Final Meta post.

The content on my blog was usually sound, recording or music related. Pictures of equipment, videos of people within the recording industry and personal sound recordings. It’s heavily focused on electronic music of many different genres and just a bit of old funk and soul. I chose those topics as it’s enjoyable for me to blog about my interests. Using the tags on the content I posted helped describe my posts so people were able to arrive there by searching tumblr. I posted a google trends screen capture of ‘Drum and bass’ versus ‘Dubstep’ at one point. In the graph you can see that ‘Dubstep’ as a search term has had at least a 5 fold increase from late 2009 to present which is where I think a lot of hits came from. Just by using that magic word ‘Dubstep’. Very interesting. I have some original content on there as well. Short movies I’ve done sound mixes for and a piece of music made using a toy synth, famous break beat and a computer.

My audience was mostly other tumblr users, 54 visits 35% of the total which is no surprise. I did post my blog URL on my facebook which netted 33 clicks which is 21% overall. 46 people found me directly with a 30% share and 6 clicks from people within the Networked media production class. There were a total of 155 visits and 284 page views to audioand.tumblr.com but I can’t help but think it’s not because of anything I’ve done apart from ‘reblog’ other peoples creativity. It’s not like I’m trying to claim their work or anything, it’s just really odd my blog gets traffic because of other peoples accomplishments that I post about. The most looked at item on the webpage was a picture I posted of an up and coming Dubstep duo called ‘Zeds Dead’ with 32 page views. I’m sure there is a lot of stuff on the net at the moment about them and it shows with their post being the most popular on my blog.

Only had 4 hits from searches using 3 keywords which was interesting. That tells me that either I don’t have enough tags going on or that people just bounce from blog to blog via links rather than searching for what they want. As I said I posted it on facebook once and did get a few hits from doing that, but rather than be that annoying friend I never posted it again. I’m sure by ‘participating’ and posting my URL on facebook again I would get more hits. Makes you think about what Michael said in his lectures about becoming a ‘Participator’ not a ‘Spectator’. You can see in my analytics graphs when I wasn’t posting much and when I was posting content. It’s really easy to see the peaks and troughs.

I understood most of what the tutorials had to explain, even if it was only on a basic level. I understood what CSS is and what is needed to build a theme for a tumblr blog even though I wasn’t fully comfortable doing it myself. I could ‘view page source’ on a webpage and look around the code and work some things out. And that’s the reason why I went with a custom built theme. I may have been able to build and theme from the ground up, but let’s face it, I’m not a coder. Tag clouds were an interesting addition. Dubstep is clearly the most used tag on my blog. Embedding a reddit drum and bass widget was cool too. Lots of awesome tunes have just appeared on my blog because of it. Thanks heaps reddit! I did have some trouble with making my own mashup. I’ve marked out all my map points but when I go to grab the code to embed my map google maps tells me I cannot embed the map. Tells me to turn off google maps labs but I did that. No love.

I must say I did enjoy blogging… blogging other people’s creative works I mean (well not entirely other peoples, I did have a few posts in there)   and it’s inspired me to get creative and go out and ‘participate’ and create.

Thanks for the adventure.