Showing posts with label classical music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classical music. Show all posts

Sunday, March 09, 2008

How Google Sees My Site(s) - II

Google isn't necessarily the best search engine; in fact I'd rate it third out of a field of four. Nonetheless, a recent survey showed that Google accounted for 58% of all the searches performed on the Internet. Obviously, Google's opinion is important to any webmaster whose goal is to attract viewers to their content. The following Amazon.com products are those that Google believes are the most "significant" ones listed in my Amazon aStores.

Google's idea of significance isn't necessarily mine -- or yours. My goal is to help shoppers find what they're looking for -- a task which should correlate pretty well with sales (which, of course, is my real goal.) Google's evaluation is based on a number of mostly irrelevant data, which produces some fairly odd results. (Similar results can be found with Live Search and Yahoo! )

Here are a couple hundred products Google thinks you'll be interested in. Frankly, none of them have been big sellers for me, but that could change. In any case, I've placed them into the appropriate subcategory aStores, which should help customers and indexing 'bots alike.

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How Google Sees My Site(s) - III

Google isn't necessarily the best search engine; in fact I'd rate it third out of a field of four. Nonetheless, a recent survey showed that Google accounted for 58% of all the searches performed on the Internet. Obviously, Google's opinion is important to any webmaster whose goal is to attract viewers to their content. The following Amazon.com products are those that Google believes are the most "significant" ones listed in my Amazon aStores.

Google's idea of significance isn't necessarily mine -- or yours. My goal is to help shoppers find what they're looking for -- a task which should correlate pretty well with sales (which, of course, is my real goal.) Google's evaluation is based on a number of mostly irrelevant data, which produces some fairly odd results. (Similar results can be found with Live Search and Yahoo! )

Here are a couple hundred products Google thinks you'll be interested in. Frankly, none of them have been big sellers for me, but that could change. In any case, I've placed them into the appropriate subcategory aStores, which should help customers and indexing 'bots alike.

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Monday, January 07, 2008

Amazon Classical Music Forum's Listmania

I'm no expert on classical music, although I have been known to listen to NPR at times. As I slogged my way through a major expansion of my Classical Mania aStore, I was surprised at just how many of the featured artists I actually had heard of. I guess I should have expected that. Classical music is part of our culture, after all. Not pop-culture or counter-culture, just plain culture -- the things we all hold in common that bring us together.

Stereotypes about classical fans abound, but I discovered in glancing over Amazon's Classical Music Forum they are actually a pretty diverse group. I was encouraged to find that the forum was less opinionated and more informative than the dread pop-music boards. There was also a considerable amount of attention paid to beginning classical buffs. I guess everybody has to start somewhere.

If you're looking for E. Power Biggs definitive recording of Bach's renowned Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, it's here. (A recording I know of strictly as a stereo equipment enthusiast. I mean you could smoke-test your bass with Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida, but how prosaic that would be!)

You might be surprised how much classical music you've heard a thousand times, but just couldn't name. After all, The Lone Ranger and Beat the Clock didn't have to pay royalties to Rossini and Khachaturian! You can also give yourself a big pat on the back if you immediately realized that Arthur Sullivan is more often mentioned in conjunction with his librettist William S. Gilbert.

Here is a selection of classical music Listmania lists from the Amazon Classical Music Forum:

  1. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Symphonic Cycles
  2. Listening List for Trumpet Students
  3. Hoshour's Guide to World Class Violin & Cello Concertos
  4. Hoshoshour's Guide to Definitive Beethoven Symphonies
  5. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Bruckner Symphonies
  6. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Brahms Symphonies
  7. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Piano Concertos
  8. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Mahler Symphonies
  9. Music CDs I Listen to in 2007, and Music CDs I Recommend.
  10. Sublime Beethoven recordings
  11. Essential Prokofiev
  12. Best Brahms Symphony Cycles according to The Penguin Guide
  13. Best Beethoven Symphony Cycles according to The Penguin Guide
  14. Got Scenery?
  15. Wade's Piano Student Listening List #1
  16. My favorite classical recordings of 2007
  17. ~Handel's MESSIAH~the best recordings~
  18. A Ranking of Rach 3
  19. Music of Howard Hanson
  20. Favorite "Messiah" Recordings
  21. My 20 Desert Island Recordings
  22. Essential Brahms
  23. Christmas-Themed Classical Music
  24. Mahler for Audiophiles
  25. Great Christmas Music From Various Genres
  26. CHRISTINE SCHäFER's GREATEST REALIZATIONS...
  27. GLENN GOULD's GREATEST REALIZATIONS.
  28. My favourite opera recordings on DVD
  29. Great Classical at a Great Price!
  30. Favorite Classical Music on the Philips Label
  31. A Must-Have Mahler Cycle
  32. A Strauss-Lover's Four Last Songs
  33. My Favorite Italian Pop
  34. Collecting the Deutsche Grammophon Collector's Series Classical CDs
  35. Deutsche Grammophon "Archiv" Favorite Recordings
  36. Building an Outstanding Classical Music Library with Box Sets
  37. The World of Classical Music and the Performing Arts!
  38. A Debussy Discography
  39. Classical Trumpet
  40. Some uncommonly beautiful recordings
  41. Not Just for Longhairs: Funny Classical Music
  42. Leonard Bernstein, Renaissance Man
  43. Classical Entry Points
  44. Musical Performance Practice Favorites
  45. Classical Music starter list
  46. Classical Music
  47. Classic Recordings of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos
  48. Classical pieces recorded by progressive rock groups
  49. Classical Music - sophisticated structures in sound from the Masters
  50. Classical Music For People who don't like Classical Music
  51. Heavenly Voices
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Saturday, January 05, 2008

Featured Classical Music

This article really is about Classical Music, but first I'm going to "entertain" you with a brief diatribe on the semantic web and search engine optimization. People like choices, but they don't like to be overwhelmed with a very large number of choices. Amazon.com's approach to this is a logical one: They arrange their products into broad categories, which are divided into subcategories, and further into sub-subcategories for as many levels as they find appropriate, as in the familiar outline form.

This is reasonable, but it presents a problem to those searching for products. Without a key to Amazon's taxonomy (or outline), one might easily take a wrong turn in the process of "drilling down" to the specific target classification. Search engines don't adequately address this problem. Attempts to search for a specific category simply return all items containing the search keywords instead of limiting results to category headings.

Google's PageRank alogrithm (and other search engine ranking schemes that are less well-documented) only compounds this problem. Briefly, search engines assume that the more specific "lower" levels of the outline are less significant than the "higher," more general headings. In fact, we humans already have our own taxonomy in our rich and diverse languages (English, in this case). It is far more likely that we will select highly specific terms in our very first search attempt than extremely broad ones. PageRank is upside-down.

What does this have to do with classical music? Only this: Amazon's Classical Music category is a recent spin-off of their more general Music category and has relatively few subcategories. Therefore, I hope to achieve my goal of creating more useful search engine listings sooner and more directly in these top-level categories:





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