Here we are one month after the 2007 IBMA World of Bluegrass. If you followed along here on the blog you saw a lot of the photos and video we posted, but content is starting to find its way to the web in other places.

Our good friend Dave Roye has started posting galleries of his photos from the event. Dave tells me he took over 2,000 photos this year and it’s taken him a while to go through them all. But he’s made it part way and he’s edited a bunch of them and resized them for viewing online.

He currently has photo galleries up from the Business Conference that took place Monday – Wednesday. He’s also got galleries from some of the artist showcases that occurred during the early part of the week. He promises more galleries soon from the Awards Show and Friday and Saturday at Fan Fest.

If you missed the event this year, this is a great way to check out what happened. And if you were there, you might relive a little of the fun and excitement while going through Dave’s photo galleries.

Two weeks ago at IBMA John and I, along with Brandi Hart of The Dixie Bee Liners, conducted a seminar, the official title being Establishing & Maintaining an Effective Web Presence. I thought I’d do a recap here of some of the topics we discussed during the seminar, as well as some we didn’t get to but had intended to cover.

The main point we focused on was the difference between merely having a web presence, and having an effective web presence. Now, effective means that it successfully produces the desired results. That means you must have some desired goals in mind to begin with.

As an artist or event producer or DJ or whatever, we all have the same basic goal for our web presence. We want to make a living at bluegrass music and we intend for our web presence to assist us in doing so. From that point on though, the specific goals will differ considerably. That’s your first task, decide what your goals are. Here are a few suggestions.

• networking
• gathering contact info
• maintaining communication with fans
• finding new fans
• selling merchandise or tickets

You get the idea. Depending on your goals, you go about developing your web presence differently, but some constants remain.

One of the main topics of discussion was MySpace. A point we kept trying to make was that MySpace is not YourSpace, it’s TheirSpace. (more…)

OK… here is our final photo gallery from the 2007 IBMA Awards show on October 4 in Nashville. Special thanks to Tami Roth for getting us such superb photos.

If you would like to see all of our coverage of the 2007 IBMA World of Bluegrass and Awards Show, just click the IBMA 2007 tag just under the post title.

        

        

        

As promised, we’ll have a couple more photo galleries from last week’s IBMA festivities in Nashville. Here is a batch of photos from the party held backstage at The Grand Ole Opry house just prior to Thursday’s International Bluegrass Music Awards.