The first of January of 2010 is not only the beginning of a new year, but also the first anniversary for our website. Thus together with the New Years Day we will celebrate and the blog’s 1st birthday. One year finally since everything started but it feels like only a few weeks have passed by… What are our impressions, what we have learned, what we have achieved, what finally blogging means for us? We are happy to answer all those questions but firstly we would like make a journey through time and see how everything started.The history behind it:
On the sidebar it says that the website started at February of 2009. However, the first attempt to launch it was on the first week of January 2009 . We created a blogspot account but we soon found that Wordpress.com (the free version of Wordpress) suits more our expectations. Despite Blogspot tops in reliability and easiness (as it is powered by Google) and it is more customizable, Wordpress has much more professional look and features.
The blog started as an attempt to raise an independent voice in the world of music and culture apart from promoting Wichael R. Willow albums and videoclips. Attracting more visitors, not only readers, was always (and still is) an important goal for us, in order to create a musical community with similar approaches and ideas not only regarding music but generally for everything that happens in life.
Our old friends would be able to remember the old design “based on the free themes the Wordpress.com provides”, the old comment form, the less organized posting system, generally a primitive form comparing to what we have today.
The blog migrated from the free Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org self-hosted in June 2009 and within a few months it was totally transformed into an advanced website, thanks to some fantastic Wordpress Plugins. As we can see the blog posts were transferred to a different section. This gave us the opportunity to add some more discussions apart from music, about social matters, opinions, etc
Within a year we have 63 unique posts, 339 comments. The total number of page-hits until June was estimated to 8,760 according to Wordpress.com stats. The number increased dramatically after we moved to self-hosted Wordpress where according to Awstats 47271 are the unique visits and 64110 the page views. Nevertheless, we have to do about different stat systems and the way they measure the page traffic is completely different. Typically the Wordpress.com stats is very strict, it does not include the visitors who land on your blog as images searchers. Using Awstats it is possible to identify every single hit, but trackbags, agents etc have been excluded from our system as we would like to count the human interaction in our website.
Top 5 posts
September 2009:Guns And Roses (24819)
July 2009: Michael Jackson (10103)
Is the screamo singing dangerous? (3136)
Sound explorations: Vinyl vs Cd (2389)
Charlie Chaplin: Artist of all times? (2170)
The meaning of blogging:
Michael R. Willow says: “Music is our way of expression. With music you can say everything you feel, you don’t need anything else if you are a musician. I don’t see blogging as an alternative but there are some things that you would like to express differently. Blogging could be considered as an art. It helps people to interact with each other, to exchange opinions. Many artists are a sort of social commentators. They may be able to see things from a different point of view. Apart from that it’s time for the people to take the media in their hands and resist”
Are the other social networks enough to promote your music?
“Definitely Myspace and Youtube are useful. Personally I prefer Vimeo for uploading my videos. Myspace keeps the standard of users very high than the rest of the social networking websites which is good for us, but it is still not enough. Blogging allows you more freedom, meaning not only that you can express your beliefs, but also that in a blog there are many features (especially in the self-hosted Wordpress) that are important for your music promotion. Myspace offers the very basic only”
Likes and dislikes in music for 2009:
As it is mentioned this is a music website. Let’s take a look and see which album is worthy to receive thumbs up for 2009 and which should be placed in the bin straight away.
The album “Abnormally Attracted to Sin” by Tori Amos. Most of the critics have 
classified it as a mediocre album, however I found it really interesting. Instead of repeating the same sound, Tori moves forward. In the songs “Give” “Abnormally attracted to sin”, “Flavor”, “Lady in Blue” the electro influences are very strong. “Ophelia” probably the best song of the album, “500 miles”, “Fast Horse” are the most melodic compositions together with the “California” and “Curtain Call”. In overall, the album is better than the previous “American Doll Posse” where we can find a lot of dodgy songs. Here Tori seems to know what she wants. After listening to it a few more times, the impressions of a composer who respects the originality are very intent. The only negative in this album is, perhaps the sound engineering. It is not bad, but it feels like in the previous albums the sound is more powerful while in the “Abnormally” some rhythm stuff sound dull, dry or soulless. Perhaps this left a subliminal bad taste in most of the analysts but the album is more than that. It is possible to find a lot of live versions from this album where Tori seems to be a great performer and composer as she was always.
Stratovarius “Polaris“… was an album that I had no patience listening to more than one minute of every song. A dull album, full
of compositions that are “copy pasted” of what they have done in the late 90s, double bass, slightly heavier guitars. Nothing interesting in the whole album except the tolerable “Forever is today” and “Deep unknown“. It looks like the Finnish band has been lost in their 90’s success. Of course all the fans of the band will remember the “Episode”, “Visions”, the warm “Dreamspace”. The downfall started with the “Destiny” but things got better with the “Infinite”. After that, there is no album that I would reckon as meaningful. For most of the fans of the so called “German power metal” this may be a very disappointing release.
Likes and dislikes in general for 2009:
When all those things happen in music, what happens in the rest of the world and which event will affect the future more than anything?
General elections in Greece, a big loss for the Right Wing Christian Democratic ND party (previous government), responsible for putting the country in a huge dept and the rise of para state far right violence. The question is… could the PASOK (Social Democratic party) do it better? Well… at least not so bad as the previous. Similarly I liked the rise of Die Linke in Germany. A big hope for the poor people.
Of course I dislike
-The all time high xenophobia in Greece, where 1 in 2 people said the 
immigrants are a threat to our society. Of course this is a symptom and not a cause as the previous government failed in immigration, unemployment, recession, crime and safety… in almost everything….
-The fact that 137 journalists were murdered, six of them in Russia, where the climate is hostile towards any independent thinker.
-Michael Jackson’s death news…
-That thousands of people died from an earthquake in L’aquila (Italy)
-The Air France flight 447 that crashed in the Atlantic ocean with killing 216 passengers
What do we expect?
We can keep on hoping for the best, for all the human of the world… at least there is no harm on that…
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January 5th, 2010 at 12:16 am
Congratulations on a year of blogging! It’s such a unique form of communication. Thank you for sharing information with us … and here’s wishing you many years of blogging success!
January 1st, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Thanks for always keeping me updated on what’s going on. Life’s just gotten complicated. Good luck in all your ventures!!! God Bless!!