_www.FantasyLibrary.com [Visit Who Is Joseph Teller?] Synthesis & Synchronicity 049

Synthesis & Synchronicity #49

This is being put together, again, over several days. The reason is that I am busy running around getting ready for the Arisia SF/Fantasy convention this weekend in Boston at the Park Plaza Hotel. This involves shopping, packing, planning, keeping everyone else in the household focused and on schedule, preparing handouts for panels, doing research for handouts and for information to use on the panels, keeping the housework up to date so that we don't have to worry about it during or after convention, and generally acting like a mad hatter.

We're doing a lot less promotional effort this year than on previous years, for a number of reasons. We have nothing new in the pipeline to announce, distribute or otherwise promote quite yet (too early a promotion can be just as bad as not enough promotion - there's nothing so annoying as vaporous advertising for things that are drastically late or never manifest).

Additionally, last weekend Kiralee worked part of the weekend, went to the Fetish Fleamarket to look at various costumer selections (also at the Park Plaza) and of course we had our regular roleplaying gathering. There'll be no game this weekend, since several folks in the group will also be at the convention, and the weekend after that we're having a Glut of gaming to make up for it (it's looking like there will be a Friday night one-shot that weekend with Dev, one of the organizers associated with Vericon to playtest one of their planned RPG events for that convention at the end of the month) including a Saturday Afternoon game and a Sunday Game. See The Western Ave Irregulars Page for details.

Net Bits : Anyway, while doing research for my handouts and panels, I discovered a few interesting 'tidbits', one of which is that at least one person used Interregnum APA (and some of Kiralee's writing in it) as part of their college dissertation on fan publishing and networking. To say the least, Kiralee was thrilled to find out she had had this honor.

I've also managed to raise her visibility in recent weeks. Kiralee.org is quickly becoming visible in the google search engine (at least she has quickly become the most visible and accessible person with that name as of Monday).

Another thing I came across was that evidently www.newstrove.com has been scanning and including my Synthesis & Sychronicity journals as part of its database of 'news outlets and news related sites' on the internet. We showed up (fairly well down the list) in some scans there on various keyword topics. This caught me a bit by surprise, since it's not exactly the sort of folks I expected to pick up on what I write, especially what I write about here in my personal journals. Ok, maybe I would think that some of the articles on the fantasylibrary.com site in general might get picked up on, but evidently we're getting more visible than I expected.

Hmmm... I wonder if this means I should be more paranoid than normal about what I share here? I've been presuming that only a small number of folks were reading these columns, and that they would be invisible to major outlets (considering what happens with Google and the other search engines and how the search engine placement sites do 'ghost page linking' to force folk's sites up into the top 20 or so choices when you put a term in at google.

Ghost Page Linking : Oh, how do I know about the ghost page linking? Well I was recently approached by a couple of different placement companies who tried to convince me that for $3k or so they could get my pages (and Kiralee's new site) to the top 10 or so ranking. They basically explained some details on their system, including that since google highly looks at metatags and how many sites link to your own for concepts of popularity (rather than actual site hits, pertinance to subject or value of content) as they spider the net, that they use lots of ghost page links on various sites that they manage that are popular. So they hide extra URLs in the coding of pages, URLs that humans don't actually see, that the spiders see and use to up the number of links to a site. In this way they can make a site appear far more visible and important than it really is, and get it more search engine visibility.

Technically it's legal, but seems downright unethical to me. But it does explain why my site rarely shows up on many search engines that are supposedly 'fairly managed' rather than purely 'pay for position on keyword' managed, and sites that seem to have nothing to do with a subject may in some cases dominate it beause of a combination of ghost paging and meta tag manipulation. {Sigh}

A few Interesting Sites To Visit : This is a few of folks who Kiralee ran into while at the Flea this past weekend who I thought deserved a little more visibility. I have a personal desire to make artists, costumers, photographers and writers more visible and interconnected on the internet. Ignore these links if you are under 18, as they will contain some adult related material, I'm sure:

Anddragonsohmy.com{T-Shirts, Art etc.}
Lensoflust.com {Photographer}
Pencildragon.net {Artist}
Windwolf.com {Artist}

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