I hope everyone will indulge us for a few moments of self congratulation. We’ve just passed our 2nd anniversary as The Bluegrass Blog, and managed to reach a number of significant milestones in recent weeks. In July, we recorded our 1,000,000th page view, and our 500,000th visitor.

Brance and I would like to extend a special word of thanks to all our readers – we appreciate the time you spend here, and are delighted that you find our content worthy of your attention.

Looking over our visitor stats, we see that we have doubled our readership over the past year (8/06-07).

While we’re on the subject of stats, let’s talk about some of the confusion that surrounds this question. You may find web sites – even some in acoustic music markets – who make what seem like unbelievable claims for daily visitors.

The problem isn’t with web stats generically, but with how they are collected. When we first started The Bluegrass Blog, we relied on what are known as server stats, which measure the number of times files are requested for display from our web server. We thought we were setting the web on fire, until we realized that each page on the site involves dozens of file requests, and that the only way we could get accurate stats was to measure image loads.

Image load stats record how many times a specific image is loaded from an external server (other than ours), and gives a very accurate measurement of how many times actual readers have loaded a page. We use three different image load stat tracking services, and they all report very similar numbers. These stats also allow us to ignore the hundreds (or thousands) of file requests that are made daily by indexing robots such as Google.

As an example of what we mean, if we look at our server stats for August 29 of this year, they show 17,000 unique visitors and 129,000 page views, while the image load stats show 2348 and 4831 respectively. Oh that they were true!

This final image represents where our readers are located geographically, based on the last 2500 visitors on Friday (8/31). No real surprises here, but it is nice to know that bluegrass music has become a truly international medium.

That’s right folks, we’ve been blogging for over a year now. It’s hard to believe really. As I was thinking about it this morning I went back and looked at some of the first posts John and I drafted for the blog. Our first post was made on 7/17/2005 and was simply background information on who John and I are. A series of posts followed for the next few days explaining what our purposes for starting the blog were, what we hoped to accomplish, and how you could participate. Our first news post wasn’t even about bluegrass, but about blogging! The first post with bluegrass news in it was about IBMA 2005. As the 2006 event approaches we are once again looking for ways that we can make the blog useful both to those in attendance and those who cannot attend. Posts concerning our efforts at this year’s IBMA event will be forthcoming very soon.

This morning was just a short stroll down memory lane for me and I thought I would share it with you. Thanks for reading all this time, and for telling others about us. We look forward to another year of bringing you the News at the speed of bluegrass!

Following up on the recent post from Brad Harper about file trading of live show audio, in response to one by Megan Lynch, I want to add a few words about comments, and why we typically do not allow them on The Bluegrass Blog. I also want to explain a bit more about outside Guest Contributions, which we publish on occasion.

After Megan posted some strong feelings about trading live shows in her Guest Contribution on Wednesday (not in favor), we heard from readers who wanted to chime in, and were frustrated by the fact that, unlike many other blogs, we do not allow for comments. Brad Harper wrote in to share the fact that he had used his own blog to comment on her post (in favor of file trading), and agreed to allow us to re-publish his thoughts as a second Guest Contribution.

We continue to welcome Guest Contributions, both from folks working in the bluegrass/acoustic music industry, and from fans and amateur/semi-pro pickers who have something they want to share with our readers. Cogency, timeliness and the appropriateness of the subject matter will be crucial to them being accepted for publication, and prospective contributors are invited to contact us if they have an interest in composing a brief essay for publication.

We have generally eschewed comments for individual posts for several reasons. Initially, we wanted to avoid the sort of “Shut up!” and “What an idiot!!” responses that are too often a big part of blog commenting. We did try comments on certain posts where we felt like it would be appropriate, but required that commenters be registered as users on our site, use their actual names in any comments they wish to make, and that they be moderated by The Bluegrass Blog before they appeared on the site.

As it transpired, not many of our readers felt the compulsion to post comments, perhaps because of those restrictions, so we have gradually discontinued enabling them. In response to some reader requests, however, both of the posts referenced above have now been enabled to allow for reader comments, and anyone who wishes to chime in is welcome to do so, as long as you are willing to abide by our comment policies.

All comments are moderated and must be approved before publication, and anonymous comments will not be allowed. We want to foster conversation via opinion posts, but insist that it be open, civil and clearly credited.

In the past few months, we have also discovered that a pernicious spambot was able to penetrate our registration filter and post some plainly vile pornographic links as comments. Of course, since the comments require moderation, none of them get through to your eyes, but it both further soured us on comments, and got us thinking in a new direction where reader participation is concerned.

We are currently developing a major upgrade to The Bluegrass Blog that will allow our readers to be more active in discussions of posts we publish here. Look for more news about The B in the next few weeks.

Follow-up, 10:15 a.m.: Commenting has been enabled for this post as well, should anyone wish to add a thought.

Your humble authors of The Bluegrass Blog are featured in a profile in today’s edition of The Roanoke Times, our hometown newspaper. It was written by Ralph Berrier, one-time features writer for the paper, more recently on sabbatical, and now preparing to return to the Times staff full time.

Berrier is a very valuable part of our regional music media, as he is both a fiddler and a serious student of old time music who brings a level of genuine expertise to his coverage of traditional music in our area. We have linked to Ralph’s pieces in the past, most particularly his in-depth series of articles about the efforts of the state of Virginia to establish and promote The Heritage Music Trail, a series of traditional music attractions in SW VA, as a tourist destination for folks interested in the music, and Appalachian culture.

His story in today’s paper marks the upcoming one year anniversary of The Bluegrass Blog, and is drawn from my recent conversation with Ralph about how the site came to be, and what we have in mind for the future.

You can read the full article on The Roanoke Times web site. There is a small glitch in the article online, where several paragraphs of text are repeated at the end of the piece, but that shouldn’t provide much of a distraction for those interested in reading it.

He mentioned at one point in the article, my thoughts on the international nature of our readership, and how the internet has helped fuel continued growth in interest for all things bluegrass online. We watch those stats (country of origin) with great interest, and they never fail to provide encouragement about the expansion of our music worldwide.

As you may expect, the largest percentage of our readers come from the US, east of the Mississippi, with another large percentage in Europe. What has been interesting is the number we find in Asia. Japan and Australia are not a surprise, as their interest in bluegrass music is well-documented, but we are delighted to consistently see readers in Viet Nam, Thailand, Philippines, Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong and even mainland China. We have regular readers in India, and several in northern Africa and Ethiopia.

Of particular interest of late has been our readership in the Middle East. Just today, we have had visits from cyber surfers in Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Iran. About ten days ago, as open warfare was breaking out, we found simultaneous visitors online in Tel Aviv and Beirut.

Perhaps Del McCoury could be dispatched as a roving ambassador?