I also was living with a family just north of Pittsburgh at the time…the Hanchericks (Lou, his wife Peggy, and their kids). Lou was the publisher of Harmony Magazine, which was one of the earliest publications dedicated exclusively to the emerging genre of Jesus Music (later known as Contemporary Christian Music (or CCM). I still had this Phil Keaggy interview, which had only aired once previously on local radio in central Ohio…so Lou decided to make it the cover story of the third issue of the magazine (spring 1976), and then the interview was completed in the following issue (I don’t have a copy of this one anymore).
I thought it might be fun to scan the cover, the table of contents and the 3-page interview and post them here (click on the thumbnails to see the full-size scans). I hope you enjoy it!
New Kids Music Video Released: Hovercar
I’m pleased to be able to announce the release of the third in a series of “legit” videos for kids. The first was Yellowberry Jam, released in early March 2011. The second was The Fantabulous Cumulo-Nimbuli Pump, an animated story released a couple weeks later.
This new one is called Hovercar, and it’s based on a song I wrote some years ago about a boy who own a hovercar…which he loves for all the obvious reasons, but feels he has to keep a secret because he doesn’t want word to get out, less people feel jealous that he has such a cool toy and they don’t.
Rather than sing this one myself, I invited my friend D. Skite (Dave Schuiteman) to sing it. I created the music tracks, but they were significantly enhanced by my friend Dave Matchack, who then mixed and mastered it, and I found a fellow Ohioan named Kyle Akers to take my vision of a LEGO stop-motion animation and kick it up about 10 notches! Finally, I added the sound effects to help bring it all together.
I hope you enjoy it!