I keep meaning to write a post about my favorite things on the Internets but I never seem to get around to it. So instead I will make one post about one of my favorite things, my favorite Flickr set.

The image above is from Least Wanted,a Flickr user that ostensibly collects old mug shots. I had no idea that this was a hobby before I found this feed. But wow, what interesting photos! I don’t know where one might find these things, but I love them. They are a lot of reasons to. They are photos of what are likely some of the less fortunate of a society often taken shortly after some traumatic event.
The faces sometime are as interesting for what you can’t read into them as they are for what you can.
Even their clothing is interesting. A lot of these were taken at a time when you would find even the worst criminals dressed in suits and ties … and HATS! Photos like this must be a gold mine for period costume designers. Any way check it out and enjoy.

Kentucky Derby at the Royale, originally uploaded by bill.streeter.

Had a great time at the Royale on Saturday. I’ll post some video from the event soon.

A lot of people in America don’t have a clue about what May Day is really about. It’s a shame because it’s really part of American history. Most Americans think that May Day is a “Commie” holiday that is/was only celebrated in Communist block countries. Of course, most people in the rest of the world know better.

So what is May Day really about? Well in short it’s the international labor day. The day the world remembers all the contributions and progress working people have made by fighting for their rights. Specifically it remembers the great Haymarket protest that happened in Chicago in the 1886 when workers struck to get an 8 hour work day. Yes those kinds things weren’t always standard operating procedure in America, or the rest of the world for that matter. In fact early industrialization meant that workers were often required to work long hours (12 hour shifts were common) and 6 or 7 day work weeks. It really was pretty close to slavery on a lot of levels. The bosses, didn’t think too much of it because the long working days meant higher productivity. And they pushed back hard against the workers who demanded better treatment. The 8 hour day, 5 day work week standard eventually came, but it didn’t come from the kindness of the bosses heart. The standard was forced by long years of labor organization, fighting, and eventually political pressure. Now those things are more or less codified in law. Overtime rules, vacation benefits, reasonable pay for a days work, time off for illness or family emergencies, lunch breaks—all these and many more rights and benefits are the result of battles fought long ago by workers who organized to protect their rights and be treated as human beings.

So that’s what May Day is really about. Take a minute today and thing about how much better off our society is because we have these rights today.

Read more about May Day at Wikipedia

Ok here is a simple strategy to promoting your band online. This could be a very long post so in the interest of brevity, I’m just going to lay out an outline now and do a few more posts on the finer points of these.

1. Get your own damn web site. Buy a URL (internet address) from Godaddy ($8) and sign up for a hosting plan from them or someone else. I use Dreamhost but there are others. Sometimes these services (like dreamhost) will give you a free domain registration when you sign up. That’s fine, but I prefer to keep all my domains registered in one place because it makes it easy to manage them all. Good hosting is generally fairly cheap (but not free). A lot of hosting companies charge around $10 a month and often less. It’s worth it.
2. Put good relevant information on your site. Photos, band bios, mp3 samples of your music, and links to other services, like MySpace that you might use. But make sure that URL that you registered (you know the one you OWN) is the only URL that you publish for your band. Don’t promote a MySpace address, because you never know when a fickle service like MySpace might accidentally delete your shit (see previous post). And put your URL on all everything you get printed, and use it in your message signatures, on myspace and everywhere else.
3. Set up a blog. Yes, this is the single best way to generate traffic to your site and develop a community of fans around your band. It doesn’t have to be great, it only needs to be relevant. Don’t do long posts. Just keep people updated on what you are doing as a band– recording, taking a break, up coming gigs, or what you are listening to, blah blah blah. Make it relevant and make it regular. Why does this work? Regular updates mostly. Blogs get indexed by search engines more often than other sites because search engines know that they are up dated more frequently.
4. Link to other sites and blogs that you like. That’s important because if those other bloggers and site owners are smart they are curious about who is linking back to them. And if you like them, chances are they’ll like you and link back to you. And that means more traffic for everyone, and the beginning of a community. Sites like MySpace exploit this idea with their “friends list” construct. But this kind of interaction has already been in place on the open Internet for a long time. Learn this and use it.
5. Set up email addresses for you and your bandmates with your own URL. Use this email for official band communication. Most web hosts make it easy to set up forwarding addresses so you don’t actually have to set up a mail box. I have all my mail forwarded to my gmail account because it makes it really easy to manage all my mail there. Yahoo mail can work too, but nothing beats gmail IMO. DO NOT DEPEND ON MYSPACE MESSAGES FOR OFFICIAL COMUNICATION. If you are a serious band, you need to manage your band business seriously. MySpace messaging is not a serious messaging system. It’s a toy for kids.
6. Use other web services besides MySpace. Again I’m not saying to not use MySpace, I’m just saying it’s not the only game in town. Some of these other services are used by people who wouldn’t get caught dead on MySpace. If you want to reach them, you need to go to them. Some of these services I like are Flickr (photos), UpComing.org (calendar publishing), Twitter (short messaging), Google (for all kinds of stuff), Yahoo (all kinds of stuff too—owns UpComing and Flickr above). But always use your own web site as a hub that links to your identity to any and all of these services that you choose to use. Someone asks if you are on one of these other services just send them to your web site for the link. I’m a big proponate of not trying to reinvent the wheel. If someone has a great service that you can’t do just as well from your own site, use it!
7. Set up a store for your music and merch. There are a number of ways that this can be done. There are services like Sno-Cap that allow you to sell your music online, and of couse there is iTunes. And for merch there are a number of options. Café Press is very popular but there are others like Spreadshirt and GoodStorm. And don’t forget CD Baby. If you are really ambitious you can even set up and manage your own shop hosted on your own site. But if you have a lot of popular items you might have a problem keeping up with order fulfillment.

So that’s a start. But it’s mostly common sense. I’ll add more to this list in future posts as I think of them. I think my next one is what to put into an online press kit. But if you can think of anything else, or have questions please ad it to the comments.

A few bands I know have as their singular Web presence their MySpace Page. A really bad idea, IMO. I’m NOT saying that you shouldn’t use MySpace at all—it’s a great tool for promotion—that’s not really in despute. I use it myself. But what I’m saying is DON’T make it the ONLY place on the web where your band can be found. Here are some reasons not to and my next post will be what I think is a much better strategy for promoting your band online (using myspace and other web services).

1. You Don’t own your MySpace Page.
MySpace can and does delete user profiles often without notice or an obvious reason. If you are using MySpace as your bands only web site and this happens you are shit out of luck. If you also have a real web site that is hosted on a paid server, then you aren’t necessarily SOL. If you aren’t paying for a real web site on a paid host then do it now. It ain’t that hard and not that expensive. The cost is less than 2 beers a month. Give up 2 beers a month for tour piece of mind.

2. MySpace wants you to host all your media with them.
Have lots of photos on Photobucket, or Flickr embedded on your MySpace page? Guess what? MySpace can easily block these services to force you into hosting all your media with them. In fact they just started playing hardball with Photobucket. Put a few choice photos on your MySpace page but host the rest on your own paid for web space. Embed them on MySpace from there. Yeah MySpace could block that too, but it’s not very likely.

3. Looks like shit
MySpace profiles all look the same (more or less) and they all look like shit. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s a fact. I can’t help but think that using MySpace as your only web site degrades your bands image on at least one or many levels.

4. MySpace is slow and it breaks a lot
You know it, I know it. Enough said.

5. MySpace us only as useful as the number of people using it
What happens when the day comes that there is a mass mirgration from MySpace to the next new hot social network and you’re fully invested and only invested in MySpace? Yeah you can move too. But if you have a real web site you can keep your fans updated on all the services you participate in right there, on your page, that you own.

6 … So what am I missing? Can you think of any other good reasons bands shouldn’t use MySpace as their only web presence? Am I wrong? Tell me in the comments.

Next I’ll lay out my online band promotion tool kit.

One of the other things I did to amuse myself was listen to the radio. I got to know radio much better than most kids my age. I listened to music, sure but I also listened to a lot of talk radio. Talk radio wasn’t the same then as it is now. It wasn’t really even political. It was just hosts chatting about what was going on in town and reminiscing about the old days, mostly. It was about this time that I discovered Public Radio. Sunday nights the NPR station that I listened to would run serial radio dramas. Not old ones, but, new modern radio dramas. These were really well produced, deep, aural experiences. Quite frankly it blew my little 12 or 13 year old mind to listen to them. Among the ones I remember was the Star Wars Radio Drama, A Canticle for Leibowitz (based on the novel), and a series of programs produced by a company called ZBS productions. These were all serialized dramas that continued over several weeks. The ZBS series included the 4th Tower of Inverness, The Amazing Adventures of Jack Flanders, and Moon Over Morocco. For some reason these, in particular, captured my imagination and I never really forgot them. Years later I heard stuff produced by the 60’s audio sketch comedy group The Firesign Theater, which reminded me a great deal of these radio shows. I can’t be sure, but the Firesign stuff must have had an influence on the ZBS shows somehow (the firesign stuff started in the 60’s and the ZBS stuff was produced in the mid 70’s). I realize now that what I was listening to was the creative child of 60’s art counter culture mashed up with good old fashioned radio drama. The people producing this stuff in the 60’s and 70’s likely grew up listening to radio dramas in radios golden age of the 40’s and 50’s. I also was familiar with golden age radio shows because my dad collected those on cassette, which I also listened to in lieu of TV.

So anyway, I give you that personal background to tell you this; Moon Over Morocco is now being podcast! If you have any interest in audio drama, then please check it out. You won’t be disappointed.

I have to say that the interview went much better than I expected. I think I actually answered all the questions coherently, in spite of my lack of sleep last night. It was interesting seeing how a television producer puts together a story. Which isn’t a whole lot different than the way I put together a story. Except that I use a smaller camera, and umm … fewer people. Oh and less light … and I edit it myself. But the basic process seems to be the same. Paul was a nice enough guy. He seems to be a fine reporter a real down in the trenches kinda tv guy. Really friendly with a bit of an edge hiding just below the surface. I keep thinking of a few select questions that I wished I would have answered sightly differently, but at the same time I’m really happy with some of the answers I did come up with. So hopefully they’ll get a nice story out of it. I’ve always thought that the channel 2 guys were pretty good at putting together tv stories. Their photography really seems to stand out.

I’m tired. I have more to say about this … but later …

• Tomorrow: I’m shooting a piece about Firecracker Press, what seems to be a really unique design shop that specializes in doing their own printing on antique letterpresses. Then later in the evening I’m shooting an interview with Pokey LaFarge an interesting talent to say the least–after which I will be shooting his show as well as the Vultures and Johnny O and the Jerks.
• Thursday: I’m getting interviewed by the local Fox afiliate in the afternoon. Editing in the evening.
• Friday, shooting a band at The Wayout Club called Human After Taste, which judging by what I’ve seen of them on myspace, should be interesting.
• Saturday I’ll be editing.
• Saturday or Sunday I’m shooting a piece about Peat Walleagar in his studio for an ad agency in NYC.

WHEW!!

At the end of next week I’m off to SXSW with Podtech. ]]> http://www.billstreeter.net/busy-week/feed/ 0 http://www.billstreeter.net/going-to-sxsw/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=going-to-sxsw http://www.billstreeter.net/going-to-sxsw/#comments Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:55:00 +0000 Bill Streeter http://billstreeter.net/2007/02/19/going-to-sxsw/ I’ve had a bunch of stuff that I’ve been wanting to put here but the only time of the day I have to do this (most days) is while I’m at work. And I feel sorta weird about blogging at work.

Anyway Podtech wants me to go to SXSW interactive in March, which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve heard that it’s really a great conference, and I’m really looking forward to seeing all my online friends in person again. I’ve never been and hopefully I’ll get to see my friend Doug while I’m there.