Stage6, long a resource for high quality video online has closed up shop as of yesterday. Reasons for the closure are multifarious. Here is an excerpt from an e-mail by Stage6 guru Spinner:

“So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.”

Geekazine chimes in on the closure and the looming closure of another online resource Bloglines, which seems also to be a casualty of no-profits. 

Registered buyers and sellers can now import all or some of their contacts from Outlook 2004/2007 and Outlook Express directly into their IPEX TV account.  A few simple-to-follow steps, and you can have your complete sales list at your finger tips.  Need to prepare for a tradeshow?  Blast digital sell sheets, including trailers, to your entire contact list with just a few clicks.  Maybe you’re a buyer and you want to inform multiple members of your team about some great new titles you’ve found. Perfectly formatted IPEX TV e-mails: easy on the eyes, easy to send, a pleasure to receive.

Feel free to contact us at support@ipextv.tv if you have any questions about this new service, or if you would like a tour of the system.

The first session of our latest webinar, SEO Strategies for the Film and Video Industry, with guest speaker Jordi Duran i Batidor, just finished and we’re sorting through the feedback and questions.  Thanks again to everyone who attended. 

We won’t have the presentation ready for download until tomorrow, but in the meantime, we did want to answer one question right away: how do you submit your site to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

As Patrick pointed out at the beginning of the webinar, only 7% of sites are actually visible to search engines.  There are a number of things you need to do to make sure that search engines first know you exist...then you can start worrying about Page Rank.

The first thing to do is to submit your site.

Here are the links to the submission page for four major search engines:

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl/

and make sure you checkout other great Google tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

dmoz
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

MSN Live
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

If you have a blog (and Jordi’s offered many compelling reasons why you should) make sure you submit your blog to blog specific search tools like

Technorati
http://technorati.com/

and blog post promotion sites like

FeedBurner
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/blogs