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We vBulletin for nancies.org's discussion boardS, as we have for the past three years, and we're really happy with it. It's against my grain to pay for software (as opposed to writing it myself or using free software), particularly one with as many good free options as web-based discussion boards, but each annual reevaluation of the market has led me to conclude that vBulletin is the best choice out there. It has good support, a nice feature set, it uses MySQL and PHP (a major bonus, as far as I'm concerned), and product updates are frequent and worthwhile.

To be fair, I haven't looked at phpBB in the past ten months, so perhaps it has improved vastly in the meantime.

-Waldo Jaquith

We vBulletin for nancies.org's discussion boardS, as we have for the past three years, and we're really happy with it. It's against my grain to pay for software (as opposed to writing it myself or using free software), particularly one with as many good free options as web-based discussion boards, but each annual reevaluation of the market has led me to conclude that vBulletin is the best choice out there. It has good support, a nice feature set, it uses MySQL and PHP (a major bonus, as far as I'm concerned), and product updates are frequent and worthwhile.

To be fair, I haven't looked at phpBB in the past ten months, so perhaps it has improved vastly in the meantime.

-Waldo Jaquith

From: "David Hall"
To: "Waldo Jaquith"
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 3:31:50 PM US/Eastern

Dear Waldo:

It has come to our attention that you have been engaging in the practice of posting illegal tab arrangements on your website. Unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted musical compositions constitutes infringement under the United States copyright law, and the law provides substantial remedies to rights owners. Whenever printed music is copied or distributed on the Internet without permission, you are stealing from composers, publishers and music retailers.

It is essential to the future of printed music that the copyright law be upheld by all. Composers, arrangers, publishers and dealers are losing a significant percentage of their income because of illegal photocopying. This loss of revenue ultimately means that less and less printed music is available for sale, short print runs mean higher prices for what is available, and dealers are no longer able to afford to carry large stocks of music.

As a webmaster, you hold a special responsibility to understand and uphold the laws regarding what can and cannot be posted to your website. We urge you to practice compliance with copyright law so that no further action is necessary on behalf of music rights owners. Such compliance will benefit all of us in the music community - students and educators, creators, publishers and retailers.

Sincerely,
David Hall
Sales Manager, eCommerce
www.halleonard.com

From: Waldo Jaquith
Date: Wed May 7, 2003 4:31:06 PM US/Eastern
To: David Hall

David,

Make me. I dare you. Just try it. Seriously. I'll own you.

I'll be very disappointed if I don't get a nastygram in the mail from you within a few weeks, because that will rob me of the opportunity to waste lots of your money by using up your attorney's time.

Don't let me down, Dave!

Kisses,
Waldo Jaquith

From: "David Hall"
To: "Waldo Jaquith"
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 3:31:50 PM US/Eastern

Dear Waldo:

It has come to our attention that you have been engaging in the practice of posting illegal tab arrangements on your website. Unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted musical compositions constitutes infringement under the United States copyright law, and the law provides substantial remedies to rights owners. Whenever printed music is copied or distributed on the Internet without permission, you are stealing from composers, publishers and music retailers.

It is essential to the future of printed music that the copyright law be upheld by all. Composers, arrangers, publishers and dealers are losing a significant percentage of their income because of illegal photocopying. This loss of revenue ultimately means that less and less printed music is available for sale, short print runs mean higher prices for what is available, and dealers are no longer able to afford to carry large stocks of music.

As a webmaster, you hold a special responsibility to understand and uphold the laws regarding what can and cannot be posted to your website. We urge you to practice compliance with copyright law so that no further action is necessary on behalf of music rights owners. Such compliance will benefit all of us in the music community - students and educators, creators, publishers and retailers.

Sincerely,
David Hall
Sales Manager, eCommerce
www.halleonard.com

From: Waldo Jaquith
Date: Wed May 7, 2003 4:31:06 PM US/Eastern
To: David Hall

David,

Make me. I dare you. Just try it. Seriously. I'll own you.

I'll be very disappointed if I don't get a nastygram in the mail from you within a few weeks, because that will rob me of the opportunity to waste lots of your money by using up your attorney's time.

Don't let me down, Dave!

Kisses,
Waldo Jaquith

From: "David Hall"
To: "Waldo Jaquith"
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 3:31:50 PM US/Eastern

Dear Waldo:

It has come to our attention that you have been engaging in the practice of posting illegal tab arrangements on your website. Unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted musical compositions constitutes infringement under the United States copyright law, and the law provides substantial remedies to rights owners. Whenever printed music is copied or distributed on the Internet without permission, you are stealing from composers, publishers and music retailers.

It is essential to the future of printed music that the copyright law be upheld by all. Composers, arrangers, publishers and dealers are losing a significant percentage of their income because of illegal photocopying. This loss of revenue ultimately means that less and less printed music is available for sale, short print runs mean higher prices for what is available, and dealers are no longer able to afford to carry large stocks of music.

As a webmaster, you hold a special responsibility to understand and uphold the laws regarding what can and cannot be posted to your website. We urge you to practice compliance with copyright law so that no further action is necessary on behalf of music rights owners. Such compliance will benefit all of us in the music community - students and educators, creators, publishers and retailers.

Sincerely,
David Hall
Sales Manager, eCommerce
www.halleonard.com

From: Waldo Jaquith
Date: Wed May 7, 2003 4:31:06 PM US/Eastern
To: David Hall

David,

Make me. I dare you. Just try it. Seriously. I'll own you.

I'll be very disappointed if I don't get a nastygram in the mail from you within a few weeks, because that will rob me of the opportunity to waste lots of your money by using up your attorney's time.

Don't let me down, Dave!

Kisses,
Waldo Jaquith

On one of my websites, we switched to book-your-own text ads a few months ago. For the first month, the clickthru rates were astounding -- 5%-15% on some of them. Now, we're lucky to break 1%. The reason, of course, is obvious: they were new and interesting, and people noticed them because of that. Now, they are neither new nor interesting. They remain an amusing thing on the site, but they're not paying the bills, I'm afraid. All that we can do from here is continue to switch it up: move them around on the site, offer formats with bigger text, more words, etc. But that's not a solution, just a stall tactic.

-Waldo Jaquith

I've written a PHP/MySQL-based text advertising system that I'm testing out on one of my sites, a Dave Matthews Band fan site. It's a wicked-simple PayPal-based system that has held up nicely for millions of page views over the last couple of months. If you want to sell your own ads self-serve style, and you think that your site's users will find that to be a useful service, you should consider such a system. Best of all, the ads are non-intrusive, both in terms of download time and visual clutter. If you (or anybody else) want a copy, e-mail me, and I'll send you a tarball. I intend to release this properly, but I'd lke to make a few more enhancements after exams are done in a couple of weeks before I release it into the world. :)

Waldo Jaquith
waldo@nancies.org

My girlfriend and I went to Virginia Beach on the weekend of July 13th to see Dave Matthews Band, the very weekend that the cameras were scheduled to be turned on. If I had known about the cameras prior to making hotel reservations and acquiring tickets, I probably would have skipped the trip. But having made a financial committment to going, I wasn't about to back out. But I did let them know that I wasn't happy.

First, I called their tourism bureau (1-800-VA BEACH) in an attempt to determine where the cameras would be, such that I could avoid that area. The woman had no idea, and asked why I wanted to know. I explained -- without getting into lots of details about privacy -- that I was not comfortable having the cameras watching me, despite the fact that I was not, to my knowledge, wanted by any police department. And, as a matter of fact, I was on the verge of cancelling my trip, I told her. The woman was troubled, and directed me to call the police department.

That went about as well as you could imagine. I talked to a cop there that figured that anybody that didn't want to be on their cameras was obviously a law-breaker. But, hey, he told me the streets that the cameras were on, and I told him that I would certainly not be patronizing businesses along that stretch.

Did I make a difference? I have no idea. If one person calls, they'll think he's crazy. And if two, two people call...they'll think they're queer. But, friends, can you imagine three -- three people -- walking in, sitting down, and humming a bar of Alice's Restaurant? Friends, we'd have a movement -- the Virginia Beach Massacree. [1]

-Waldo Jaquith

[1] "Alice's Restaurant," Arlo Guthrie

Maybe if your web server gave me the 3K of text that comprised the content I wanted, without the 50K of surrounding Javashit, and the 700K Flash animation, your bandwidth fees would go down?

It does.

http://www.nancies.org/

It's a simple fact: each pageview costs more to serve up than the advertising revenue that it brings in. Even when every page on your site is 30k.

-Waldo Jaquith

Over at nancies.org, we made a Red Cross banner and put it into rotation, which is (IMHO) even better than donating whatever paltry income that sites make from advertising these days.

http://www.nancies.org/images/banners/redcross.gif

Anybody is welcome to use it, of course. We linked it to redcross.org, but the Amazon.com thing may be better.

-Waldo

Yeah, what he said!

(Wrote the author of said story. :)

-Waldo

I've got a problem with that right now. A site that I operate, nancies.org, serves up about 600,000 pageviews each month. But we're regularly credited by 24/7 Media (aka ContentZone) for just over 400,000. But they don't give two shakes for our logs, and say that we just have to trust them. That's like the U.S. government saying, regarding carnivore, "trust us."

BS. So I applied to Engage (formerly Flycast) last night to get our ads through them. Are they any better? I have no idea. But I do know that ContentZone is screwing us over, and that's incentive enough for me.

-Waldo

Also, I do have to give a shout-out to some friends of mine at Meticulous.com, who do bangup jobs of running database-driven sites using open-source technology, such as Nancies.org, the fan-based Dave Matthews Band site, and Viber.net, the Agents of Good Roots' fan-site. Good peeps. Ask for Bobo/John or Waldo.

Some people feel that trading for the cost of the tapes is fair. So you send me a 2-tape show, I send you $11 -- $4 / tape and $3 for shipping. Is that sales? Probably not, if you're just breaking even.

So now we have the wonderful world of MP3s. I have an MP3 website. You want MP3s. I pay $50 / month for hosting (all that storage, dontcha know), I get 50 downloads a month, so I figure that I want to show 5000 ads and get $0.01 each. That way, I break even. Just like when trading those tapes.

Oooh, but what if I show 5001 ads? Then I'm profiting. But is that wrong?

I dunno. But I've got the DMB site anyhow, complete with ads. :)