Porpoise Mouth: psychedelic music for body & soul

When asked what his favorite music was, Duke Ellingtonsaid: "There are only two kinds of music. The good and the bad. I like the good." That pretty much covers it. So when I made up a Last FM radio station for psychedelic music, I included the Duke's "Caravan." Huh?

I didn't include the so-called psychedelic classic "My Green Tambourine." Or "If You're Going to San Francisco." Or any other of the nehru-jacket songs that cashed in on the hippie-music craze. Sun Ra sits next to Pink Floyd on my magic bus.

To me, psychedelic music at its best transports listeners to another place, another state of mind. "Discorporate and come with me," Frank Zappa invited us in a song. ("Discorporate means to leave your body.") Zappa wasn't a drug guy, but he made his share of psychedelic music.

This bit of off-topic comes to the blog because I'm building a site about psychedelic music. Of course, I need music and I found it on the Last FM platform, which more or less lets you build your own radio station without worrying about copyright fees.

Many blogs and web sites are including audio and video as a matter of course. When you're starting up a Web project, be sure to ponder how you'll bring multimedia to the site. Before long, text-only sites will be considered quaint, academic, out of touch.

Meanwhile, discorporate and check out my Porpoise Mouth station below. If you'd like to know when porpoisemouth.com goes up, just send me an email.

Starting a blog: What would you do differently?

A lot of bloggers vamp on this topic: What would I do differently if I were able to go back and start my blog again? Here's my take on the occasion of my 50th post here:

A couple of things come to mind, such as getting control of my domains/URLs and keeping them straightforward instead of having TypePad or Blogger in the mix.

I do appreciate both of these services, but think I'd have been better off on the bigger sites using WordPress and a host. Seth Grodin, who writes one of the world's top blogs on TypePad, has said the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of TypePad. Just wish it was free.

WordPress brings its own set of problems and certainly throws up barriers for bloggers who aren't tech savvy. When asked for advice these days, I recommend Blogger for personal/hobby blogs; TypePad for non-tech people who want to build some kind of active business blog; and WordPress for those comfortable with, say, FTP and HTML. CSS helps a lot.

With TypePad you get tired of hearing, "It doesn't do that like that." Blogger just doesn't do that. With WordPress, you get tired of figuring out how to do that.

I just updated my Download Movies 101 blog to the latest WordPress, quite the adventure, only because I spaced one freaking detail. That's the thing with WordPress -- make an error, pay the price. I didn't find the help forums any help. Just kept trying to figure it out until I did. Took three days. Learned a lot while clanging around, though.

On TypePad, there's great tech support and an even better auto-help. Blogger is so simple, it's tough to screw up.

Back to doing things over: I started my DVD blog without giving the content's structure much thought. Made up categories as I needed them. Ended up with a rat's nest that had to be blowtorched.

Darren over at ProBlogger just posted a handy "mindmap" that should prevent this sort of thing. Self-explanatory, simple, essential. Don't forget the part about writing series.

Anything else? Oh yeah, I'd have read more blogs about blogging. Starting with this one. (Say what?)

Email newsletters: the old in-and-out

I wake up screaming. In fear of smothering in email news updates. I use RSS as well, but find that it's easier to prioritize, file and dump content pushed to my incoming email box.

Aside from the newspapers -- New York Times, L.A. Times -- I'm on the receiving end of something like two dozen SEO-related newsletters.

A client once asked which SEO books I'd read while learning that voodoo. Well, there were a couple of books (good and bad) but the nature of SEO is right here and right now. And so every day, the mailbox groans under the wisdom of the SEO elite.

These email provide an excellent alternative activity to writing. All writers have cherished ways of dodging that blank screen. This is my No. 1. Convinced myself that "ongoing education" in SEO must eat up at least 90 minutes a day. Good for the clients, bad for the blogs.

New law: If a new email product comes in, one must go out.

IN: SearchCap: Outstanding roundup of posts about "what happened in search today as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web." Easy format: Homegrown stories up top with heds and blurbs, then categorized headlines below. I head straight for the "Searching" and "SEO & SEM" listings, skimming over a lot of links in categories such as "Paid Search & Contextual" and "Local Maps & Local." A terrific free service from Search Engine Land, which just celebrated its first anniversary. Happy birthday to them.

OUT: Copyblogger: I've been reading this popular blog since midsummer and have tired of trying to figure out why it's popular. To be fair, I'll say several posts have been quite good, including this one about writing and fear: The Nasty Four-Letter Word That
Keeps You From Writing. I'm not in the target audience, which seems to be wannabe ad copywriters and marketers. Copyblogger's content soon came to grate on me -- lame link-bait headlines and too many watery posts by guest bloggers. The blog clearly is bigger and more useful than Write for Blogs (a leisurely side project for me), and it just might provide inspiration and illumination for you. (If so, here's hoping for a quick graduation.) Whatever. I'm putting a -30- on that clutter.