Great Expectations: musicisgood.org is a go!
Okay folks, step one in our great blog experiment is in the books. Now a new thread for some nitty gritty:
1) As Dr. Mutex noted in the Modest Proposal thread, he is looking for WordPress Admins. If you are interested, let him know.
2) We need writers. Who wants access?
3) I'm going to write an "about us"/mission statement for the blog. As an aspect of that I'm going to be highlighting the diversity of our musical interests and would like to list some of our favorite blogs. Can you please post here what blogs you read regularly? Thanks.
4) If you have any other ideas/interest in a particular duty, please post it up.
This is exciting boys and girls!
Craig
1) As Dr. Mutex noted in the Modest Proposal thread, he is looking for WordPress Admins. If you are interested, let him know.
2) We need writers. Who wants access?
3) I'm going to write an "about us"/mission statement for the blog. As an aspect of that I'm going to be highlighting the diversity of our musical interests and would like to list some of our favorite blogs. Can you please post here what blogs you read regularly? Thanks.
4) If you have any other ideas/interest in a particular duty, please post it up.
This is exciting boys and girls!
Craig
Comments
ETA: once we figure out all the contributors, we should loosely define the areas of expertise. I figure that BigD and I could handle older music and blues (how does "A Little Scratch" grab you for a column on reissues), Greg, kez and I on folk, GP and BN on post-rock and ambient, etc.
Craig
Should it be direct access or should it go through one of the admins? I'm thinking of a question I raised on the other thread: if we all get inspired in the same week, it might be better to drip-feed the results onto the blog rather than have ten pieces added one day and then nothing for two months. That would imply that someone is responsible for scheduling.
I will write in due time. I am still in the middle of the busiest stretch at work that I can remember, so it might not be right away, but things will ease eventually and then I'd be glad to pen something. Current interests include but are not strictly limited to ambient, glitch, electronic/experimental, minimal techno, drone, post/neo-classical, post-rock, German music...and just the whole experience of listening to music.
Another thing I think I mentioned on the other thread - are there any existing longer reflections on this board that it might be worth dusting off/reframing to seed the blog? Or is there enough energy here to cook it all with fresh ingredients?
Do we want any particular balance between e.g. (a) reviews of new releases (easiest thing to generate in quantity), (b) retrospective commentary on music that's been out a while (c) more general reflections and editorializing on issues, trends, genres etc.? I ask because I think especially in the early going this could influence how visitors see the blog - if the first six pieces are all reviews of new music, then as far as I'm concerned (if I'm an outsider) if I visit it it's a reviews blog, and if the first 6 are not of things that interest me I might not come back.
mommio - That's really what I'm planning to focus on in the "about us". Once I have a draft I'll post it here for comment (that may not be for a day or two though).
BigD - That seems to me to be more of a emusers post anyway. My thought is to have the two places tied fairly tightly anyway, so I don't know that it would need to be posted in both forums. Anyone else with thoughts on that?
Craig
Craig
(a) it's a snippet of info posted on the fly, somewhat tweetish, or a turn in a conversation, or it's really only news this week - still gets posted to emusers.
(b) it's something I actually sit down to compose and clean up before posting, it's probably, say, 200 words or more, it makes sense outside the immediate emusers conversation and for longer than a few days, or it draws several pieces of information together in a helpful and cogent way (e.g. an overview of a couple of months' releases in a genre) - candidate for the blog.
Again, that's just me...but perhaps it would be helpful to agree some general editorial guidelines of this nature?
(Might it make any sense to have a thread here for comments on drafts? Can we set up threads that only members can see?)
Also, I lied. I apparently wanted to waste time at work so I wrote up a potential about us/mission statement:
Thoughts? Suggestions? Beatings?
Craig
I'd be willing to share some occasional jazz thoughts, at least until someone who actually knows what they're talking about comes along. I'd anticipate mainly plagiarizing Jonah.
Though little or no tech knowledge to back it up, I am educable and might be able offer some time to help with some of the hosting stuff, if needed.
Questions:
The vibe it gives me is of the launch of a new magazine. It sounds ambitious, promises much (see "massive undertaking" below). If that is what we want, this does it well. If we want to communicate more modest, rootsy, be-our-buddy-and-hang-out-in-the-smoky-corner aspirations the tone here and there ("dedicated","mission", "massive") might need taking down a notch. So what tone do we want exactly?
Nitpicks, FWIW:
Maybe "Oscar Wilde" is enough for the tagline, rather than the full reference?
Does the first sentence get snappier if you delete "where we are"?
"introduce you to your new favorite artist or song" - on the one hand this is quite true; on the other I have the nagging feeling it somehow rings of corporate advertising copy for the launch of some new wannabe big online service. Makes it sound to my ear a little as if we want to be the next Napster rather than have a cool blog. I think the combination of this with "mission" might help produce this sense for me. But I could be persuaded otherwise. Back to the question about tone above.
Does "massive undertaking" oversell (again see above)? Suggest maybe removing that clause and cutting straight to "Unlike".
Would it add a sense of personal connection if you added a sentence about how we started the blog because we were talking to each other about music all the time and realized we had things to share? Something that gives a sense of why this started and that it's home grown? ("our mission" sounds a little as if we just started a company or a brotherhood. Maybe we did, but it's also a little more ad hoc.)
Disclaimer: as a Brit I am pretty much culturally programmed to want to reduce any promotional text to understatement. I have also traveled the world enough to be fine with other voices, so if folk feel we do want a "big" tone, I'm fine with that.
Disclaimer 2: I edit professionally. I find things to change in any stretch of text. (And by the by, my impression is that many folk here can write, but if anyone wants to contribute but wants their prose cleaned up, I'd be happy to do that).
- this is a great mission statement.
- I don't know about having a traffic cop responsible for the genre classifications. I for one wouldn't want that job.
- As I see it, an easy way would be to split it up in contributor segments in the same way as The Free Music Archive, such as
Cafreema's Corner
The Danish Connection or Mr. B's Corner
The Good Thoughts from Bad Thoughts
- But I'd be happy to chip in with my observations from the music universe in whatever form this will take.
Please note that I suck big time as a review writer, even in Danish, so it will mostly be copy-paste stuff from people who are good at what they are doing
I'll see what I can do.
Craig
Craig
Also let me know if your want to be an editor (I see Germanprof, cafreema). Editors will be responsible for reviewing, editing, and publishing articles. You can also kick the article back to the contributor for revisions.
I've installed a workflow plugin so I can create the workflow that's been described. This also provides a calender feature so the editors can see at a glance what's in the pipe to publish. Comments can be added to the work-in-progress. Take a look at the Edit Flow plugin page to see what it can do.
...we began searching for a way to share our love of good music.
And at the very end, capitalize the words for emphasis, as in...
...about music, because Music Is Good.
But like I said, just a small quirk that I've trained my eye to notice. Others may not suffer similar side-effects, etc, etc.
So, can I admit to a small bit of ignorance... how exactly does this work in terms of submissions? How often are we looking to post material on this thing? Do we want to post new content daily or are we looking to do a new batch of content on the same day every week? A mix of those two?
One of the things I'm considering submitting is a jazz album duo review... one of my short mini-reviews of a jazz new release paired with a previously mentioned "What My Wife Says" stream-of-conscious review of the album. I'll run it by you guys here first, because I don't think I actually posted any of the material, but it might be pretty whimsical. You can let me know about that.
Great work, everyone.