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.