singingfish.com and audiofic
I've been sifting through my site statistics lately, and discovered a few hits on some of my audiofic from Singingfish, a fairly new search engine for audio and video media. I have mixed feelings about this.
As a writer of sometimes explicitly sexual fanfiction, I don't want anybody finding my stories unless they are specifically looking for, you know, explicitly sexual fanfiction. I have thought about using robots.txt files and meta tags to ask spiders to not index my site, but I decided against that some time ago because most search terms I see in my referral logs are clearly trying to find the sort of fanfiction on my site, and some are even trying to find my site in particular, and I'm all for that! I do have ICRA and SafeSurf meta tags in the html code for all of my stories that should block them from being viewed by browsers that filter out adult content.
To its credit, Singingfish has a "family filter" that excludes all files on sites that have any adult content as determined by their "semi-automated, rules-based system" - and when I tested it, it indeed excludes my site. My main page URL is given as the source, and in fact it's in the returned title (because I entered my URL as the "album title" when I created the mp3 files), so if anyone checks that out before downloading or streaming, that will give them an idea of what they are in for.
What I really want to do is make it easy for people who find these files through a search engine - or who perhaps saved the files to their computer a long time ago and have just rediscovered them on a hard drive - to find out what they are, who created them, and where they can find them on the net. (This is why, for example, my stories all have titles at the top and my name and the story file URL at the bottom.) Now that Singingfish has begun to index my audiofic, I'm thinking that I need to make some changes to the way I assign metadata so that searches which are actually looking for audiofic will be able to find them, and that people who were looking for far different types of audiofiles will be able to tell that these aren't the files they're looking for. Right now my audiofic is found on a search for 'isis' but not a search for 'fanfiction', for example.
The problem is that audio files have a limited amount of metadata that is propagated through the search engine, and that metadata is structured in a way that makes sense for music tracks, but not necessarily for audiofic. So I need to put some more thought into what I assign to "album title", "artist", "song title" and so on. When I created the files, I put some mp3 metadata in as comments (fandom, pairing, and rating), but that information doesn't show on Singingfish, and in fact it doesn't show to the casual mouseover, or as an available "detail" in a folder listing - I have to actually right-click and view properties to see that. Hmm. Maybe I should make that information the "album title" (which is currently http://isis.arithmancy.net for all of my audiofic files), and fold the URL into "artist" (which is currently Isis).
Ideas? Suggestions? Pointers to other sites which do this in clever ways I should have thought of already?
As a writer of sometimes explicitly sexual fanfiction, I don't want anybody finding my stories unless they are specifically looking for, you know, explicitly sexual fanfiction. I have thought about using robots.txt files and meta tags to ask spiders to not index my site, but I decided against that some time ago because most search terms I see in my referral logs are clearly trying to find the sort of fanfiction on my site, and some are even trying to find my site in particular, and I'm all for that! I do have ICRA and SafeSurf meta tags in the html code for all of my stories that should block them from being viewed by browsers that filter out adult content.
To its credit, Singingfish has a "family filter" that excludes all files on sites that have any adult content as determined by their "semi-automated, rules-based system" - and when I tested it, it indeed excludes my site. My main page URL is given as the source, and in fact it's in the returned title (because I entered my URL as the "album title" when I created the mp3 files), so if anyone checks that out before downloading or streaming, that will give them an idea of what they are in for.
What I really want to do is make it easy for people who find these files through a search engine - or who perhaps saved the files to their computer a long time ago and have just rediscovered them on a hard drive - to find out what they are, who created them, and where they can find them on the net. (This is why, for example, my stories all have titles at the top and my name and the story file URL at the bottom.) Now that Singingfish has begun to index my audiofic, I'm thinking that I need to make some changes to the way I assign metadata so that searches which are actually looking for audiofic will be able to find them, and that people who were looking for far different types of audiofiles will be able to tell that these aren't the files they're looking for. Right now my audiofic is found on a search for 'isis' but not a search for 'fanfiction', for example.
The problem is that audio files have a limited amount of metadata that is propagated through the search engine, and that metadata is structured in a way that makes sense for music tracks, but not necessarily for audiofic. So I need to put some more thought into what I assign to "album title", "artist", "song title" and so on. When I created the files, I put some mp3 metadata in as comments (fandom, pairing, and rating), but that information doesn't show on Singingfish, and in fact it doesn't show to the casual mouseover, or as an available "detail" in a folder listing - I have to actually right-click and view properties to see that. Hmm. Maybe I should make that information the "album title" (which is currently http://isis.arithmancy.net for all of my audiofic files), and fold the URL into "artist" (which is currently Isis).
Ideas? Suggestions? Pointers to other sites which do this in clever ways I should have thought of already?