more competitors every day

Back in November I launched ZiFiMusic.com, a music discovery service ala pandora, last.fm, etc.
It seems that within a week of launching everybody and there dog set-up competing services. Even Gerd Leonard (who blogged about HearWhere yesterday) got into the game with Sonific, which he later closed just before I shut down ZiFi.

I didn't think I had jumped into HearWhere without doing any research on the market, but at the time it didn't seem that much was out there, and certainly nothing that had the depth of HearWhere, or the ability to play music from the artists which were being presented.

Now it seems everyday I can find another concert listings site. Though I feel fortunate that HearWhere has more listings, is the only site I've found which can sample the artists music in the same UI, and is simpler to understand than most, I also find it disconcerting to discover that these other sites are not only getting funded, but getting press often because they are funded.

I'm hoping to break out of this cycle shortly, and maybe if I get a spot on a major blog, I'll get enough traffic to make HearWhere a viable business.
Time will tell, though it appears my faux pas from a few days ago has hurt more than I had anticipated.

Rookie mistakes and 420

Yesterday I noticed a significant bump in traffic coming from StumbleUpon. I thought myself very fortunate at the time, and decided to put a 'Digg This' button on the HearWhere index page to see if I could get the site on to Digg.

I loaded the new site into production, and continued to watch the visits increase. Happy with my moderate progress, I went for a ride.

I noticed that the bounce rate was high, and that for the increase in traffic, I was actually seeing a decline in ad clicks. Thinking this was some sort of StumbleUpon anomoly (stumblers blocking ads, etc.), I continued to be high on the fact that I was getting visits which I suspect were a result of the new design.

Well, at 12:18am, Gerd Leonard (music futurist) dropped me an e-mail to let me know that the links on the links on HearWhere were not working.

DOH! A two second fix and everything is back in order. My pride hurt, feeling like an idiot that i got a good amount of visitors to the site while it was in non-working order.

So I looked through my logs to see how many visits were affected. Exactly 420.
Maybe it's a music industry thing, maybe it's because I live in Whistler. Hopefully it's a good omen.

NOTE: i don't use drugs, and don't condone there use, but 420 is a bit of an icon around here.

new site design

After not much time at all comes a new site design.
This one is far from final, but getting closer, and better all the time.

I am hoping this design will last more than a few weeks ;) I think it holds promise.
The facebook app, and widget have also been redone to match the website.
The blog will be next.
Let me know what you think.

The Widget is dead, long live the widget

Just one day after Fred Wilson somewhat ominously announces the end of widgets as we know them, and mashable promotes iWidgets as the next best thing in making your website go viral, I have decided to build a quick and dirty widget for hearwhere and see what happens.

I side with Fred on the idea that for most visitors, widgets don't do much. However, of course, I like to consider the hearWhere widget a bit different. Rather than just being a showcase of what the blog writer thinks is important, the hearWhere widget uses the viewers location as the jumping off point.

Knowing that Fred is in NYC, showing me a list of upcoming shows happening in NYC doesn't help me, as I live on the other side of the continent. So, the hearWhere widget shows a small list of shows playing locally.

In no way is the widget the ultimate use of hearWhere, it pales in comparison to the abilities of the main website and the facebook app. the facebook app can show you what shows your friends are going to, and a list of shows you have decided to save.

The widget thing for me right now is a bit of a wait and see. Will anybody use it? Does anybody care?

Let me know what you think, and if you think it's a good idea, i'll dedicate more time to making the widget a better product.
For now, I'll be getting to work on another redesign of the site, and trying to get more uses, so spread the word, and go!

Welcome to the HearWhere Blog

Thanks for stopping by.

On May 22nd 2008, I launched hearWhere.com. A simple website for finding live music anywhere in the world.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep this blog up to date with updates regarding hearWhere, and I'll likely comment on other web apps, technology developments and random thoughts.