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We're about to cancel our Sirius car subscription. We'll still get it in the house via our Dish package. There are a few good channels, but they miss some of the obvious stuff. For instance, Sirius has never had a channel that reflects current taste in jazz - the sort of stuff that get's good reviews from jazz journalists at AllAboutJazz or Downbeat. All they've had for jazz is the "smooth" and "classic" stuff that any real listener either doesn't listen to (smooth), or already has in her collection (classic).

Their rock genre stuff has always been largely lame, with the "college" and "alternative" stations not nearly so explorative as real college alternative stations - unlistenably lame really. There was one good free-form rock station, Sirius Disorder, which got killed in the merger - although they're giving it's main DJ an afternoon show now on the otherwise-bland "The Loft" from XM. We'll see if she gets to use her own playlist though.

Little Steven's Underground Garage is great, if you want a channel where every song is three minutes with a backbeat. I say that not cynically. When it the mood for that, it's perfect. But most of the rest of the rock stations are bad pop hits from name-your-decade. The blues channel doesn't have the depth that a real blues collector would take you to in his living room - again, it's the pop version. They gave up on "world music" - just as well, but why not a serious African channel?

And if they really wanted to get a serious group of listeners, they'd program for readers of Signal to Noise - that is, to those exploring the edges of current musical artforms. It might be a small audience, but if they programmed for it, they'd own it - unlike the majority of the Sirius/XM channels where the content's as stupid as what Clear Channel pumps out, only suitable for background noise, not focused devotion.

Maria got Composer and Arranger of the Year Jazz Awards from the Jazz Journalists Association in 2004 - and it wasn't the first year she'd won awards from them.

Well, well. Just Wednesday put up a story on the Jazz Journalists Association 2002 Jazz Awards winners and linked from each of the winners to the best page I could Google for them. A few of those were on NPR. Those pages don't have any notice or request about not linking to them. So NPR expects, in making this empty "prohibited" claim, that someone like me would have even seen it? We are supposed to search sites we find a page to link to on to be sure that somewhere they haven't claimed links are "prohibited"? Fsck that! We sure won't do them the favor of any links in the future, but I'm not about to do additional work now to remove links that were made in the normal way and without any warning from them that they'd be offended.
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Now I just don't see how AltaVista can give anyone more current results if their bots are featherbedding.
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I wonder if that's true. I just spent the weekend closely analyzing the logs for site where a bunch of jazz critics have articles posted, and at this point about 4/5's of the traffic enters the site from Google searches. So when I look at another jazz site that's gone all to Flash (I tried to talk her out of it), I can only guess that all the folks searching for info on their favorite musicians (most of the Google searches are that) are totally missing the musicians' pages on that other site - which the musicians are paying for - so it's pretty totally a disservice unless the business goal is just to have something that looks cool when the musicians show their friends.

I was really surprised at how much Google has become the approach-of-choice to the Web. Thought it was just /. types who realized how good it was. Turns out it's most of the world, if the logs I've just been reading through are any indication - and a couple years ago they looked entirely different, people entering from bookmarks or links at sister sites. This has prompted some adjustments to the site, so people coming in sideways will still find the other resources easily.

Flash consists in removing yourself from the Internet, and only makes sense if you have a captive audience, at least until the search engines can all digest it and drop people in precisely.
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You're streaming audio, and that's going to cost. But you've also found a way around that - send people to composers you feature at mp3.com. Also, many composers have ties to academia, where space can be available.

One thing to remember: the site isn't the community. The site is one location, like a coffee house or bar, where some of the community can meet sometimes. I've been webmastering a site for the Jazz Journalists Association since '96. Why? Because I share your belief in the value of encouraging real music. What does it cost? Well, I've built it up incrementally, so it's not a big time drain. Content is donated by association members - it's an adjunct to an already existing community. At first it was hosted at a local not-for-profit ISP I volunteered with (to learn the trade - which worked out fine for me). Then I used a couple of hosting services (service quality was problematic - it was Superb and Pair). Now it's sitting on a Speakeasy DSL line, which actually ends up getting better reports from users than hosting, and is a whole lot more convenient to administer. Plus I've got that connection for other uses, so only a portion of the cost is attributable to this project.

Does it create a sense of community? Well, the Association is growing nicely, although conducting most activities in the real world, which makes most sense for an artform that works best live anyway. Attempts to get visitor discussions going on a BBS-type section haven't gone anywhere. People do add occassional comments to stories - but we're not set up as a weblog. Special events where journalists log on together for a few hours to publicly discuss a special topic, with questions coming in from the public, have some success - especially when they draw in existing communities, for instance from special-purpose mailing lists on the topics.

Money? Nope. Referrals for book and record sales have brought zilch. Taking the Association to a formal not-for-profit and pursing grants is the long-term plan.

But to reiterate: It's rare to form a brand new community. But communities are out there, and adding new service for an existing community can more likely find at least modest success, especially if you can piggyback your hosting and connectivity on systems and lines you have other good uses for.

"Don't fit in anywhere else" would seem to suggest that what belongs under .org should not be anything that clearly belongs under .com (business operated for profit), .net (network services, although it seems to be an extension of .com now), .edu (eduational) or the country domains. So ruling out commercial enterprises would make the most sense - not restricting it to government-chartered not-for-profits.

If an individual's business should be .com the same as a corporation's, why should an individual's non-profit activities not be an .org the same as a corporation's? This establishes a special requirement - a bar to jump over - to do things for no profit that does not exist when individuals (or partnerships) do things for profit. Are we trying to discourage individual good works in the name of further corporatizing society?

For example, I provide free hosting and webmastering for jazzhouse.org, the Jazz Journalists Associations' site. I just like promoting this end of our culture. But guess what, the Association isn't formally incorporated. So I have to tell them "You have to pony up the legal expenses for formal incorporation or they're going to take away your well-established domain"?