Monday, December 27, 2010

Who Broke Google?



This is the last 12 months of our website bandwidth. It had been steadily growing for 5 years, then google changed something, such that in August, we now cyclically drop out of the first few top search results.

Makes a huge difference. It isn't just me either, but many illustrators. The Google webmaster forum is full of cases, and after posting about it several times with our findings, haven't had any positive results yet.

Basically Google broke the search for many things, especially image searches. I assume it was trying to stop the sites that just contain links to other sites and contribute nothing, but it is more than that. When searching for any of our illustrations around August, you would find our images on a few such sites, and not the original source. They seem to have fixed that, but broke it in a different way.

A two word search can significantly reduce the significance of one of the search terms. Can only assume this has significantly reduced the usefulness of Google for searching for everyone, but unless you actually test this, you wouldn't notice.

It would seem "All good things...."

Saturday, November 20, 2010

An Industrial Design Ending

Car Styling, a leading car, design school and product design reference, has ceased publication after 37 years. Issue 196, May 2010 was the last.

This seems indicative of a global trend, and the changed economics of product development, sales and manufacture. At least for the time being.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Zero Billion Dollar Business?

I attended Steve Jobs Tokyo introduction of the NeXT Computer, around 1990. It was very cool and inspiring.
The guys at ID Software trudged threw the snow to get a NeXT computer and soon after came up with DOOM. The first web server was developed on a NeXT computer. The NeXT Computer was some kind of catalyst.

Around that time Steve said multimedia was a "Zero Billion Dollar Business". He meant there was no money in it. It has a different meaning today. But, in the last week or so "Call of Duty: Black Ops" (a modern DOOM like game) has become the biggest grossing first day release of anything of all time.

We call computer based stuff like that multimedia. I think history has shown that Steve's interpretation of what multimedia was, wasn't correct. Apple for longest time hadn't thought the game market was significant either.

If it had been, would the NeXT Computer still be around? Would many more cool things have been developed, by people that have since been sidetracked posting trivia from their iPhones to Twitter and Facebook?

Sunday, November 14, 2010

ReverbNation Rocks!

MegacurveQuantcast

ReverbNation sets the bar higher for band promotion websites.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Wow, what perseverance and hope!

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Heavy Metal Illustration Demo Reel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YdTtD67twY