All Things Digital

Flash content on the Web may be slow-loading and occasionally nonintuitive, but at least now it’s searchable.

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

Of the 1,770 songs stored in the average MP3 player of the average 14- to 24-year-old, nearly half are pirated. This according to a new study by the University of Hertfordshire, which found nearly two-thirds of that demographic willing to admit it downloads music illegally. Commissioned by the recording industry group, British Music Rights, the study also found that 58% had copied music from friends’ hard drives and 42% had shared their music over a peer-to-peer network. A full 95% said they’d copied music in some way or another at one time or another.

And 80% would pay for a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music.

Which, if true, illustrates the great disparity between the consumer and industry views of digital music. Because according to the Hertfordshire study, consumers–at least those in this particular age group–view digital music on the Internet as a sort of giant mixed tape to be explored and shared. They don’t have much of an emotional connection with it: “Respondents seem to attach a hierarchy of value to different formats of music, with streaming-on-demand the least valuable (though still valued); ownership of digital files somewhere in the middle; and ownership of the original physical CD the most valuable.”

The recording industry, of course, has failed to recognize that hierarchy. When, and if, it does, the study notes, it may finally succeed in monetizing that mixed-tape ethos that’s befuddled it for so long. “Survey responses suggest that respondents would continue to purchase CDs and go to gigs, even if they subscribed to a legitimate peer-to-peer file-sharing service,” the survey adds. “Fans want to support or pay tribute to their favorite artists and ownership of a digital music file does not necessarily do justice to their sense of devotion.”