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2whatcom-blog · 6 years ago

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Machines Can Create Artwork, however Can They Jam

Because the CTO of an utilized pc imaginative and prescient firm, I spend the majority of my time overseeing and honing full-stack AI setups that make use of neural networks and pc imaginative and prescient algorithms to establish and analyze the content material of photos and footage. In my spare hours, I play the sax with my jazz quintet, buying and selling off solos, jams and improvisations with the opposite musicians. It is a course of filled with emotion, surprises and communication. I've at all times seen it as a distinctly human enterprise--one impervious to expertise's usurping ambition. Certainly, for a very long time I noticed AI's viability solely via the lens of its utilitarian benefits. The latest deluge of experiments involving neural networks and creativity--everything from writing poetry and designing mid-century furnishings to producing intentionally non-derivative work and creating runway fashions--has began to vary my view. It has made me wonder if the identical method might be utilized to jazz--and to what finish? Was there any profit to creating an AI robotic, program or agent that's able to passing a jazz Turing take a look at, and is that even conceivable with at present's AI cutting-edge? I researched the subject and spoke with specialists on the nexus of AI and music from academia and enterprise, in addition to with a few of my fellow musicians. Here is what I discovered. Some Music Genres Lend Themselves Higher to AI than Do Others A lot has already been accomplished on the intersection of AI and music technology. Tech giants corresponding to Microsoft, Google, IBM Watson and Sony, together with startups corresponding to Aiva and Amper, have commercially obtainable expertise and companies round AI-generated music. Final summer season, YouTube star Taryn Southern launched I'm AI, an album that was created with the assistance of instruments and expertise from Aiva, Amper, Microsoft and IBM. Likelihood is that a few of the soundtracks you hear in shops, elevators, infomercials and video video games is AI-composed. Some is carried out dwell by orchestras from AI-created scores and preparations. Some is in-studio manufacturing fashion of pop music spewed in ultrapolished type immediately from a pc itself. Regardless of a number of human-intervened exceptions, what you in all probability will not hear in these venues and platforms is AI-generated jazz. That is considerably stunning for the reason that typically sudden end result of algorithms would appear to lend itself to the style's improvisatory nature. Then once more, as any skilled jazz musician or membership proprietor can attest, jazz tends to be a labor of affection for performers. It serves an fanatic area of interest viewers. And it could hardly be anticipated to draw the form of enterprise urgency that auto-soundtracking YouTube content material and video video games does. However there are different challenges as effectively. How Deep Is Your Studying? DeepJazz is a 2016 mission by Princeton pc science scholar Ji-Sung Kim that spews out piano solo variations on Pat Metheny's "And Then I Knew." The mannequin was created utilizing the unique Pat Metheny monitor MIDI file as the info supply, the Keras and Theano machine studying APIs, and a long-term brief reminiscence (LTSM) recurrent neural community. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are well-liked in at present's AI composition as a result of they study from earlier enter by looping and thus backpropagate on the fly. That stated, conventional RNNs are likely to solely work with brief musical phrases. If you happen to're composing something longer than a ringtone, LTSMs come into play as a result of they're capable of have interaction extra reminiscence and work over the course of a whole track, tackling the general construction, verses, bridges, refrains and so forth. With slightly extra finessing of tempo and dynamics, the expansive melodies and hopping chord progressions that DeepJazz produces might actually go for the actual factor should you heard them on the radio, within the grocery store, or on maintain with customer support. But when offered as a pc or human Turing take a look at question--i.e. was this track created by a human or a machine?--maybe not a lot. Because it was solely skilled on a single track, DeepJazz's output can solely ever produce outcomes that sound just like that one track. What's extra, the output reduces the unique guitar, bass, drums and keyboard instrumentation to only piano. Producing improvs from the unique track, with its authentic instrumentation, can be a way more complicated enterprise. In any case, there is a large distinction between the mounted notes of a piano and the extra malleable prolonged tones of the opposite devices usually related to jazz, corresponding to trumpet, trombone and saxophone. "The thing that makes wind instruments so hard for computers is that you're pumping energy into them all the time, so you have continuous control and jazz players are free to use that control very expressively," says Carnegie Mellon pc science professor Roger Dannenberg, who additionally performs jazz trumpet. "It's not just figuring out what notes to play, but how to play them. You have almost infinite flexibility over vibrato, bending the pitch, and even producing sounds that instruments such as piano simply aren't capable of." Stay Aids Past timbre, dwell efficiency with AI "musicians" brings different challenges. No matter musical style, the advert hoc, real-time communication that takes place between musicians through the collective improvisation of dwell jams merely is not there but between machines and people. The acoustics of a room or efficiency venue that have an effect on sound, the vitality of the viewers and, after all, the visible cues shared between musicians can't be accounted for by any present expertise. It could require refined audio recognition that permits machines to listen to and interpret the opposite devices, superior pc imaginative and prescient to choose up on assorted and refined visible cues, and a few option to sign and talk with the human musicians--all synced up with a real-time improvisatory algorithm. The computing energy alone required to assist these operations can be staggering. A lot research--from a robotic marimba to a Nintendo Wii-activated bebop improvisation generator to present music software program mash-ups able to robotic call-and-response solos with human musicians--has been accomplished on this space, however nothing but pulls collectively the common or common AI equal of a worthwhile human jazz musician. It Do not Imply a Factor if it Ain't Bought That Swing Given a few of the analysis and experiments round artwork created with neural networks skilled on present masterpieces, I usually surprise if the identical could be completed with the music of legendary jazz musicians. Is it potential to recreate the superfast virtuosic bebop jazz solos of Charlie Parker or the minimalist precision of Rely Basie's piano and band? Charlie Parker did play notes, so a few of his tunes have been transcribed into sheet music and MIDI already, and a few even fed to deep studying algorithms. However that is nonetheless not sufficient coaching knowledge to output new Charlie Parker solos carried out by machines in ways in which can be compelling and Turing test-proof. Although instruments exist to parse out particular person instrument tracks from songs, they aren't but adequate to untangle recordings of dwell exhibits, which represent a big portion of a jazz nice's oeuvre. "That's another big signal processing and machine learning problem that's a very active area of research, but it's not a solved problem," says Dannenberg. And that is not even taking into consideration subtleties of tempo, timbre, dynamics, stress, launch, drama and storytelling which might be distinctive to every dwell efficiency and recording. You'd in all probability have to create your individual knowledge set from scratch: Get new jazz musicians to play every instrument in each potential Charlie Parker- or Rely Basie-like approach after which prepare algorithms on these recordings. That method is just like what Amper Music has accomplished for different musical genres. It is too late to get customized samples from Parker or Basie themselves, however not so for Joshua Redman or Kamasi Washington. Consider it as movement seize for audio. Do We Want AI Jazz? For now, a few of the most promising analysis utilizing AI and jazz is that underway on the Protection Superior Analysis Tasks Company (DARPA), which is growing jazz-playing robots to review and advance communication between people and machines, one thing that might be as helpful on stage or at a freeway exit clogged with merging autonomous vehicles as it's on the battlefield. When it comes to AI-generated music, that also appears higher suited to extra musical-score-based genres corresponding to film and classical music, or extremely produced and sometimes synthesized and sample-heavy pop music. I am additionally interested in AI and jazz just because it will be helpful to sometime have an on-demand musical accomplice to jam with in a seamlessly lifelike approach any time of the day or night time, not only for pure enjoyment, but additionally for studying. In any case, how significantly better might music college students hone their abilities if they'd AI-based lecturers that might present instruction and suggestions on their enjoying anytime? It could be a boon to music training and make follow much more sensible. We're nonetheless a approach off from both providing. We nonetheless do not have the slightest concept how you can get these jazz AI musicians to have the ability to both play with or detect the presence of "swing," "emotion" and "soul." Extra importantly, can they improvise--zigging when conventional coaching and music idea would have them zag? As my band's drummer places it: "If you're talking about live improvisation, that gets to the ultimate core of what AI is. That's like having a relationship. It has to be 100 percent real." Ken Weiner on sax with a small jazz ensemble. Credit score: Cambron Carter. Regardless of the world's present love affair with machine studying, it might not be the ultimate method for AI-generated music. "Deep learning in jazz has similarly downplayed the crucial rhythmic, timbral, and textural aspects of music," says College of California, San Diego, music professor and saxophonist David Borgo who, moreover being my pal, additionally wrote an interesting chapter in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Research on improvisation and computer systems. "Research in this area has tended to focus on getting computers to play the 'right notes,' but we are still a long way from designing systems capable of the micro and macro temporal, timbral and textural adjustments necessary to groove together and to develop high-level collective improvisation in an unscripted fashion with human musicians (rather than insisting that human musicians improvise with, or groove to, the computer)." In different phrases, even when I'm fortunate to someday get a robo-Charlie Parker on-demand bandmate, it is nonetheless prone to be a one-sided expertise till we get to the holy grail of human-level common AI. Read the full article

#2what.com #ai #computer #improvisation #jazz #learning #musicians #play

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frederator-studios · 7 years ago

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Meet Joel Veitch and David P. Shute, Creators of “Kid Arthur”

From the dawning of 2000 AD - when Adobe Systems first pulled Flash from the Software Stone - British animators Joel Veitch and David Shute have crafted absurd and iconic web comedy for their site, Rather Good. They are bricklayers of our Modern Age of Memes; but beyond builders, they are Wizards of the Web, gracing our desktops with such magic as the Spongmonkeys and Punk Kittens Play ‘Fell in Love With a Girl’ by the White Stripes, memes that thrived even in the dark ether of the pre-YouTube web. Frederator is honored to have aided in their maturity into long-form content, heralded by the release of their GO! Cartoon, “Kid Arthur,” which comes in at a whopping 5 minutes and 40 seconds long. Joel, David and I sat about a round table to discuss out-of-control saxophonists, dial-up modems, and wizard cats of great Magick.

So how did you each find your way into animation?

JV: We were both already in animation when we met, weren’t we David? DS: I was fairly newly graduated at the time. I studied animation at Uni - Southampton University - and was doing adverts for a while before I met Joel. JV: I started off more on the web comedy side, and drifted into animation when I began learning Flash in the early 2000s. I soon realized that my heart lay with that more than anything else. I made a couple of things that did alright and it became possible to do it for a living… so yeah, I kind of fell into animation by accident, but loved it once I’d discovered it.

How did you guys meet?

JV: I had an office, which I was sharing with some people, who were making a video which was never released. It was... all copies were ordered destroyed.(they start laughin’) They were doing it for a client! Which turned out to be just so... completely insane. DS: It was a stop motion cartoon, and the idea was to parody something, but it was…. they gave… no I won’t say it, I won’t - (Joel is cracking up) They gave us the brief to be as offensive as possible with it. So me and another animator, we just went to town, made it. It was monstrous. It never got released, and that’s a very good thing. JV: I saw it through production and it blew my mind. Of course it never saw the light of day. But I was so completely overwhelmed by what I had witnessed being made that I asked David to come team up with me, and we’ve been a brothership ever since.

What did you guys first work on together?

JV: I still do a bit, but at the time I was doing a lot of comedy music. So we made a load of animated videos for the songs. For our own projects, that was kind of the bread and butter of what we collaborated on.

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What did the comedy music entail?

JV: Well the not-full-band stuff we did as Rather Good; often just guitar and singing. But I'm also the singer of a 7 piece ska band called 7 Seconds Of Love, and we did live gigs, which was a lot of fun. We still gig, if the events are big enough—but it’s tougher now that some bandmates have moved from London.

Any legendary comedy music gig stories?

JV: If I had to choose one… it’d be the time Chaynsaw climbed the lighting rig.

We all have band names: I’m Stallion Explosion, The Bearslayer is bassist, Chaynsaw is the saxophonist, and so on. One night we were playing at quite a big venue in London; large stage, gallery seating, and there was a huge lighting rig that went all the way to the ceiling. During the song “Ninja”, Chaynsaw flipped out. He took a running jump and flew over the barriers and into the crowd, disappearing in a pile of flailing bodies. He ran through the crowd to the back and began climbing up the scaffolding of the lighting rig like some kind of crazed sax-wielding gibbon. Up and up all the way to the gods, as the crowd went crazy and we wondered whether we were about to witness his death. When he reached the gods, he climbed over onto the balcony and sprinted out of sight. The crowd was going wild. They thought the stunt was part of the show but we had no idea what he was playing at. The song approached Chaynsaw's solo, with no sign of him. I assumed he had run off into the night, probably bellowing "CHAYNSAAAAAW!" and wielding his saxophone. However, just at the exact moment his solo began, he came barrelling out from backstage at full speed, skidded to a halt at the front of the stage and blasted out a storming solo. The crowd went crazy: they thought it was the best bit of showmanship they’d ever seen. But it was a fluke. He'd just run headlong through random passages and stairwells backstage until he’d burst out on to the stage at the exact right moment. It was a triumph. Nobody need ever know that it was a suicidally dangerous lunatic episode. My lips are sealed.

Yes, clearly. So Rather Good’s animations pre-date YouTube?

JV: Oh, pre-YouTube, yeah. You couldn’t really do video in those days because you didn’t have the bandwidth to do it, which was why Flash was so popular. You had to keep projects down to a couple of megabytes, very small files. Everyone was on dial-up modems.

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(Rather Good’s highly educational vid about the history of the world wide web)

Wild. Was your goal to just have fun, or did you have an online audience in mind while making things?

JV: Historically they’ve been a way to entertain ourselves, at least primarily. On the basis that if you’re making something fun, that you enjoy making, then it’s more likely to be interesting and enjoyable out in the world. If you over-analyze it, you end up with something that doesn’t work very well; that’s how bad comedy gets written.

So what was it like, helping to build meme culture from the ground up… rewarding?

JV: Ha, yeah... it’s a fascinating and evolving world, isn’t it? And it’s changing so much and so fast it’s just… it’s almost difficult to put into words, the sheer magnitude of it. DS: You couldn’t really imagine this ecosystem now, 20 years ago. It would sound insane. JV: I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that the big hit was a mini track with a bunch of animated gifs of hamsters. DS: A 4 second loop of a CGI baby dancing... JV: God, and do you remember the crazy frog? DS: Oh God… yeah. JV: (laughing) It’s come a long way, and that’s a good thing. And it’s not just a technological thing is it, there’s really important stuff about the way that it’s opened up… I used to say “democratization of creativity,” which is a slightly overblown way of just saying it’s much easier for people to get stuff out in the world than it used to be. There was a system of gatekeepers in place that was very difficult to get past, until a little before YouTube. That system is bypassed now, it doesn’t really have the power anymore to dictate what makes it onto TV and hence into the popular consciousness. That’s now distributed out into the world. Which is good, although there’s a new dictator now, isn’t there? The algorithms. But that’s a different sort of thing.

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(“We Like the Moon,” an ancient and powerful Rather Good meme. So revered that Quiznos used it to sell subs, in a commercial that you may, like me, vaguely remember as a fever dream from your adolescence)

Our strange new reality. Have you guys done much in the traditional kids space in the UK, with CBBC or CITV or others?

JV: We haven’t done much of anything in kids—most of what we’ve done for telly has been in the adult realm. One of our motivations for “Kid Arthur” and some other projects is getting to focus on character and narrative. Because for a long, long time, we’ve done short form - proper short form, often a minute or less long - and that’s fun, but you don’t get the opportunity to really develop character and story in those. It’s just gags. DS: That’s what’s been so fun about “Kid Arthur”: being able to actually build characters with a relationship between them, and have the space to explore that and the outer world.

So how did you guys come up with “Kid Arthur”?

JV: We’ve both always loved the Arthurian legends, fantasy worlds, Tolkien’s writing. It’s been a big part of our... cultural space, if you know what I mean? It feels like it’s been more ‘everywhere’ than ever in the last couple of years, since The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Game of Thrones and everything - everybody’s all about swords and dragons these days, which is fun. We’d talk about King Arthur and he’d pop up in conversation a lot, and we thought it’d be hilarious to put him and Mordred as kids in a modern day school.

So is the rest of Arthur and Mordred’s world totally normal, and no one notices that these kids are summoning dragons and crazy shiz?

DS: Absolutely, they’re clueless. JV: It’s too out there for people to process. DS: I think they’re aware on some dim level, but their minds are totally unable to process or comprehend it.

(Poor, sweet, unknowing ‘Miss’)

When did you guys decide to pitch to Frederator, and what stage of development was “Kid Arthur” in?

DS: It was still pretty early on when we pitched it. JV: I met Carrie Miller in London a while ago now, at an animation event. And we talked about how we ought to pitch something to you guys. So we’d been thinking about what we could do with Frederator specifically, and “Kid Arthur” felt like the right fit.

Who do you each relate to the most between Mordred or Arthur?

DS: That’s pretty obvious isn’t it? I’m definitely Arthur. (note: David voices Arthur. Meanwhile, Joel is cracking up) JV: But this is the thing though isn’t it, part of the joy of the character, is that Arthur, he’s a kind of all-conquering heroic warrior, but he’s got Dave’s personality here, you know? He’s kinda like “Sighhhh… oh God. He’s trying to destroy me again, isn’t he”. DS: Yeaaah. JV: And I very much relate to Mordred. (Joel voices Mordred)

Oh gosh, really? How so?

JV: Well, he’s an extension of my own character to a certain extent. I’m not painting a very nice picture of myself there, am I? I mean, he’s not totally evil - he’d be gutted if he ever did destroy Arthur. That’s key to it, isn’t it? DS: Oh yeah. He’d be bereft. JV: Utterly bereft.

Have you guys been developing your ideas for a full series?

DS: We’ve talked about it quite a lot. JV: There’s a whole expanded world that we couldn’t really fit into a 5 minute short, and more characters: Guinevere - DS: Merlin - JV: Merlin as a cat! He’s the most powerful wizard in the universe. But he’s also a cat, so he tends to use his awesome power to do stuff like magic up fish heads. DS: He’s not a super intelligent cat, mind you, just a standard cat. With great magic. JV: And there’s all the knights of the round table, the witches, the Lady of the Lake. There’s this pre-existing structure from legend of all of these quests, and it’s all just ripe to be transplanted into a little town, where it exists slightly below the surface, manifesting in, you know, neighborhood parks and ponds. DS: We really love this idea that Arthur and Mordred’s battle is this ageless, epic struggle between good and evil. It’s been going on in some form or another for thousands of years, and will continue until the apocalypse. So the notion that there’s all these artifacts and characters from this enormous mythology in this modern town, largely unnoticed by everyone else—that’s exciting to us.

How has reading about Arthurian legend played a role in development?

DS: The great thing about Arthurian legend is that there are several classical texts, and they all contradict each other. Even the relationship between Arthur and Mordred shifts around quite a lot. So there’s so much within range that we can play with, and select whatever fits our world best. JV: We realized early on, that with other historical characters - say Henry VIII - there’s a very firm history of who they were, a definite character that you can research. But with these guys... you know, whether or not there was a genuine historical figure who was the genesis of these tales, when you really drill into it, it’s mystic. There’s nothing definite in this history to grab hold to - or be beholden to. The variation is part of the fun of the idea.

How do you guys usually divvy up your work?

DS: We write collaboratively; we get together and bash out words. I take the lead on the art side, things like character designs and boards. Joel more on things like sound and foley, and general managing of projects, and you know, talking to people. I’m far more happy when I’m kind of locked away and not having to talk with anyone. JV: He’s happy to not deal with actual humans.

Do you guys always pitch together, or David do you prefer to sit that out?

DS: We normally get together for that kind of thing. But Joel usually says about 20 words for my 1 word, which is fine with me. JV: We’re pretty evenly split today aren’t we David? DS: Yeah, not so bad.

What are your favorite cartoons?

JV: Battle of the Planets! DS: Yeah, we like the 80s cartoons: Ulysses 31 I really loved as a kid. It was absurdly bleak. A guy and his son drifting through deep space, encountering depressing, frightening worlds… the whole thing was a bit hopeless. Which 8 year old me really enjoyed. JV: There was a show called The Trap Door which was fantastic. Claymation show - I presume that it never aired in the states, which is a shame because it’s wonderful, truly wonderful. And Danger Mouse is a favorite, always great. DS: There’s a couple more grown up things, like Venture Bros. - JV: - Adventure Time! DS: Of course, yeah. JV: And there’s some proper adult animation being made at the moment which is lovely. We both love Archer. And Rick and Morty is obviously what it is, it’s incredible.

Any last thoughts to share with the Frederator audience?

JV: I’d just like to say how grateful we are to Frederator for helping us realize our vision for “Kid Arthur,” and exactly as we envisioned it. Working with a lot of studios can feel like you’re smashing through a brick wall with your face; and you come out of it with a product that isn’t really what you wanted to create in the first place. But “Kid Arthur” has been our baby, and we were paired with an incredible team of people to help us bring it to life. Just thinking about how much we learned from Larry (Huber, the director)... it’s incredible. It has been lovely working with Frederator. DS: Throughout the whole process, it’s been really nice. That’s so rare. JV: I wouldn’t even say rare, David! It’s unique. It’s absolutely unique. So we’re thankful.

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Thanks for the great chat, Joel and David! I’ll be staying abreast of your Rather Good content - especially since I think a lot of it has been swimming around my subconscious mind for years. Excited to see what you guys do next!

- Cooper

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jacobjones2110 · 6 years ago

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History of SEO

SEO, as we all know, is a vast, constantly-evolving field of digital marketing that strengthens brand voice, and boosts website traffic and ROI (return on investment). Its inexpensive yet highly effectual nature has led to its increased use by search marketing professionals who are up to speed with the latest happenings in the field. However, seldom does one wonder about how it all began. Although there is no concrete literature pointing to a specific time when SEO first came into existence, most industry experts believe that it all started in 1991. We have come a long way since, with huge, swanky websites crowding the internet and clamouring for attention from users. Add to this the ever-changing ways of search engines and the result is a quantum shift in the way online search works. This in turn has led to the evolution of search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques over the years. If you have forever been curious about what search marketing experts did differently back in the day, read on for a quick trip down the SEO memory lane.

The Birth of the Internet

The number of internet users has skyrocketed in the past few years and is increasing every single day. Users are constantly searching for all the information they need through various devices, and search engines are pulling out all the stops to provide them with the most relevant, contextual results. But have you ever wondered when and how it all began? Remote computers could connect over basic telephone lines with the AT&T commercial modem that was launched in 1958. This was the most nascent form of the internet, with the term ‘internet’ being coined much later in December 1974.

The Very First Search Engines

With time came a barrage of online information that needed to be organised and indexed in an efficient way so that its retrieval was uncomplicated and useful. Although Dr. Vannevar Bush, the Office of Scientific Research and Development’s director in the USA, had conceptualised a directory or database for the world’s data in 1945, it was not until 1990 that the first search engine, Archie, was invented by Alan Emtage. It was born out of a school project and indexed FTP (File Transfer Protocol) files based on text.

The discovery of a few other early search engines is as described below:

Archietext was created by a group of six Stanford University students in February 1993. It later evolved into the search engine, Excite, which was officially introduced in 1995. It worked by sorting online information/content based on the keywords found in it.

The World Wide Web Wanderer, later called the Wandex, debuted in June 1993 under the leadership of Mathew Grey.

Aliweb was launched in October 1993 by Martijn Koster, and permitted the submission of webpages by their owners.

December 1993 saw the unveiling of three search engines – World Wide Web Worm, RBSE spider and JumpStation– that used web robots to crawl various sites.

1994 was a big year that witnessed the launch of four popular search engines, namely Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos and Infoseek.

AskJeeves was introduced to the world in April 1997 and later came to be known as Ask.com.

The domain Google.com was registered in September 1997.

Google Reigns Supreme

In 1998, Sergei Brin and Lawrence Page, the creators of Google, published a paper titled ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ as part of their research project while studying at Stanford University. In it, they wrote ‘the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.’ This was what many consider a history-making moment as they went on to elaborate on PageRank, a technology that Google employed to judge how relevant a webpage was to a search query and rank it. It is important to note here that it did so based on content quality and not just the search keyword.

Although Yahoo was the result of a campus trailer project by creators David Filo and Jerry Wang, it soon gained prominence for being a directory of useful sites and internet bookmarks. Web publishers would put their webpages up for scrutiny so that it would index them and make them available to searchers everywhere. In 2000, Yahoo committed a strategic blunder by striking up a partnership with Google to manage its organic search. This in turn led to every search result bearing the ‘Powered by Google’ tag, thereby catching the eye of many a Yahoo user. Thus, Yahoo helped Google script its success story by giving it an early launchpad at the turn of the century.

It is important to note here that there were many reasons for Google’s undeniable success. Until 2000, websites were ranked based on many now-archaic and inadequate practices of bread-crumbing (weblinks that indicate your site’s structure), and on-page content, among others. Google, however, analysed on-page and off-page activities side by side before deciding the rank of a webpage in its SERP. SEO professionals around the globe misinterpreted this and considered links to be the end-all of gaining a good spot in Google’s SERPs. Link-building became a rampant black-hat tactic that was addressed by Google in the coming years. The Google Toolbar was launched as an additional feature on the Internet Explorer and showed web publishers their PageRank score, a measure of how important a webpage was.

Besides the aforementioned differentiators that made it a legendary information retriever, Google has always had a reputation for introducing frequent and game-changing updates, the most major of which are the following:

2005’s Jagger update ensured that anchor text was no longer as important a factor in determining a webpage’s rank. It also helped Google make great headway in stemming the exchange of random, unsought links.

2011’s Panda update was introduced to quash the problem of content farms, i.e. websites that churned out poor-quality, unoriginal and auto-generated content and made money from ads. This update deserves special mention as, after many changes over an extended period of time, it was incorporated into Google’s main algorithm.

2012 saw the release of the Penguin update, aimed at tackling dubious, spammy measures that included suspicious linking patterns within websites coupled with anchor text that contained keywords that web publishers intended to rank highly for.

2017’s Big Daddy update shed more light on weblinks and the relationship between sites.

Google’s world dominance has irked many a search competitor throughout its long epoch. Yahoo, not one to stay beaten after the previous debacle of 2000, tried to undo its misstep by collaborating with Microsoft through a ten-year alliance in 2009. In a bid to loosen Google’s grip on approximately 70% of the American search market, Yahoo decided to have its paid and organic search fuelled by Bing, a derivative of Microsoft Live Search. This however did nothing to shake Google’s numero uno status and only strengthened Bing’s position as the second most popular search engine in the world. Additionally, the ten-year Microsoft and Yahoo partnership ended up being revisited midway, after just five years from its start.

We also provide SEO Services.

A Few Important Dates

The evolution of Google gave rise to changes in tactics used by SEO experts around the world to achieve high search rankings. The following are the most landmark moments in the history of SEO:

In 1997, the manager of the Jefferson Starship, a popular rock music band, was not too thrilled that their official website was not ranking on the first SERP. This was when the term ‘search engine optimisation’ was supposedly coined. Alternatively, it is believed that John Audette, the founder of MMG (Multi Media Marketing Group), while meeting with Danny Sullivan to convince him to join his company, first used the term. The latter conceived the idea of Search Engine Watch, an SEO news-provider and trend-spotter. A decade later, he founded the very well-known publication, Search Engine Land, after walking away from Search Engine Watch.

1998 witnessed the birth of Goto.com, which allowed website owners to bid on the space above the organic search results that were generated by Inktomi. These paid search and sponsored links were also shown adjacent to and below the organic search results. Yahoo finally absorbed Goto.com. This was also the year that MSN entered the search arena with MSN Search.

In 1999, the first official search marketing event was conducted as part of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference.

Google took over YouTube in 2006 for billions of dollars. The latter is highly popular with users with more than a billion of them overall. This led to SEO experts delving deep into video optimisation techniques and brands using the video-streaming platform to their advantage to create a strong online voice. Google Webmaster Tools (now called the Google Search Console) and Google Analytics were also launched in the same year, introducing web publishers to a whole new world of possibilities. With them, they could view the search keywords for which their sites ranked highly, errors in crawling or inclusion, user session length, bounce rate and so much more.

In 2000, Google AdWords was launched. This was also a time when webmasters around the world grew accustomed to the ‘Google Dance’, a period in which the search engine would release major updates to its indexing algorithm, leading to many shakeups in search rankings.

In 2003, Google took over Blogger.com and started dishing out contextual Google AdWords ads on various publisher websites through its new service, Google AdSense. Although it shaped the blogger revolution of the early 2000s, this plan of action was not a fool-proof one as many websites with mediocre and sometimes even plagiarised content started mushrooming overnight just to garner AdSense revenue.

In 2004, local search and personalisation became major trends, with search results bearing a geographic intent. Users’ previous search patterns and history coupled with their interests allowed Google to custom-make the SERP for every individual, meaning that two users would not see the same search results even if they had entered the same search query.

In 2005, no-follow tags, meant to push back spammy linking, were invented as a means to better shape PageRank.

2007 saw the birth of Google’s universal search wherein, instead of just plain, blue search results on the SERP, other fascinating features like news, images and videos were also included.

Google Instant was introduced in 2010 – it offered users relevant search query suggestions whenever they would type into the search bar. This was also when Google made it known that the speed of a website was a crucial ranking determinant.

Google’s Knowledge Graph was unveiled in 2012,resulting in a major step forward in understanding search intent. Here, the internet’s billions of websites can serve as Google’s knowledge database from which it draws the most relevant information in the form of knowledge carousels, boxes, etc.

A new Google algorithm update, the Hummingbird, was introduced in 2013 with an intent to redefine natural language or conversational search for mobile devices. This has been hailed as the biggest update to Google’s search algorithm since 2001.

In 2015, the number of mobile-only searchers eclipsed the number of desktop-only users. This was mainly due to the steady climb in mobile phone users who used their smart devices to retrieve useful information while on the move. The availability of robust wireless service providers was another added plus for such people. Thus, Google found it crucial to introduce a search algorithm update that would be mobile-friendly. In the same year, Google acknowledged that RankBrain was a major component of its main search algorithm. It is interesting to note here that this was perhaps the beginning of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) phase for Google as RankBrain uses Machine Learning to understand how it can provide the most relevant search results to user queries.

In 2016, Google launched the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) which instantaneously loaded content. AMPs have been extensively used by media houses.

The Past, Present and Future of SEO

Many search engines have risen and bitten the dust over the years, unlike Google which seems to be going from strength to strength. Here is a comparison of SEO tactics through the ages and the impact they have had on the way search works across devices.

All Hail the King, Content!

While the 1990s saw the mindless stuffing of various important keywords into webpage content coupled with backend optimisation, these techniques soon came to be frowned upon. This was because Google was devising smarter ways to produce genuine, useful and relevant search results. Today, search intent is of top priority, with Google’s latent semantic indexing techniques producing contextually relevant search results based on user search history and preferences, device, location, etc. Images and videos, which were earlier thought to be unimportant, have now gained prominence, with high-quality images and video content helping webpages rank better on Google.

Social Media Marketing

The social media boom took over the internet only towards the early 2000s, gaining momentum as the years swung by. Today, a strategically-placed Facebook or Instagram post can get you an immediate jump in the number of website visitors. Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora have helped boost online sales and create a stronger, clearer brand voice. Even YouTube has now launched a social feature where one can connect with friends and acquaintances on the video-streaming platform. Having a large social media following or being acknowledged by/getting a shout out from those with an army of followers is everything. However, the emphasis on creating engaging, shareable content that is a value-add to various users remains as strong as ever.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence, has only recently emerged as a field of study. It uses data from past experiences or events to recognise patterns and perform various tasks without the need for explicit programming. Sundar Pichai, Google’s current CEO, has laid great emphasis on AI, stating that the search engine will be completely driven by it in the future. While many are opting for digital personal assistants like Alexa of Amazon or Apple’s Siri, chatting through chatbots, searching using images or even videos, the need for intelligent, contextual search is greater than ever before. And this can only happen with the integration of more and more AIML into Google’s core search algorithm.

Mobile Search

In 2015, comScore came out with a report that showed that the number of mobile-only users that had had overtaken the number of desktop-only users. Mobile-first indexing is quickly changing how websites are crawled by Google, with plans of indexing all new websites this way in the near future. Local SEO can help users discover local businesses closest to them. This means that web publishers and developers alike must pay attention to the mobile responsiveness of their website. This is only a recent development as there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of smartphone users in the past few years. In fact, those websites without proper mobile optimisation might experience a decline in their position in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Keywords and Link-building

New search features like Google’s Featured Snippet, Knowledge Graph, etc. have redefined the way information is discovered and used online. They have also given rise to more intense competition among websites to feature in the top spot on the SERP and grab the user’s attention. While SEO was all about focusing on the ranking of a webpage in the past, today, it is about so much more, including how users engage with a brand online. While SEO experts focused on singular keywords and spammy backlinks coupled with increased tagging and comments earlier, now, the onus lies on keyword intent, long tail searches (specific multi-word keyword/search phrases) and quality backlinks founded on relationship building. The birth of the first blogs in the late 1990s is of great significance as popular bloggers have since helped spread the word about new-fangled online businesses of their liking, convincing legions of followers to visit their website with well-placed backlinks inside appealing content.

Also, read about Technical SEO

The Future of SEO

In the past, a single, small search algorithm change would take long to implement, allowing many black-hat SEO techniques to help a webpage’s search rankings. Google is now vastly more vigilant and intelligent, constantly evolving to foster the steady growth of clean SEO tactics. Personalization is the name of the game, with users desiring more contextual, wholesome search results with the least effort from their side. Google might even use external platform data to accomplish this objective, something website owners can prepare for by optimising in-app content to make it more user-friendly and tailored to suit user intent. Google will recognise patterns by accumulating data from different digital platforms and social media channels, making staying consistent across all of them with a single brand voice a wise move. Featuring well-optimised content, especially high-resolution images and videos, across all devices and in all forms (we are talking local search, mobile sites and voice search) is prudent. Reaching out to your customer base for valuable feedback on your online presence and communicating clearly with content creators must be your prerogative.

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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Minecraft: Story Mode?

Minecraft...Story Mode?!

A partnership between Minecraft creator Mojang and The Walking Dead developer Telltale seemed very strange when first announced. Minecraft is a game about creating your own stories by interacting with its procedurally-generated worlds and crafting and building systems, whereas Telltale makes narrative-driven stories centered around pre-authored dialogue and decision trees.

But representatives of the two studios tell Gamasutra that bringing together their starkly different styles for a series episodic adventures was a completely natural move.

The Mojang/Telltale tagteam begins to make more sense when you consider the stories that naturally seem to grow up around Minecraft. There are the hundreds of community-created Minecraft stories posted to YouTube every day, or the Let's Plays that recount a personal quest or adventure. Beyond that, people make short films and machinima with the game, and record songs about their exploits in the game.

"For the last year, we've had a private Telltale Minecraft server, and we've been documenting everything that's been going on in there"

These community stories and the many other ways Minecraft players exhibit creativity in and out of the game were integral to the development of Story Mode. Telltale tried to draw inspiration for characters, places, and plot points from things that happen organically in the community. They didn't just observe, either. They chronicled their own in-game experiences.

"For the last year we've had a specific private Telltale Minecraft server," says Job Stauffer, creative communications director at Telltale. "We've tinkered around in Telltale town and built all kinds of contraptions and buildings, and we've been documenting everything that's been going on in there."

He says that one incident with a chicken machine that went haywire even made its way into the game.

Mojang and Telltale are quick to stress that Story Mode is not the official story of Minecraft. It cannot be an official canon or mythology, because no such thing exists.

"We didn't want to explain exactly what a creeper is," says Owen Hill, creative communications director at Mojang. "It's good to have some mystery to these cool mobs and stuff."

Hill cites the Far Lands as an example of mythologizing done by the community. When you get far enough from the origin or spawn point of a Minecraft world seed, the algorithm that generates the world begins to break down and falter. "The world starts to look really freaky and a bit weird," explains Hill. "And people read a lot into that. They call it the Far Lands and it's this mysterious area."

Minecraft fans seem to enjoy coming up with their own interpretations and seeking out other people's interpretations of why things are the way they are. While Story Mode references or pulls elements from many of these player interpretations, it is meant to be just one among the infinite many possible interpretations and stories set in Minecraft's peculiarly blocky, procedurally-generated universe.

"When we first sat down with Mojang to talk about what the story was going to be, we started with Goonies and Ghostbusters."

Story Mode stars a character called Jesse--who in a first for Telltale can be male or female--and Jesse's friends. Their adventure initially revolves around four legendary heroes who are each based on archetypes the Telltale team identified in the Minecraft community. There's an engineer who's great with contraptions, an architect who likes to just build things, a warrior who excels in monster slaying, a rogue--some might say griefer--who enjoys ruining other people's creations and generally being annoying.

Stauffer is reluctant to elaborate on how Telltale has avoided the pitfalls of designing characters to fit each of these archetypes, for fear of spoiling the plot of later entries in the series. He does note that the protagonist Jesse and Jesse's friends all harbor a sort of "paragon ideal" of the qualities of the heroes that they're mimicking. Eventually, the group will meet characters who embody these heroic ideals, at which point the dynamic between "expectation and aspiration collides with the reality within the story," according to Stauffer.

The narrative draws on works beyond the Minecraft community, too. Telltale feels that they're trying to carry on the noble tradition of family-friendly adventure tales embodied in 1980s films like The Goonies and Ghostbusters.

Stauffer excitedly talks about how the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom--the one where a man rips the still-beating heart from another man's chest--was central to the introduction of the PG-13 rating to American cinema, thereby creating a niche between adult and family movies such that teenagers weren't excluded from gorier, darker plot lines. The downside to this was that there were fewer big budget films being made without scarier and more intense themes.

"But we loved seeing those [family films] when we were growing up," says Stauffer. "When we first sat down with Mojang earlier last year to talk about what the story was going to be, we really started with Goonies and Ghostbusters."

Story Mode took shape as a classic group adventure in the spirit of these films. It was also in line with what Telltale identified as the common themes of Minecraft. "[There's] survival, crafting, adventure, and if you're playing on a server there's also the themes of playing with your friends," says Stauffer.

In many ways, it's a return to the roots for Telltale. Before delving into the mature licensed content of recent years--The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones, and Tales from the Borderlands--Telltale was known for its lighter fare. The Back to the Future, Sam & Max, Monkey Island, and Strong Bad series (among others) all straddled the line between adult and kids entertainment.

It's this culmination of many different influences and ideas that Telltale and Mojang hope will make Story Mode palatable to a broad audience. Older people can enjoy the 80s film references and the familiar voices of the cast--some of whom were actually in The Goonies--while younger players get to appreciate the Minecraft and internet culture references that are more familiar to them.

And as with prior Telltale adventures, for those who don't "get" Minecraft, this new Story Mode is meant to serve as a more approachable introduction to the themes and ideas and especially the elaborate design logic of its source material.

"We worked with some of the members of the dev team to make sure everything kind of made sense within the world," says Hill. Mojang wanted to make sure that it preserves the art and animation style, while still offering a bit of leeway in how the characters can express themselves, and also to ensure that it contains crafting.

The same patterns and materials are used across both games so that anyone who plays Story Mode and crafts a sword with Jesse can then hop into Minecraft and know how to craft a sword there, too. The logic is the same, only the language and perspective through which you interact with the world is different; it's now cinematic and tailored to a narrative.

For Telltale, then, Story Mode is little more than business as usual--it's a game that tells stories and finds character and theme-driven narrative threads in an established, beloved universe. All that's different is that this world has no predefined characters--only predefined systems of logic and design.

But for Mojang it's a tentative step into a world of narrative. One that surprisingly is not part of some grand plan, despite the line of Minecraft novels hitting bookstores now and the coming Minecraft movie that's in preproduction.

"We're not going to go out looking for something desperately in order to expand the narrative," says Hill. "It's not like we sat down and went, 'Hey, we need more ways to make narrative in Minecraft.' But if something cool comes along and it kind of fits, and we feel like we could do a really good job and do justice to the game, I don't see why not."

All it comes down to is protecting the brand and watching to see what the community wants. Hill says that the reception of Story Mode may influence Mojang's future choices, but he stresses that it always comes back to the community. "[Minecraft] wouldn't be anywhere near as big if it wasn't for that," he says. "We made this game and people embraced it and not only have they built cool creations [in the game]; they've made so much stuff around it."

Perhaps the core narrative of Minecraft isn't so hard to find after all. It was always there, right beneath the surface. It just took Telltale to point it out to us.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

Minecraft: Story Mode?

Minecraft...Story Mode?!

But representatives of the two studios tell Gamasutra that bringing together their starkly different styles for a series episodic adventures was a completely natural move.

"For the last year, we've had a private Telltale Minecraft server, and we've been documenting everything that's been going on in there"

He says that one incident with a chicken machine that went haywire even made its way into the game.

Mojang and Telltale are quick to stress that Story Mode is not the official story of Minecraft. It cannot be an official canon or mythology, because no such thing exists.

"We didn't want to explain exactly what a creeper is," says Owen Hill, creative communications director at Mojang. "It's good to have some mystery to these cool mobs and stuff."

"When we first sat down with Mojang to talk about what the story was going to be, we started with Goonies and Ghostbusters."

Perhaps the core narrative of Minecraft isn't so hard to find after all. It was always there, right beneath the surface. It just took Telltale to point it out to us.

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes