Saturday, February 20, 2010

Practical Advice from Uncle Jim

Using Google Alerts is a great way to keep up on who is talking about your stuff, you, or other topics you might care about. I use it to keep track of who is talking (trash) about the "Old School Renaissance," for instance.

However, if using that particular program, don't name any of your own work after common phrases. I find Death Frost Doom has a pretty much 100% relevancy rate. No Dignity in Death, however, has netted me slightly less than thirty million hits talking about the Haiti earthquake, and I get notified when anyone posts the lyrics to that Robbie Williams song anywhere, or when someone digs up any story about anything involving dying. Lots of people are talking about Roger Ebert right now thanks to that Esquire piece.

Grinding Gear is slightly more annoying since I get a lot of technical links and did you know that online games have some sort of tactic called "grinding for gear?" I didn't until I started getting these hits.

So the dungeon adventure in the box will not be called The Wizard's Tower, but rather something like "The Tower of GHeoweoisdv'kdfd'sfdf'd." Should be unique enough for the internet.

4 comments:

  1. I feel your pain. I was doing well with "Miscellaneum", which had something like negative five hits on google. At least until the Visual Miscellaneum was released and the whole dang internet started talking about that book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Google Alerts = extremely helpful.

    Remember that if you are running into a bunch of irrelevant links, set up some additional alerts that narrow it down (no dignity in death LotFP, no dignity in death RPG, no dignity in death .PDF, no dignity in death D&D, etc.). This tactic helps out a lot in winnowing out the chaff.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Grinding for gear = where you run certain dungeons over and over again trying to gain certain pieces of equipment to upgrade your character.

    ReplyDelete
  4. you can also set up your google alert using boolean search terms and stop words to get a more accurate read on what you are looking for. although google alert seems to be much better then google search at finding connected words.

    ReplyDelete