The way here

Once I started this site, I emailed a few friends, mentioned it a couple of times on a favorite Yahoo Group that includes a large percentage of St. Louisans, and posted short notices on a couple of other message boards. The idea was to do a sort of "soft launch," so that I could get a feel for how to blog, what to blog about, and so on, while also getting some feedback from a small group of people who would, presumably, not be too brutal in their criticism.

Well, so far, the reaction has been good - better than expected, even. I haven't asked anyone's permission to quote them by name, but I.can say that various people - none of whom are related to me, or owe me money - have written to say things like "cool," "awesome," "long overdue," and "an excellent resource." While I'm not planning on letting any of it go to my head, this kind of feedback does reinforce my belief that there's some sort of potential audience out there for a site like this.

There haven't been enough hits so far for the information generated by the counters to be of any statistically significant use, but it is interesting to see what search engine queries and keywords have led people here.

So far, St. Louis Jazz Notes seems to have appeared in search results from Yahoo, Technorati and Ask Jeeves, but nothing yet from Google, which as far as I can tell must not have spidered or indexed the site yet. Yahoo's search seems to rank StLJN highest, as the site shows up in the top 10 results for various combinations of "St. Louis," "jazz" and even "festival," no doubt helped along by several recent posts on summer festivals.

Beyond those three terms, the names of musicians and bands seem to be the most common keywords bringing people to the site. Only one searcher has come here so far looking for a St. Louis musician, and I hope whoever was looking for information on saxophonist Tim Cunningham found their way to his site via the link on the sidebar. Others have arrived here searching for Herbie Hancock, John Mayer and/or Marcus Miller; the Neil Caine Quartet, Annie Lennox, the Jazz Attack smooth jazz package, and even Django Reinhardt, who was mentioned in conjunction with the scheduled appearance of violinist Mark O'Connor's hot jazz group next year at the Sheldon.

What's the lesson? I guess it could be "to pack every post with the names of famous jazz musicians," which could easily be carried to ridiculous extremes, like porn or warez keyword spamming but with Duke, Louis, Bird, Miles, Dizzy, Trane, etc as keywords. That seems rather cheap, not to mention tawdry and unseemly. So now, as I'm preparing to take things to Phase 2, and work more actively to get the word out about this site to more people, I don't see this little nugget of information changing the way I write in any substantive way.

But I suppose it may be useful in the future to know what subjects are of interest to potential readers, even after the fact. So I'll keep watching the logs, hoping to glean some wisdom from the data therein. All part of the learning curve, right?