[Clipart] Introduction to the Open Clip Art Library

[Jon Phillips]

I think the best way to increase our pagerank is to get linked to more
often and us to link to others. That seems to be the tried and true
way...basically, we need more press and people posting to their blogs
and then having www.openclipart.org linked on their main page.

Jon


On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 21:06 -0400, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:
> 
> > I fully expect us to become the number one hit for clipart soon
> > enough.
> 
> Number one?  At the moment, I'd be happy if we just got on the first
> *page* of Google results, for any of the following searches:
> 
> clipart (currently we are 25th, i.e., third page)
> clip art (currently we are 23rd, i.e., third page)
> clip-art (currently we ar 24th, i.e., third page)
> "clip art" (currently we are 19th, i.e., second page)
> 
> We *are* moving up, though; early in the year we were fourth-page or
> worse for all of those, which for most practical purposes is the same
> as not being listed.
> 
> We're not ready to be the I'm Feeling Lucky result yet; we need to get
> some of these bugs ironed out before that happens, or else we'll be
> inundated with questions about them ;-)
> 
> We did recently make the first page for vector clip art, for whatever
> that's worth (although for "vector clip art" as a phrase we are not
> even in the first four pages).  Somehow I suspect the word vector
> doesn't make it into most searches for clipart content, but hey, we'll
> take what we can get, right?
> 
> Even better, we are fourth for public domain clip art and sixth for
> public domain clipart.
> 
> We are, not surprisingly, number one for open clip art library, but
> people will only find us that way if they already know we exist.  
> 
> We also are third for svg clipart and both first and second (via our
> own domain name and the freedesktop.org domain name, respectively) for
> svg clip art, so if people are specifically looking for clipart in SVG
> format, they can find us.  At this time, that's a pretty narrow
> audience, though.  Then again, it's a good core demographic for us,
> because people who are already aware of SVG and looking for it are
> particularly likely to contribute and/or become active.
> 
> I take the trouble to note all of these statistics mainly so that the
> numbers will be in the mailing list archive, for the express purpose
> of allowing us to compare at some point in the future (say, six months
> from now) and see how things have shifted.  I have thought about
> trying to do a little optimization (e.g., arranging things so that a
> lot of our pagerank aggregates on the home page and only a little
> leakes out offsite), but I concluded that it is not necessary, because
> if our content is compelling, other sites will link to us and we will
> eventually have all the pagerank we need.  If you do the Google
> searches listed above, you find that many of the results are inferior
> in one way or another to our collection; if our collection continues
> to improve, we will eventually rise past most of them.  Search results
> only very occasionally change suddenly; usually the shift is gradual,
> but it does catch on -- the search engines are *designed* to get the
> most compelling results to the top of the list.  So we should focus on
> making the collection and the site compelling and useful, and let
> Google worry about how to get their algorithm to list us first :-)
> 
-- 
Jon Phillips

USA PH 510.499.0894
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

Inkscape (http://inkscape.org)
Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org)
CVS Book (http://cvsbook.ucsd.edu)
Scale Journal (http://scale.ucsd.edu)