Here's some stats for MiG, now that it's been running long enough to have meaningful stats. When looking at these numbers it's important to understand that this is total requests, not unique visitors. Also somewhere around 5% of the requests are from bots like Google's GoogleBot. The #pages is the column to look at. #reqs counts every single image, css file, and javascript on the pages as well.
month #reqs #pages
Nov 2011 47071 9504
Dec 2011 102779 24842
Jan 2012 60585 19381
We are currently serving about 1/2 Gigabyte of bandwidth per week. The bandwdith isn't an issue but I have to be careful of the CPU load. I will probably turn on caching soon. I've wanted to keep it off while we were tweaking things and folks were learning how to work with Edit Flow. When caching is on things are sometimes less intuitive because changes don't always show up on the site until the cache expires. It's been several years since I really dug into WordPress caching so it has probably improved considerably. I think this will be less of a concern for us since we schedule most posts in advance and aren't expecting to see things change instantly.
These stats are for this week
Listing the top 20 queries by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests. This is traffic coming from search engines.
#reqs search term
7 recollage erik nilsson
5 farewell poetry
5 lama oneiros
4 wist rec
3 austra
3 polica
3 poliça
3 american record guide best cds of 2011
2 contredanse savall
2 music is good
2 howler america give up download
2 lama
Here are the requests for the articles. This was extracted from a report of the top 30 files, so it doesn't have every article. Note that the top article is the one that has a link coming from one of the artist's sites.
Okay, I've begun tweeting for MiG (@MuiGoo). I've been choosing articles based on whim and simpleness. I'll probably go through all the articles that have single album/artist references first, then begin with the multi-album articles. Here's what got tweeted out this morning:
Noam Pikelny (which, actually, isn't showing up for some reason. Huh. Maybe I sent out too many tweets right after opening up shop and now we're in a mod queue or something.)
Christina Pluhar
Good Weather for an Airstrike
Farewell Poetry
A Retween of Bang on a Can's offer for an album for a memory
An intro Tweet
We're following most of the musicians above and/or their label (couldn't find anything for Pluhar or a FareWell Poetry-specific account, but I got their label and one of the main musicians Frederic).
If there's anybody else that you think we should be following that isn't on our Following list, let me know and I'll try to find and add them.
Seeing the tweets, Jonah, thanks! You ought to shorten the urls -it's easy with bitly.
Thanks for the stats Dr. M - it's encouraging to me just that folk are finding us. It's definitely.worth letting artists/labels know when we post something - I've been getting reteeets that way.
I think those tweets are shortened. Twitter does it automatically as far as I can tell. I once compared their shortened tweet to a TinyUrl shortened tweet, and they came out the same.
Are you sure you're not seeing my additional @-mentions to artists and labels following the URLs and thinking they're a part of it?
Weird. Let me take another look at that, then. It wasn't long ago that I did a few comparisons between the options on my BitW account and found no difference.
We should add a Page to MiG that is titled "Review Requests".
The description on that page should give a brief statement about our varied interests and how we are open to review requests and artist profiles and interviews, label overviews, etc. Basically anything that interests us musically. I currently have it set up on BitW to have people email me at the posted email. But because we're a decentralized group, it might be a good idea to refer them to the emusers site and a dedicated emusers thread for them to post their requests on as well as links to material they would like reviewed, etc.
Then, each of us could look it over and someone could call dibs on it. At that point, the MiG author could begin direct correspondence with the artist/label/etc. I think all MiG correspondence should be done through MiG's gmail account, just in case someone else needs access to that correspondence to follow up on editing or other story ideas.
Sounds good. If we are going to make a serious go of this some structure is I think inevitable. I agree a requests mechanism would be good. After doing GWFAA, I've already had a request from Hibernate to review their next release. I didn't promise anything, that's still open (anyone feel like reviewing Listening Mirror?).
Re correspondence and putting the correspondence through the MiG account:
Pro: keeps things official, keeps things in one place and allows an overview and later follow up, makes it easier for the next person to see who to contact at a label and whether we have written to them before (that last one might be important in some cases - don't want to be starting three conversations with the same label head from folk who don't know other arms of the MiGtopus are already talking to them).
Con: Means I need to remember to regularly check and use another Gmail account, which I may or may not prove efficient at doing; some conversations have fuzzy boundaries (e.g. my current exchange with Farewell Poetry started as a lengthy conversation back and forth between them and me about their lyrics, the idea of an interview came at the end - so do I then ask them to switch email address for the next message? Not saying I can't do that, just listing cons. Similarly, once I approached Hibernate Records about a review I got into a nice chat with the label head about various things. I am wondering if I would converse differently if the conversation is essentially public on a shared account. (Just thinking aloud here).
Re: using a thread here to post review requests: seems like a good idea. One thought: are there any quality control boundaries and of so how do we regulate them? I am thinking about the hypothetical worst-case scenario that a review request is posted and someone who joined emusers 6 minutes ago says "I'd like to do that". They might of course be a great person, informed, articulate, etc. Or maybe not. As a journal editor, I feel bad for publishers (especially small ones) when they send me a review copy and then I can't print the review or it says nothing. I'm not saying the boundary should be close-knit, just that it might need to lie somewhere if small labels are trusting us with their stuff. (E.g. if we don;t know you, send us a sample of your writing about another album?) The benefit is it could tempt someone on here into writing if they see something that's a great fit.
Do we already need a MiG Work In Progress thread to note what albums are currently under review, what topics folk are working on, when articles might be ready? That's happening a bit on this thread, but amid lots of other stuff. Or are we making this too daunting too quickly? (As appears to be the case with you, Jonah, when I get energy for something I like to go ahead and organize, but I don't want anyone here getting the feeling that they have somehow accidentally implicitly committed themselves to a second career with a management structure - how do we keep this light and fun and collaborative while also building an interface that can give us enough structure and reach is I guess my underlying concern.)
And on that last topic, I should have a review of From the Mouth of the Sun's Woven Tide on Experimedia by early next week, and a review of Contrail by Kane Ikin on 12k by, say, 10 days from now.
My interview with Farewell Poetry has been pushed back to begin Jan 29 due to their schedule. We plan to go back and forth a question at a time so it may be another couple of weeks after that before it's ready.
I am in touch with Sebastian Plano about an interview - his initial response seems interested, I am waiting for confirmation that he'd like to go ahead.
There is a new Pjusk record our in February. If it turns out to be as good as I hope (bated breath here - I love their first album and loved about two thirds of the second, so am waiting to see which way the curve goes) I'd be interested in reviewing that one.
My experience so far is that after small labels look at the quality of our writing they are very interested in having us write reviews.
1. About the email and multiple addresses. We could set up the MiG account to forward all emails to your personal account, and when you respond to appropriate emails, you could BCC the MiG account so that all of the correspondence appears there. That way you don't have to deal with an additional email and that way MiG staff has access to correspondence that others may need. Obviously, if there were emails of a personal nature, you could simply not BCC MiG, though I suppose you would have to delete the "other" side of the conversation out of there.
2. I think common sense on new people being allowed to review on MiG will be sufficient. I think some simple vetting will take care of all that. Besides, most of what MiG covers are self-produced and small label artists&albums... both of whom have very little time to do their own PR and are happy to find reputable sites with great taste in music like MiG and leave it in our hands. Every now and then we'll get an overenthusiastic street team member (wasn't there a Prose in Rsstte emuser member like that not long ago?), but they should be easy enough to ferret out; happy to have them participating on emusers, but clearly not objective for our requirements as a writer for MiG.
On the thing about the dedicated thread... the only reason for that thread is for artists & labels to post something about a review request and a link to the music or content. The only thing that any of the MiG writers would actually post on that thread would be to say "I got this one" or some sort of signifier about the album etc being claimed. The thread would basically be the MiG slush room/pile. It would not act as a Work In Progress tracker; we have the MiG Drafts page to do that for us.
@JP
Yes, #1 sounds friendlier to me. I know enough about myself to know that if something fits my workflow it is more likely to happen. I have a history of trying to get organized on my work email by setting up special folders for important things that need attention so they don't get lost in the inbox flood, then never remembering to go look at the special folder so that I actually achieve the opposite.
Re #2, yes, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. In general this is a remarkably civilized place, but you never know. Just wondered if it is worthwhile for newcomers posting something at the top of such a thread with some basic guidelines along the "if you haven't written for us before but would like to please talk to us - we'd love to have you as long as it;s a good fit" kind of thing.
Random MiG post idea, to maybe puncture the divide between folk comfortable writing long pieces and folk not. Could we occasionally crowdsource a piece from the monthly downloads thread? Basically ask everyone her eon emusers to see if they downloaded something in the last 2 months that was a fairly new release and worth listening to, and write 20-40 words on why they like it. Then we compile these into a list of bullet reviews in a single MiG post. Some similarity to what Nereffid has been doing with classical releases. I think those kinds of posts can actually be quite useful to people, and in terms of audience it means lots of different google searches might land on the same article.
#2. Yes, that would be a nice thing to include. Especially since we were all just talking about the participation size at emusers. If MiG gets some more musically inclined people to participate on the forum by way of writing for MiG, I think that would be a very good thing.
Yes, definitely. I'm all about the Tiny Reviews. I could definitely see to contributing to something like that once a week. Plus, it wouldn't require a ton of effort from anyone and it would fill out a day on the content calender every week.
Well, kind of, but only if something is already a draft. The drafts page does not tell anyone that e.g. I just had an idea to interview someone and sent them an initial inquiry. It's useful to share that kind of stuff at some point for 2 reasons: (1) so that someone else does not have the same idea the same week and write to them also (the MiG gmail cc might handle that though) and (2) because it's just encouraging, especially in slow patches, to know that there is stuff brewing. Oh, and (3) it can spark off ideas for others.
I am still in two minds how to use the drafts page. I confess I still feel a little shy about using it for very ugly early stages of drafts in progress - I tend to get a piece to the stage where I don't mind if someone sees where it's at before I put it up as a draft.
True, but we can just keep using this thread for those type of announcements. It's not like there's a deluge of posts for MiG stuff that it would get lost in the weeds on this thread.
OK. If that works I am fine with that. I wondered whether anyone (Craig) might at some point want to see what's coming and how long it would take to find that in this thread. But as long as it's still manageable it's totally fine by me.
The Edit Flow plugin we're using has a feature to Pitch articles. Someone who is planning an article can write a Pitch for the article. It doesn't have to be fancy - "Interview Sebastian Piano" and the approximate timeframe would be fine. That should give the editors a better idea what's shaping up at the far end of the pipeline.
edit to add: Pitch is one of the statuses a post can have.
We got re-tweeted by Fdoberland, who, IIRC, is a member of FarewellPoetry.
Tweeted a couple more older articles this morning. Offthesky, Taylor the Creator, and Nathan. Had to retweet that Noam Pikelny one... it was like it was stuck in the system and not coming out. Added some to our Follow list, including artists and/or labels of the above.
Kezzie, that was a pretty spiffy Nathan article you wrote.
After I get through all the "single" topic posts, I'm gonna start doing the series (ie Funkytown, etc) and Themes (ie, Holiday).
Comments
month #reqs #pages
Nov 2011 47071 9504
Dec 2011 102779 24842
Jan 2012 60585 19381
We are currently serving about 1/2 Gigabyte of bandwidth per week. The bandwdith isn't an issue but I have to be careful of the CPU load. I will probably turn on caching soon. I've wanted to keep it off while we were tweaking things and folks were learning how to work with Edit Flow. When caching is on things are sometimes less intuitive because changes don't always show up on the site until the cache expires. It's been several years since I really dug into WordPress caching so it has probably improved considerably. I think this will be less of a concern for us since we schedule most posts in advance and aren't expecting to see things change instantly.
Listing the top 20 queries by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests. This is traffic coming from search engines.
#reqs search term
7 recollage erik nilsson
5 farewell poetry
5 lama oneiros
4 wist rec
3 austra
3 polica
3 poliça
3 american record guide best cds of 2011
2 contredanse savall
2 music is good
2 howler america give up download
2 lama
#reqs %bytes last time file
329 2.76% Jan/19/12 8:20 PM /2012/01/vital-albums-hoping-for-the-invisible-to-ignite/
237 2.02% Jan/19/12 8:20 PM /2011/12/top-twenty-albums-of-2011-david-smith/
211 2.55% Jan/19/12 10:40 PM /2011/11/a-place-where-%E2%80%9Crocking-chairs-fall-off-their-porches%E2%80%9D/
203 1.95% Jan/19/12 9:33 PM /2012/01/mixtape-recipes-trains/
193 3.07% Jan/19/12 8:20 PM /2011/12/turning-the-baroque-world-upside-down-inside-out/
188 1.62% Jan/19/12 8:20 PM /2011/12/music-that-has-influenced-me-craig-mcmanus/
175 1.96% Jan/19/12 4:55 PM /2011/12/vital-albums-music-from-saharan-cellphones/
174 1.79% Jan/19/12 11:19 PM /2012/01/that-70s-show/
170 1.93% Jan/20/12 12:08 AM /2011/12/classical-highlights-american-record-guide-novdec-2011/
152 1.97% Jan/19/12 8:31 AM /2011/12/the-musical-christmas-rescue-mission/
10 0.04% Jan/19/12 8:31 AM /2011/12/the-musical-christmas-rescue-mission/?replytocom=46
131 0.97% Jan/19/12 9:39 PM /2012/01/bang-on-a-can-turns-25/
129 1.38% Jan/19/12 11:10 PM /2012/01/mixtape-recipes-craig-mcmanus-best-of-2011/
122 1.13% Jan/19/12 8:20 PM /2012/01/dispatches-from-funkytown-3-the-next-generation/
115 0.77% Jan/19/12 8:20 PM /2011/12/lama-oneiros/
111 0.98% Jan/19/12 9:50 PM /2012/01/best-free-releases-from-2011/
109 1.45% Jan/19/12 2:05 PM /2011/12/classical-highlights-fanfare-novdec-2011/
106 0.93% Jan/19/12 9:50 PM /2011/12/a-history-of-classical-music-through-recordings/
103 1.26% Jan/19/12 10:06 AM /2011/12/classical-highlights-uk-magazines-dec-2011/
10 0.05% Jan/19/12 9:49 AM /2011/12/classical-highlights-uk-magazines-dec-2011/?replytocom=39
100 1.03% Jan/19/12 9:50 PM /2011/12/gregorian-chant/
Noam Pikelny (which, actually, isn't showing up for some reason. Huh. Maybe I sent out too many tweets right after opening up shop and now we're in a mod queue or something.)
Christina Pluhar
Good Weather for an Airstrike
Farewell Poetry
A Retween of Bang on a Can's offer for an album for a memory
An intro Tweet
We're following most of the musicians above and/or their label (couldn't find anything for Pluhar or a FareWell Poetry-specific account, but I got their label and one of the main musicians Frederic).
If there's anybody else that you think we should be following that isn't on our Following list, let me know and I'll try to find and add them.
I'll try to do some more later today.
Cheers.
Thanks for the stats Dr. M - it's encouraging to me just that folk are finding us. It's definitely.worth letting artists/labels know when we post something - I've been getting reteeets that way.
I think those tweets are shortened. Twitter does it automatically as far as I can tell. I once compared their shortened tweet to a TinyUrl shortened tweet, and they came out the same.
Are you sure you're not seeing my additional @-mentions to artists and labels following the URLs and thinking they're a part of it?
musicisgood.org/2011/12/beat-t...
bitly version would be
bit.ly/AwsCQw
tinyurl would be
tinyurl.com/7zwf6hl
The description on that page should give a brief statement about our varied interests and how we are open to review requests and artist profiles and interviews, label overviews, etc. Basically anything that interests us musically. I currently have it set up on BitW to have people email me at the posted email. But because we're a decentralized group, it might be a good idea to refer them to the emusers site and a dedicated emusers thread for them to post their requests on as well as links to material they would like reviewed, etc.
Then, each of us could look it over and someone could call dibs on it. At that point, the MiG author could begin direct correspondence with the artist/label/etc. I think all MiG correspondence should be done through MiG's gmail account, just in case someone else needs access to that correspondence to follow up on editing or other story ideas.
Thoughts?
Re correspondence and putting the correspondence through the MiG account:
Pro: keeps things official, keeps things in one place and allows an overview and later follow up, makes it easier for the next person to see who to contact at a label and whether we have written to them before (that last one might be important in some cases - don't want to be starting three conversations with the same label head from folk who don't know other arms of the MiGtopus are already talking to them).
Con: Means I need to remember to regularly check and use another Gmail account, which I may or may not prove efficient at doing; some conversations have fuzzy boundaries (e.g. my current exchange with Farewell Poetry started as a lengthy conversation back and forth between them and me about their lyrics, the idea of an interview came at the end - so do I then ask them to switch email address for the next message? Not saying I can't do that, just listing cons. Similarly, once I approached Hibernate Records about a review I got into a nice chat with the label head about various things. I am wondering if I would converse differently if the conversation is essentially public on a shared account. (Just thinking aloud here).
Re: using a thread here to post review requests: seems like a good idea. One thought: are there any quality control boundaries and of so how do we regulate them? I am thinking about the hypothetical worst-case scenario that a review request is posted and someone who joined emusers 6 minutes ago says "I'd like to do that". They might of course be a great person, informed, articulate, etc. Or maybe not. As a journal editor, I feel bad for publishers (especially small ones) when they send me a review copy and then I can't print the review or it says nothing. I'm not saying the boundary should be close-knit, just that it might need to lie somewhere if small labels are trusting us with their stuff. (E.g. if we don;t know you, send us a sample of your writing about another album?) The benefit is it could tempt someone on here into writing if they see something that's a great fit.
My interview with Farewell Poetry has been pushed back to begin Jan 29 due to their schedule. We plan to go back and forth a question at a time so it may be another couple of weeks after that before it's ready.
I am in touch with Sebastian Plano about an interview - his initial response seems interested, I am waiting for confirmation that he'd like to go ahead.
There is a new Pjusk record our in February. If it turns out to be as good as I hope (bated breath here - I love their first album and loved about two thirds of the second, so am waiting to see which way the curve goes) I'd be interested in reviewing that one.
My experience so far is that after small labels look at the quality of our writing they are very interested in having us write reviews.
1. About the email and multiple addresses. We could set up the MiG account to forward all emails to your personal account, and when you respond to appropriate emails, you could BCC the MiG account so that all of the correspondence appears there. That way you don't have to deal with an additional email and that way MiG staff has access to correspondence that others may need. Obviously, if there were emails of a personal nature, you could simply not BCC MiG, though I suppose you would have to delete the "other" side of the conversation out of there.
2. I think common sense on new people being allowed to review on MiG will be sufficient. I think some simple vetting will take care of all that. Besides, most of what MiG covers are self-produced and small label artists&albums... both of whom have very little time to do their own PR and are happy to find reputable sites with great taste in music like MiG and leave it in our hands. Every now and then we'll get an overenthusiastic street team member (wasn't there a Prose in Rsstte emuser member like that not long ago?), but they should be easy enough to ferret out; happy to have them participating on emusers, but clearly not objective for our requirements as a writer for MiG.
Oh, hey, we cross-posted.
On the thing about the dedicated thread... the only reason for that thread is for artists & labels to post something about a review request and a link to the music or content. The only thing that any of the MiG writers would actually post on that thread would be to say "I got this one" or some sort of signifier about the album etc being claimed. The thread would basically be the MiG slush room/pile. It would not act as a Work In Progress tracker; we have the MiG Drafts page to do that for us.
Yes, #1 sounds friendlier to me. I know enough about myself to know that if something fits my workflow it is more likely to happen. I have a history of trying to get organized on my work email by setting up special folders for important things that need attention so they don't get lost in the inbox flood, then never remembering to go look at the special folder so that I actually achieve the opposite.
Re #2, yes, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. In general this is a remarkably civilized place, but you never know. Just wondered if it is worthwhile for newcomers posting something at the top of such a thread with some basic guidelines along the "if you haven't written for us before but would like to please talk to us - we'd love to have you as long as it;s a good fit" kind of thing.
#2. Yes, that would be a nice thing to include. Especially since we were all just talking about the participation size at emusers. If MiG gets some more musically inclined people to participate on the forum by way of writing for MiG, I think that would be a very good thing.
Well, kind of, but only if something is already a draft. The drafts page does not tell anyone that e.g. I just had an idea to interview someone and sent them an initial inquiry. It's useful to share that kind of stuff at some point for 2 reasons: (1) so that someone else does not have the same idea the same week and write to them also (the MiG gmail cc might handle that though) and (2) because it's just encouraging, especially in slow patches, to know that there is stuff brewing. Oh, and (3) it can spark off ideas for others.
I am still in two minds how to use the drafts page. I confess I still feel a little shy about using it for very ugly early stages of drafts in progress - I tend to get a piece to the stage where I don't mind if someone sees where it's at before I put it up as a draft.
Love the other ideas gentlemen. Especially the creation of a way for artists/labels to communicate with us. That is certainly needed.
Craig
edit to add: Pitch is one of the statuses a post can have.
Tweeted a couple more older articles this morning. Offthesky, Taylor the Creator, and Nathan. Had to retweet that Noam Pikelny one... it was like it was stuck in the system and not coming out. Added some to our Follow list, including artists and/or labels of the above.
Kezzie, that was a pretty spiffy Nathan article you wrote.
After I get through all the "single" topic posts, I'm gonna start doing the series (ie Funkytown, etc) and Themes (ie, Holiday).
Craig