Music "mini-festo"

By Mike Orren

One of my favorite bloggers, Hugh Macleod, is running 500 word "minifestos" from readers.

I thought this one had a lot of good advice for our musician friends.

November 24, 2006

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Thanksgiving

By Mike Orren

• I'm thankful that after nearly two years of struggle, we're on the verge of launching Pegasus News.
• I'm thankful I'm married to an amazing woman who makes me laugh, makes me think, is absolutely beautiful, cooks delicious Thanksgiving casseroles, is willing to suffer to enable my penchant for tilting at windmills, and puts up with more of my bullshit than anyone ever should.
• I'm thankful for the Pegasus News team, which worked over a year without pay; toils for near-Dickensian wages now; and is working through the holiday weekend as I type. (2:52 on Thanksgiving day and 45% of the staff is active on Gtalk.)
• I'm thankful that I have a business partner who obsesses over the details that make the difference between good and great.
  
• I'm thankful that my big brown dogs still act like kids on Christmas morning every time I walk in the door.
• I'm thankful for all of the friends and neighbors who have supported Our Little Business.
• I'm saddened by what happened to Picnic yesterday, but thankful that the community is rallying around him.
• I'm thankful for best pals like Houston who email me YouTube video of Son House.
• I'm thankful for music in general. Working while listening to my 5-star Itunes library doesn't feel like working. (Now playing: Townes Van Zandt)

November 23, 2006

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News we won't cover

By Mike Orren

I so agree with Jeff Jarvis on this one.

You will never see the "people are traveling for holidays" or "people shop the day after Thanksgiving" stories on our sites.

November 22, 2006

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Update on Pegasus News launch / TexasGigs downtime

By Mike Orren

So, I had previously said that we would temporarily close TexasGigs down tonight and reopen as Pegasus News on Friday.

The bad news, if you could call it that, is that we're not going to launch the Pegasus News site until Monday. Not that we'll ever consider the site "done," as we'll be continually adding features, we think it will be substantially more "done" by Monday. Enough so that it's worth a couple extra days.

The good news is that it looks like TexasGigs service will be uninterrupted. We've figured out a way to do what we need to do without shutting anything down.

That said, I won't kid you -- Don't expect a ton of new stories and blog posts between now and Monday. But everything on the site will be functional. We'll update Best Bets this afternoon, and all will be well.

November 21, 2006

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A world gone mad

By Mike Orren

So I just went out to get the paper(s) and found some balloons from a neighborhood party had drifted into our yard.

No biggie, but when I went to pick them up I saw that each one had printed on it in large black letters a long warning and disclaimer about being a choking hazard.

Any child too dumb to play with a balloon is either too young or too dumb to read the warning. Ditto for their parents.

In my day, we had toys like the Mainway Sack o' Glass. And we survived. Uncle Darwin can tell you why.

I feel myself slowly turning into the world's youngest curmudgeon.

November 19, 2006

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Effusiveness re: JLR

By Mike Orren

I felt bad a few weeks ago thinking that I was a little over the top in my praise of Johnny Lloyd Rollins' Let's Be Poor Together.

I wasn't. I'm working on the site right now and "Who You Are" just popped up in Itunes. I just changed it from 4 to 5 stars. (That's how I manage my playlists.)

I have 25,230 songs in my library. .7% of them get 5 stars.

JLR rawks.

November 16, 2006

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Sam Machkovech serves up Bosque Brown video, weekend reviews

By Mike Orren

Sam Machkovech has a good wrap-up of this weekend's shows, including this sweet Bosque Brown video clip.

Drop in to see Sam's take on The Strange Boys and Red Monroe too.

November 13, 2006

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AT&T Internet hates puppies

By Mike Orren

You may have gleaned that we're in the web business. And that we're launching the product we've slaved over for almost two years in just under two weeks. If you're a deductive reasoner, you might conclude that an internet connection would be important to me during this particular time.

You might also glean that we're working pretty much around the clock right now. And when one has two dogs dependent upon you for feeding, exercise and companionship, working from home on the evenings and weekends is the natural solution.

So imagine my chagrin when my AT&T DSL went out Tuesday night. And my frustration when the Fort Worth switching station outage that they told me was causing my trouble wasn't fixed Wednesday. And my pique on Thursday when they told me that the two previous people who told me that a Fort Worth outage was affecting my East Dallas connection must have been smoking something and had wasted two weekdays where it could have been fixed. And my outrage when by Friday night they told me that they knew that the problem was in the neighborhood box down the street but that the field office had twice refused to go out there because they didn't want to admit it. And my outright fit yesterday when they told me that wasn't the trouble after all and that the earliest they could get someone out to my house was between noon and five on Monday -- a time in which I presumably won't be able to work online.

So, I've been up at the office much of the weekend while my pups are bored, hungry and doing the potty dance. Thanks, AT&T.

You may have noticed AT&T DSL ads on our site in recent weeks, delivered by Tacoda, our national provider. I've blocked AT&T from our ad queue for now, because I can't recommend them in good faith to our users.

And there's a certain local bar and grill that would be in the same straits if they were an advertiser of ours, but that's a story for another time.

November 12, 2006

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Another "under construction" reminder

By Mike Orren

About a week ago, I mentioned some impending construction dust on the site. Judging by a couple comments on the site this morning -- one surprising and one (ahem) graphic -- let me renew and expand that warning.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, this site is going to transform into a broader local news and information site called Pegasus News. We'll still have the same depth of coverage on local music, but TexasGigs will be one tab in a site that also covers neighborhoods, news, politics, non-music arts, dining, sports, business, shopping and lots more.

Because we're building all this other stuff around TexasGigs rather than as a separate site, there will be some weirdness. Not only do our categories on events look different, you'll see that our event search categories look "f-in retarded," as one user put it. And there are a lot of nonmusical and duplicative categories in there. That'll be cleaned up by Thanksgiving, so bear with us in the meantime.

Also, as that crafty Mike Davis discovered, there are some non-music news stories hiding about the site, even though there is no table of contents leading to them. We're practicing our newsroom workflow, so some of that will appear. Consider it work in progress, though.

Looking ahead, here's what to expect over the next couple weeks. You'll see more goofy event categories pop up. And you may start seeing a lot of non-music events on the site if you look into future dates. That listing will look really overcrowded, but rest assured that we're going to break that up into more manageable and user-friendly chunks by d-day.

Most likely around midnight on November 21, we will shut down TexasGigs for a couple of days, partly so we can all have a bite of turkey, but mostly so we can finish the rearranging that would be REALLY disruptive to folks trying to use our site. We'll leave up a static list of the shows happening on the 22nd - 23rd. Then, good lord willin' and the creek don't rise, we'll emerge from our cocoon early the morning of November 24th.

So please be patient with us for the next couple weeks. We promise it'll be worth it. If you have questions or serious issues with the site, give us a shout.

November 11, 2006

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Propping up online circulation too? -- Updated with answer from DMN

By Mike Orren

Working our newsfeed today, I just came across this item in the Dallas Morning News' Allen Neighbors blog:

"Win $10,000 for your prom

Attention AHS supporters - Dallas Morning News Sportsday is having a "click off" contest, with the school with the most clicks receiving $10,000 for their prom.

Just click on Allen High School's homepage every day at www.dallasnews.com/myhighschool until Thursday, Nov. 17. The winning school will be posted in the SportsDay section of the The Dallas Morning News Tuesday, Nov. 21. Only one click per computer per day will be counted. Now get clicking!"

It strikes me that DMN is falling back on the sort of tactics that most industry folks would tell you contributed to the current mess faced by the newspaper industry. In print terms, these clicks would be called "low-quality circulation," like unrequested newspapers sent out on behalf of advertisers; deeply discounted print subscriptions or lapsed subscribers who keep getting the paper anyway.

What's troubling to me here is that the DMN sells online advertising on a per-pageview basis. So, if I were an advertiser paying (even at low online rates) for an ad on a page that was being clicked on just to help a school win a contest, I would be upset. Granted, there is a small difference in clicking on an ad and viewing a page, but when you get paid by the pageview, there is a problem. Google ejects any publisher who actively exhorts users to take an action that incites a charge to an advertiser. And most reputable national advertising networks (like Tacoda, whom we use) forbid their participating publishers from driving traffic via click-contests.

In the end, is this much different from "click a monkey, win an Ipod?" Couldn't they at least have provided the deeplink to the Allen High School page?

The online media industry is struggling mightily with clickfraud. Given that the DMN has already weathered a print circulation scandal, I can't imagine that their management would intentionally engage in such marketing behavior. To find out, I sent an email to the person who posted this to get some clarification. I'll update when I hear back:

Saw this item on your site: http://allen.beloblog.com/archives/2006/11/win_10000_for_your_prom.html



I'm wondering if the DMN is charging its advertisers for pageviews on the pages in question here? I'm sure that it's not your intention, but most online advertisers would consider this to be clickfraud.

Just heard from Cyndi Carr at the Dallas Morning News: She says the ads on these pages are sponsorships, and therefore not prone to per/pageview charges.

November 10, 2006

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