Fun With Search Engines...

For a multiplicity of reasons, I've been running a lot of tests on search engine results. Last night, just out of curiosity to see what actually got the best Google rankings (at least at that moment in time), I did a Google search on "vampire." Not surprisingly, that term returned 39,400,000 hits. I wanted to see, first, what a person who typed "vampire" into Google would immediately be presented with; and second, how close to the top any "real vampire" sites were, and which sites were top rated. What I saw was...interesting.

The top-rated Google site for "vampire" is the Wikipedia page with that name, dealing with vampire folklore. Next came Vampire Wine, which I believe is the old domain that used to be Pathway to Darkness, and hence may be riding on that now long-vanished site's extensive linkage and popularity. Then VampireRave.com, which is a commercial Goth/punk site aimed at Lifestylers and vampire fans more than vampiric people. Then came the two main pages for Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: Requiem at White Wolf Games. Then the Skeptic's Dictionary page on "vampire," which links Sanguinarius.org and Dr. Elizabeth Miller's Dracula page. A technical page was number 7, then VampireFreaks.com, which is a very disturbing site. 9th and 10th on the first page of hits were Sanguinarius.org and Temple of the Vampire. So, two "real vampire" sites appeared among the first 10 hits.

The second page started with two gaming sites, "the vampire random name generator" and the "vampire" section in the site "How Stuff Works," titled "How Vampires Work." This is kind of sketchy, and has a handful of links that need updating. (Among other things, it links a page on this site that is no longer there.) But the fifth entry, the vampire section on Monstrous.com, is a candidate for my Hall of Shame--it's entirely plagiarized! I started to read it and immediately recognized big chunks of text from my old "Human Living Vampires" articles and from Sanguinarius' site, all just jumbled together without attribution or credit. The whole section consists of unashamedly ripped off material. The rest of the page was technical sites, gaming sites, and VampireMeetups.com.

The technical sites are intriguing. There seems to be a trend to name technical products, businesses or projects "vampire" something. There was "Vampire, an extension module for mod_python," "Net Vampire, a file download manager," "VAMPIRE--Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval," and "Vampire Wire," an online store for cables and wiring.

The third page of Google hits included Damien Deville's organization The Vampire Church, and one of my friend Bev's articles on vampire myths. It also contained Vampire Wear, the IMDb page for "John Carpenter's Vampires," a gaming site, a photographer's gallery site, the spoof website "Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency," and the website for the band Vampire Weekend.

And so it went, for pages and pages. Very few serious information sites or real vampire sites appeared among the top, say, 200. Obviously, anyone running a Google search on just the word "vampire" is going to have a hard time finding much information of substance--and not because the information isn't on the 'Net. But Google's method of ranking sites is not angled toward returning the highest quality material. Apparently, it's related primarily to the number of links a site has from other "important" websites.

The results from the same search on Yahoo! are entirely different. Yahoo! returns far more hits, 54,100,000, to start with. The first site on the list is Vampires Among Us, followed by Vampires Only, Dr. Miller's Dracula Page, Sanguinarius.org, Beverly Richardson's Vampire's Vault, and Vampyres Online. By Light Unseen is number 11, top of the second page, and with the correct name. Google still lists us as "Living Vampires," which hasn't been the site's name since 2002. (It still comes up if you Google By Light Unseen, however). Unfortunately, Yahoo! also returns Monstrous.com on the first page of hits, so I really will be contacting Monstrous about their little copyright problem. But the bottom line is: Yahoo! returns a much more substantial assortment of websites at the top of a simple keyword search than Google does.

"Angel"--the story continues:

On the heels of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" comics (or graphic novel) series, Joss Whedon is producing a comics series picking up the plotline of "Angel" after the television series finale's cliffhanger ending.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2007/09/return-of-the-v.html?csp=34

I'm tempted to say something about a line drawing of David Boreanaz having more range than the actor does...but I'll be nice. There are some sample pages of the comic available on Ain't It Cool News, it looks quite handsomely done.

"Paper Sang" posting on YouTube

I discovered via the VCMB messageboard that a person going by the name of LilyCerise is posting a series of short, very simple videos (they're sort of like animated Power Point presentations really--the author does not appear in them) about "True Vampirism" on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/LilyCeriseShe also has a "True Vampirism" Wiki page at http://truevampires.wetpaint.com/?t=anon. Being a "Wetpaint Wiki," anyone who registers with Wetpaint can contribute to the page.

I am kind of curious as to who LilyCerise actually is--links on the Wiki page so far include Sanguinarius.org, the House Kheperu site and Darkness Embraced. The information that LilyCerise gives in her videos is consistent with that on dozens of realvamp websites, and except for her promotion of the "psi-feeding" or "energy feeding" illusion, I see no problems with it. Some people on the VCMB seem to be concerned about LilyCerise "acting as a spokesperson" which I don't think she's doing any more than anyone else on the 'Net. After all, if it wasn't for the people like Sangi, Sphynxcat, M&D, Saras, LadyCG and me who have been maintaining websites and forums, even publishing books, for all these years, none of those folks on the VCMB would even be there.

I'm darned if I know what the nickname "Paper Sang" refers to, though!

Blood drinker achieves international fame!

International newswires have been carrying this item:

"Vampire" arrested for stealing and drinking blood at hospital

I wonder if this fellow even knew what he was drinking, or if he was so drunk, he thought they were shooters of something? I certainly hope the female patient wasn't being tested for something really nasty...

Mortal Touch, the first novel from By Light Unseen Media, has just "hit the street" as they say in the biz--well, it's hit my kitchen floor, anyway, five boxes full, many of which are now going out for reviews, complimentary copies, copyright registration, the Library of Congress, award competitions and what have you. But we have two positive mentions online to announce right now.

The Self Pub News blog and online newsletter has just posted an announcement for Mortal Touch. You can view it at http://smallpress.typepad.com/selfpubnews/.

Author and vampire scholar Margaret L. Carter, who kindly gave me a cover blurb for Mortal Touch, posted a very favorable review in the May issue of her online newsletter, "News from the Crypt." Click the link and scroll down a little to read the review. You can subscribe to this e-newsletter via Ms. Carter's website or read it online. Thank you, Margaret!

From Shadowed Shelves bookstore has been updated for the summer--we are now up to an incredible 552 titles, even without subsidy press books, "Buffy" tie-in books, gaming books and YA or juvenile fiction. I remain mystified at the drop-off in bookstore traffic and sales, however--feedback welcomed, if anyone has ideas about this.

Bookstore updated for the holiday season

I've completed an update of the From Shadowed Shelves online bookstore, just in time for the holiday season. I caught a few errors and typos left over from the major re-design I did at the beginning of September, and I hope there are none left now. If anyone notices a problem with the bookstore, do send me a note about it at realvamp[at]net1plus.com. There are 34 new titles added, including both of Charlie Huston's novels, Already Dead and No Dominion, and Practical Vampyrism for Modern Vampyres by Lady CG. Enjoy browsing!

I should have continued making posts here, but I've been more in an information-collecting stage--and the holidays have intervened.

I'm doing a lot of research and information-gathering for the articles which will be the next major additions to the website content. These have been planned for a very long time and I'm finally getting to them.

I've been reading other websites and message boards, as well, catching up on discussion topics and opinions and reviews after my long period of time being less connected to the OVC and its doings. There hasn't been a dramatic change in the basic outlook of self-identified vampires since the 2000 psi-vamp/sanguin schism. But there are two very noticeable changes since then: the explosion of the "Otherkin" communities, which in 2000 was barely getting started, and the much greater overlap with the VC and Pagan/Wiccan/Witchcraft/Magickal topics, which in 2000 was far less evident. Both of these may be related directly to the ascendency of the psi-vamp identification in the VC as a whole. Whatever is behind it, it's now more common for messageboards to include forums for these categories than not.

I posed a question on the Smoke & Mirrors messageboard, asking anyone who had let a vampire-themed website lapse in the past, why they didn't keep up their website. No one replied, suggesting that people who let websites lapse also stop participating in the community (not that the whole world is on Smoke & Mirrors, but Sanguinarius is moving her forums to a new server and they're currently on hold). I remain curious about all the vanished websites, though. Where did they go, and why? Even among the sites still running, a significant minority of them have obviously not been updated or changed for years.

Anyone who hasn't filled out the Atlanta Vampire Association's VEWRS and AVEWRS surveys, should do that: they need to be done by December 31st.

I lied...

...now I've got the flippin' template straightened out.

I've revised the site banner, so if anyone reading this has a copy of it on their site for a banner list or exchange, you'll need to download the new version. I'll try to contact site owners individually, but I'm not sure where all copies of the banner are.

I'm having an interesting "trip down Memory Lane" as I review materials and assemble notes for some of the content that will be going up in the near future. Where, oh where is the "Vampire Community" hiding out these days? I've applied to a couple of webrings, pending approval from their mods. I've added a couple of sites to the links pages.

If anyone would like to suggest a site of their own that I've missed, contact me at realvamp[at]net1plus.com.

I finally got the template straightened out--it's probably working better than I deserve, given the seat-of-the-pants hatchet job I did slapping it together. I do appreciate the flexibility that Blogger.com gives users in customizing their blogs. Other blog servers make you pay for anything approaching it.

I've made some more updates to the links pages. I've added this site to the Occult 100 Topsites list, so go to the Search & Topsites page and vote for it, if you're so inclined. I've added the Site Mission Statement and a few odds and ends. Much more content to come!

And we have a launch!

Version 4.0 of By Light Unseen is now online and running! There's much more to come, and some tweaking to do with this blog's format and the links pages, but at least there are no more broken or outdated links on the site. I hope that people will be able to find the bookstore more easily; I've replaced the old store main page and Resources page with blank pages that automatically forward to the new store, in case people had those specific pages bookmarked and were getting lost. Woof, what a job! I've spent the last three days doing almost nothing else!

Still tweaking the blog format

I've been working for a couple of hours on this blog, trying to get the formatting to match the rest of the pages. While I'm certainly pleased to have gotten the background graphics and header and nav bar to work, the problems with the text column being on the left and the text centered inside the column continue to baffle me. I was probably rather reckless in how I shredded the template, but I'll keep working on it.