It’s been two years since I launched IndieRiver as a bootleg-trading community tracker using BitTorrent. That seems just a little crazy to me. I didn’t think we’d be to 85 shows by now, but we are!
I don’t think I’ve ever told the story, but IndieRiver was a domain that Bryan picked up in early 2006. Around the same time, Ron picked up Indiemand.com, and Casella was pushing what ended up becoming the Square Peg idea. [To be fair, I think this is something that all the Pegs were considering, but I distinctly remember having more discussions about it with Jerry than anyone else.] As you might expect, we decided that it made sense to combine forces; as such, IndieRiver sorta sat on the sidelines, unused, and then when I fell in love with BitTorrent for distribution of allowable concert bootlegs, well … torrent, river, you got it.

It takes a village, people.

Boss: “How was your weekend?”

Me: “Honestly, pretty shitty. I spent all weekend tangling with my Web server and got three hours’ sleep.”

Boss: “I’m not really sure that it’s worth the time that you put into it.”

Me: “Trust me, on days like today, I wonder about that myself.”

I think that Tom Coates’s thinking about online communities seeking self-reflexive rulesets is awesome. Most communities are pretty darn hierarchical, and while you need that at some points in your community—especially early growth—I’m not sure that it’s the best thing for the long term, no matter how benevolent the folks at the top are.

Change in such situations is hard, either because those in power rarely want to give it up or because people just generally fear change. I think that the reason that the Rumor [rocksmyfaceoff.net] Forum had the growth that it did is that both Bryan and I were willing to cede power in favor of growing the community. I mean, really … we’ve had a Web community for four years, and you can count on one hand the number of people we’ve banned in that time. It’s not as if we dodge tough issues, either: politics, music, and religion are our biggest topics!

And yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about community.

I’m still kinda shocked that, one week in, I have 153 users on IndieRiver.net. Kinda astounds me.

I had someone tell me this morning that a bunch of the sites that I run “are very Web 2.0ish”. I think that this was supposed to be a compliment.

Frankly, nothing that we’re doing is anything we couldn’t have done four years ago. We are breaking very little, if any, new technical ground.

I mean, I think that I was getting el softo soapo, but … ugh.

Looks like Upcoming has made lots of process improvements:

New Add Event Form

As the number of events on Upcoming grew, several parts of the original design have become harder and harder to use over time. A perfect example was the “Add Event” form, which used a pulldown menu for choosing a venue. That worked fine in the beginning, but some metros have thousands of venues! Not fun.

That was the inspiration for the new Add Event form, which addresses some of our long-standing complaints. Among the changes:

• Venue autocompletion. Pick a venue by typing a couple characters in the venue’s name, and it will do a real-time search across all metros. No more huge dropdowns.
• Inline venue adding. If the venue you’re looking for doesn’t exist, click the “Add a new venue” link to open a window to add it without leaving the page.
• Better calendar. The calendar picker is much improved or you can still type right into the date fields, if you like.
• Better duplicate checking. We’re doing a number of tests to find events and venues similar to the ones you’re adding, which helps everyone.
• Add an event from anywhere! In the past, if you wanted to add an event, you needed to find the metro first. This was a big frustration for new users, in particular, so we’ve lifted the restriction and put the “Add Event” link right in the header.

Man, yeah. That’s badly needed. I use Upcoming [or, well, I'm working on it ... the initial data entry is a cast-iron bitch, and I haven't managed the workflow properly ... grrrr] for managing the collaborative calendar over on squarepegalliance.net; I dump SPA shows to the Square Peg Alliance group, which tumps it over with one of Upcoming’s badges. Saves me time.

Y’know, since I started down the BitTorrent-music-bootleg path back in December—for which I thank Mark Smiley—I’ve been wanting to find a reasonably decent tracker solution for [rocksmyfaceoff.net]. Fast forward to the spring a bit, when Bryan grabbed indieriver.net for an indie-support project he was wanting to do. We were shaping that and figuring it out when we started hearing sniffs about the still-nascent Square Peg Alliance, which led to a phone conversation approximating the following:

B: I think we should be in on this Square Peg thing.

G: I agree. Let me go look at domains …

B: [a line of conversation I don't remember]

G: Okay, we now own the .net, .org, and .info.

B: Excellent.

G: Now to get on board.

So we—being myself, Bryan, and Ron [whom I'd met at the AP Christmas show in 2004, never really realizing that he'd become a key part of my musical universe inside of 18 months]—talked it over with the Pegs we all new and, suddenly, we were in. So in, in fact, that the news link on their site points to SquarePegAlliance.net. Cool.

But as we were working all that, it occurred to me: Bryan’s awesome “indieriver” moniker was going nowhere. [And yeah, Ronzilla, I'm thinking just now that "indiemand" is still sitting on the horizon, waiting for a place. ;)] But then I was thinking … rivers have torrents. Hmmmmmm. So I set out on a quest to find something. Then I did. So now I have IndieRiver.net up and running, and with less than a week on it, we’ve already hit a dozen shows [mostly thanks to Richard]. Already, I’ve had a couple people tell me that exposure to these artists via bootlegs is making them want to buy more music. And for me … that’s what I’m wanting.

I watch things like the growth of sizes of databases on sites I run. It’s just a peculiar fascination of mine. One I’ve always watched with interest is the size of the database powering the Rumor Forum. It’s always been large—it’s been years since we’ve been below 100 MB!—but I’ve noticed lately that it’s been growing at a faster rate. This surprised me: changes in the fundamental structure of the database occurred when we moved from phpBB v2 to SMF v1 actually shrunk the size of the database by about 25%. Since the switch about a year ago, our posting volume hasn’t increased very much, certainly not enough to keep up with the growth of the database. I realized why this morning: an improved quoting tool [that is, one that auto-generates a quotation waterfall on the post selected] encouraged more people to use the function, and that function means that we’re generally posting longer messages because the tool works with the user, rather than against them.

Better tools for creating and organizing data are generally going to beget more data. I’ve seen it in Weblogging—as soon as I first started using b2, I wanted to write more—and I’ve seen it in Web forums. Shoot, with better cameras and audio field recording equipment, I generate more data, too … I unfortunately don’t generate more time to sift through it all.

I gave the [rocksmyfaceoff.net] folks their own wiki. This is going really well, and the folks I figured would be on top of it are.

People want to tell their stories; communities want to tell them collaboratively. Give ‘em the space.

I first saw this three years or so ago. My friend Peter Welle, who works with a group called RockTV at his Minneapolis area church, sent it to us; they do a weekly TV program as part of their ministry, and part of it is fake commercials and gags. Office Slam!!! is a goofy takeoff on Girls Gone Wild videos, but instead, it’s office workers doing stupid [and I mean ... stupid] pranks.

It runs a little long, but it’s wickedly funny. So funny that, when we first watched it, I thought Scott was going to laugh himself into hyperventilation.

I’ve only been peripherally involved with this, but I’ll join Mark in announcing Bryan’s new baby: [donmillerfans.net]: The Don Miller Fan Site.

As you know, Bryan Allain is the founder of [caedmonscall.net] and [derekwebb.net]. He is a great friend and a fun partner in crime. Derek actually got the DMFnet ball rolling, hooking up Don with Bryan. That’s pretty awesome.

Why is my involvement limited? For one, I have other fish frying; for another, I’ve never read any of Miller’s stuff. Bryan is hounding me to make time for it, though, and I will.gfm

I love working without a net, if only because falling on my ass is good for my humility. Mark’s too nice to tell you, but there was a little SNAFU with my automated system for seamlessly transitioning from http://rmfo-blogs.com/rumorsage/ to http://foolishsage.com/. Karyn had approached me a little over a week ago about her plans, and we’d set up most everything. Mark didn’t know it at all, but he’s actually been working out of the new FS.c database for a week. I had a nice little shell script set up: it made the necessary database changes inside WordPress to work correctly, and then it triggered some .htaccess redirect action that would seamlessly move people from the old URL to the new one. [Go 'head ... try it out. ;)]

There was only one issue: in an effort to hide FS.c from Google’s prying eyes, I’d moved wp-config.php to wp-config-moved.php. No big deal, but … I’d forgotten to include that move in the shell script-fu. [Actually, I would have needed a second shell script, but anyway.] So, come 6:30 p.m. Saturday night, I pull out my Treo to check FS.c and make sure that all went well. I saw WordPress’s “I can’t see your database” error, and I began to panic.

After trying a couple different things with cPanel—forgetting that cPanel’s File Manager is written to use frames; my Treo never stood a chance—I sought Google’s help. “There’s got to be an SSH client for the Treo!” And there is: TuSSH will work on a Treo to give you that in-a-pinch SSH access. I then held my breath and downloaded it, not knowing if Treos were smart enough to install packages downloaded through its on-board browser. [Hey, I'd never had to do it before!] A minute or so later, and I was happy-dancing; another minute later, and all was fixed.

The lesson, as always, is that I’m never as clever as I think I am.

Scott says that it’s insanity to expect that Web services should be free. I agree, and I’ve written here many times about my support for services that I well and truly appreciate. This is homesteading the noósphere at its root.

If you didn’t check out the comment I linked, let me quote myself:

I’ve just gotten my Web community to near self-sufficiency. Know how that happened? I told them the costs involved.

Now, we’re a non-profit, and also seeking to just break even … , but … still.

We’ve made fundraising pitches at [rocksmyfaceoff.net] before, but I think this time we hit on the magic trifecta of how to get people to donate:

1. We gave them incentive to do so. In making the wider Rumor Forum experience optional but placing a value on it, we gave people a reason to support us [wanting to be involved in the full community experience] without degrading the basic experience [talking about the bands that form the basis for the community].
2. We gave them a simple mechanism to support us. Prior to this point, supporting us was an admittedly byzantine issue. Make it easy for people to support you, and they will.
3. We told them why we needed their support. This is quite similar to Kevin Burton’s Golden Tickets for TailRank—he explained where the community funding would be spent, and he got people [including me] to support him.

I think that there are lessons to be learned here. Simply: openness about your needs, incentives for support, and simple mechanisms to allow people to support you. The 2005 Internet supports all this, so when you have a fait accompli, I think you can make it happen.

I don’t think you can do this when you don’t have a reputation or a product that people are already familliar with; if you’re an unknown quantity with an unknown product, you’re going to fail. If your product or your reputation are known values, though, I think you can leverage this mechanism to get yourself to self-sufficiency. [Yes, this means that you have to spend some capital to make some money.]

After reading Ars Technica’s speculation on what all Google Base might do, I think I have an idea for what I’d use it for: export of tour date information for the indie sites I’m (very, very slowly) building. If the idea is to leverage and get your data in Google’s hands easily—and that’s one thing it could be useful in doing—then by all means, I’ll pump the data into their hands. But I’ll still own it on my end, too.

It’s all speculation, though, until they actually launch and enough geeks read the stuff to figure out what it’s good for…

I am now officially Alex’s bitch: not only do I personally use Tasks and FeedLounge, but I have a TasksPro install for [rocksmyfaceoff.net] and, as of yesterday, a UseTasks install for the UAH SGA House Rules Committee.

All this because of WordPress. WordPress is the marijuana of the personal productivity software marketplace.