Some site news, and a request for your comments

No updates for the last couple of days, partly because it's apparently been a slow period for local jazz news, and partly because I've been working on some other aspects of the site.

* Over on the sidebar, I've added links for some more St. Louis musicians and venues, deleted links to a couple of jazz blogs that were abandoned by their owners, and added a handful of other links spread throughout the various other sections as well. There's also a whole new section called "From St. Louis To The World" that links to sites of some of the musicians from this area who have gone on to achieve significant national and/or international fame. I've started with a couple of dozen of the best-known players, and will be adding more as time goes on. As always, your suggestions are welcome.

* I've also been working on some ideas for ways to add some more original content; use this site to encourage some online discussion of the St. Louis jazz scene; and, in general, get more people more involved. I'll have more to say about the first of these ideas later in the week.

* There's been a nice spike in site traffic this month. Last Thursday was StLJN's busiest day ever; last week was the busiest week to date; and February will easily top January as the busiest month so far. The absolute numbers are still small - on the average, StLJN is now getting about 30 unique visitors and 60 page views a day, with more on weekdays and fewer on weekends - but they are moving in the right direction.

To give you some perspective on the numbers, All About Jazz.com says they had about 880,000 hits (a term seemingly used interchangeably with "page views') last month; StLJN will do about 1,800 hits in February. So, as you might guess, while I am glad more people are finding the site, I'm not expecting a big-money buyout from a major media conglomerate any time soon.

* As long as I'm tidying things up, this seems like a good time to address some nagging questions:

What happened to the Erin Bode interview outtakes you promised? On second look, there just wasn't enough there to make a cohesive post. The most interesting leftover bit was that Erin and her bandmates enjoyed a bonding experience during their two brief, well-received tours of Italy last year, and that her college studies of the Italian language came in handy during their travels.

What happened to the interview with Neal Caine? I had to put it aside temporarily due to a lot of breaking news stories and some paying gigs, but it will still appear. The tape has been transcribed, and there's probably an afternoon's worth of work to turn it into an article. I hope to get to it over the weekend for posting next week.

What happened to your New Year's "state of the site" post? Basically, I wrote a very long post that wasn't very interesting to anyone but me and maybe two other people, and thus decided to table the idea. Then I thought post number 300 earlier this month might be a good occasion to get retrospective, but there were a bunch of breaking news stories happening that week that sucked up all the time I had available to work on the site.

However, as of today, StLJN has reached the 300-day mark, with a total of 320 posts in that time, so to commemorate this momentous occasion, here's the updated, condensed, sort-of-bullet-point version of that "state of the site" post:

1) Overall, I'm happy with the way things have gone so far, and I plan to keep the site going for the foreseeable future.

2) While I'm pleased that anyone at all is reading the site, of course I'd like to have more readers. So if you enjoy StLJN, please tell your friends about the site, link to us on your own blog or personal site, and do anything you else you can think of to help spread the word. I have exactly zero dollars to advertise the existence of this site, and so word-of-mouth is crucial.

3) In the coming year, I will continue to gather and report as much news related to jazz in St. Louis as I can find, but I'd also like to offer more original material - interviews, reviews of CDs and live shows, commentaries and so on. There may be some guest contributors involved, but to produce more content myself, I also need to see if there's any way for this site to generate a bit of income that might help justify the rather substantial investment of time it requires. And that means...

4) There will be some ads on the site in the very near future. Specifically, I'll be adding a box of those "context sensitive" text ads, the sort that "read" what's on the page and then serve up advertsier links related to those topics. There will also be some ads for affiliate programs from book, CD and other vendors, the sort that pay a small commission if you click the ad and then buy a CD, book, DVD, sheet music or whatever from that merchant. I don't expect to make a lot of money from these, but as a freelance writer and musician, every income stream (or trickle, as the case may be) helps. If ads can generate a few bucks to pay my ISP bill, or buy some tacos or something every once in a while, that would be great.

5) There will be a redesign happening some time this spring, just to try to make StLJN look less Blogger-generic, but I don't know exactly when it will be done.

6) As mentioned above, I would like to do more this year to encourage reader participation and comments. I realize that many posts are short news items that don't especially lend themselves to commentary, but it would be nice for this site to be something of a meeting place as well as a news source. To facilitate that, and to help keep things generally moving forward, I'd like to find out a little bit more about you guys. The site tracking software tell me something about where people are logging on from, and what search terms they're using, but that only gives me a very rough idea of what's actually going on.

So I'd like you, dear reader, to use the comments section of this post to answer a few questions and offer your opinions and thoughts. I'm especially interested in hearing from any regular readers, but first-timers, please feel free to jump in, too:

- How did you find St. Louis Jazz Notes?
- What do you like about the site? What would you like to see changed or improved?
- Are you living in the St. Louis area? If not, do you have some sort of connection to St. Louis? And if the answer to both of those is "No," what's your interest in StLJN?
- Would you be interested in taking part in some sort of online discussion of jazz in St. Louis - perhaps a weekly open thread, or something with a suggested theme or two?
- Anything else you'd like to tell us?

If you have enjoyed reading this site over the past ten months, and/or found it useful or informative, please do take a moment to leave a comment, even just a brief one. Your thoughts and opinions can help shape the coverage and future direction here, but only if you speak up about what's on your mind. Thanks!

(Edited immediately after posting to fix some typos and a bad sentence or two.)