And I’m not referring to puppets literally

I’m not just referring to the posts about replicas either. I’m talking about the whole site in general. Over the weekend, I had one visitor try to use my search function to figure out where they could buy puppets in three different locations: ‘highpoint’, which is a local shopping centre; ‘brunswick’, a suburb in Melbourne; and one more just on ‘Melbourne’. I’m also getting phone calls/emails every week or so from people looking for puppets/companies/events/whatever in a location near them, mainly because my site pops up first in Google searches and is practically outpacing UNIMA Australia’s website tenfold in terms of Google heirachy on any subject.

While I’m glad that people find this site so informative that they feel as though they’re going to find the answer to everything to the nth degree about puppetry, I do wish some common sense would be applied: this isn’t Google maps after all, nor am I the yellow or white pages, UNIMA itself, or a crystal ball. (I actually am starting to put disclaimers in some of the posts about not being Google maps) I can’t possibly post about every single topic, seller, character, idea, material, technique (etc), especially since most readers browse and disappear, without me knowing exactly what they’re looking for.

Take for example this last search: ‘Australian animal puppets sold in brunswick’. I know from the other searches this person was looking for ‘hand puppets’. But read those terms again and they become very ambiguous (or at least to me). Each word can mean a lot of things; ‘Australian’. Does that refer to Australiana? That is, animals that are native to Australia? Or does it mean puppets made by Australians? Already my suggestion of where to buy them would be completely different depending on the answer. On the one hand Australiana glove puppets are easily found in tourist shops around the country and are ten times more easily found than Australian-made glove puppets of a different character (like, say, a non-native animal). You already know what I think of the ambiguity of the term ‘hand puppets’.

And Brunswick? Well, Brunswick is not near Highpoint shopping centre in Melbourne (it’s in Maribyrnong); there’s also Brunswick St, which is nowhere near either the suburb Brunswick (it’s in Fitzroy) or the shopping centre. All three suburbs are somewhat close together, but not exactly what you would call in walking distance, more like a half hour drive (check out the map for a visual; incidentally I also marked roughly where my street is, which is about half an hour away from Maribyrnong). And this is not to mention that none of the locations of interest would have many, if any, toy shops in range that would even remotely stock anything other than a couple of Folkmanis animals; let alone any other kind of puppet… So you can see immediately that trying to account for every search term is near impossible without having a live conversation with the person doing the search.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to field questions about Aussie puppetry, especially since I’m always the first and last to have an ‘open information’ policy (a nod to my The Prompt Copy days when I refused to charge fees for the publication). But there’s a fine line between providing information and being turned into the yellow pages. What’s more is that it’s taken me a whole two years to post more than 100 articles, and that’s updating five times a week, sometimes more; and I spend practically every day bookmarking yet another site to blog about. I wish people would realise that this site grows and changes every day, and there’s simply not enough time or energy for me to post every little thing about puppetry in one hit. (Plus, it makes it so much harder to make people come back to read the site when everything’s already there! )

With great blogging comes great responsibility I suppose, and I’ve created a monster that I now have to live up to. … That and people are stupid. Someone also decided to put the word ‘google’ into the search function :crazy: I guess it kind of makes sense: the field to enter the search term does have the ‘google’ watermark on it, so maybe it confused someone |-|