When we first began this blogging adventure, it felt like we were shouting into a brick wall cause we were writing all this stuff, but then when we’d go looking around for what people were saying, we would never see ourselves in search results ever and so it was obvious that people would never read what we were saying.

I use a lot of yahoo pipes to track VAF Octavio search results from any system that will output an rss feed so that I can keep track of what the internet is saying efficiently. About a week ago I started to notice that these pipes were increasingly filling up with our own posts (which was annoying in a way because I want to hear what other people are saying). Well actually this is quite a jubilant moment for us because it means that if people search for Octavio information using Google Blog Search or Technorati then they are highly likely to find us and see what we’re doing. Hopefully they will find out about the Octavio’s rare features and VAF’s strong interest and history in high quality sound.

Here are some pages that demonstrate our new-found search engine cred.

• Google Blog Search for “VAF Octavio”
• Technorati Search for “VAF Octavio”

As you can see blogging about the Octavio looks very healthy according to the technorati graph, largely because we tend to post about it every second day. Great thanks to Mike Seyfang (Jamie’s dad) for blogging about us and linking to us because his amassed internet cred has allowed him to rise to the top of search results however his links should direct people to us hopefully. I believe that the results of this “search test” suggest that the making of the promotional videos was worthwhile because they seem to appear quite high in the results for some reason. Also in technorati they appear as large colourful thumbnails which I imagine would be very enticing to click on.

Also if you continue to the second technorati page where our actual posts start appearing you will notice that my blog has an authority of 4 which trumps Jamie’s blog, this blog and even Mike’s livespaces blog. I have no idea how that came to be because Mike’s blog is regular, interesting and gets heaps of cool subscribers, but who cares - I still think I’ll milk my bragging rights.

Next project is to increase our Google juice because our first contribution is only on the third page.

Hopefully my next post will be less statistical and more radical, but I guess it’s good to check on progress occasionall

Jacob for VAF

Agenda:

1. How to subscribe to a feed with Google Reader
2. Subscribe to the  Radiohead’s Dead Air Space feed url - (feed url is:http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/deadairspace.rss)
3. Subscribe to US
   1. http://feeds.feedburner.com/wholesalemeatmediablog
   2. http://feeds.feedburner.com/yakface
   3. http://feeds.feedburner.com/salamano
4. Great Octavio’s in History: Octavio Paz
5. Musical Item: “Us” by the Well Meaning Shells

Sorry it goes for 12 minutes - please skip through

Podcast 3 mp3 file

Jacob and Jamie for VAF

There has been some speculation about where/if the VAF Octavio is available in Australia, so we tried calling a few major stores to check if they are in stock for Christmas. The only place we have found so far that definitely stocks the Octavio and will be likely to have them for Christmas is Next Byte. It’s a bit of a shame that it’s hard to find South Australian product in South Australia, however after talking to Mr Vafiadis today it looks the Octavio will soon be found in a number of other retailers. But for now it looks like Next Byte is the go.

Jamie and Jacob on behalf of VAF.