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A Look Back at Burgo's Blog Thus Far...

Year End Roundup Post – Happy New Year all!

So this is just a quick post before I head out the door for a New Year’s Eve spent up Tambourine Mountain, but to all the readers out there… Happy New Year!

It’s been a great year here on Burgo’s Music Blog… so here were a few takeaways:

– Most visited post on the site in 2008:

Unsurprisingly, this honour went to the “30 South African Bands you NEED to hear!” post. Given that the post ranks #1 for the term “South African Bands” on google, it tends to bring in a fair amount of traffic.

– Most commented post in 2008:
Toss up here… obviously the “South African Bands” post ranks right up there, as it is one of the most visited, so it still continues to get a lot of comments in 2008. But the post itself was actually posted in 2007, so that kind of excludes it from that honour. Looking solely at posts published in 2008, it was a close race with posts like “Counting Crows, live on WXPN” and “Live Music Friday – Alex Dezen and Dave Chernis of The Damnwells, live on World Cafe Live” both garnering 13 comments a piece, but the winner in the end was the “Howie Day, live at the Troubadour in Brisbane” post, which ended up with 15 comments. Yeah, I know, 15 doesn’t sound a lot, but the community is definitely growing around these parts.

– Most downloaded mp3s from the site in 2008:
Without a question, it was the mp3s located at the “Live Music Friday – Coldplay, live at London’s Brixton Academy” post. The amount of other sites that were hotlinking to these mp3s was simply staggering, and it prompted me having to move from my old host to another. Yeah, we’re talking gigs of bandwidth here in an incredibly short amount of time, which wasn’t exactly appreciated by my previous host. While it’s great that it was popular, hotlinking directly to another site’s mp3s on your own site without linking to the original post is just a lack of plain old manners. Let’s remember kids, common courtesy is our friend…

Other highlights? Well, the blog finally led me into communication with some of my musical idols this year. My “Live Music Friday – Pete Francis, live at The Woodstock Opera House” was actually featured by Pete himself on his own Myspace blog (you can see it here) which blew me away, and my constant rambling about The Damnwells led to some communication with Alex Dezen. Related to that, it also led to me launching another site, The Damnwells Music.com… don’t worry all those who offered to help with that site, I haven’t forgotten about you just yet; it’s just that Alex and I are still discussing how best to use that site to help the Damnwells word get out there.

We also had our first guest post featured on the blog this year, with this post from Rachel Morris about Josh Moore. Personally, I think Rachel did a great job with the post, and encourage anyone else out there who might feel like trying their hand at guest posting to get in touch with me (email address listed in the sidebar, to the left there).


All in all, it’s been a great year, especially on the live music front. 2008 saw me attend such shows as Matt Costa, Will Conner & Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz at the Tivoli (twice), Ozomatli & G Love and Special Sauce, Death Cab for Cutie, and, most recently, Howie Day at The Troubadour. Then of course there are the countless other shows I saw, that I didn’t manage to post about, such as Australian legends the Hoodoo Gurus, Children Collide, The Boat People and many others.
2009 promises to be just as exciting, with upcoming shows Bon Iver, My Morning Jacket, Neil Young, and Ryan Adams & The Cardinals all coming up in January! Following on from that, there’s a show with Josh Pyke coming up, and then Coldplay in March. All in all, it looks like the beginning of 2009 is off to a cracker!

Anyway, that’s all from me kids. Here’s wishing you all a happy and fortunate 2009. Until then… be lucky.

Happy New Year!!!

newyear



By Burgo

Once upon a time was in a band. Now writes (all too infrequently) about good music at Burgo's Music Blog; about personal musings at The Home of Matt Burgess; and about marketing at Conversation Media.

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